over a year, until the La Dolces discovered it and evicted Wallington and her children as “squatters.” Stories of how people doubled up for the duration are well known, but it is important to recognize, as well, that even into the midfifties, there were about two million married couples or single parents still living with relatives.70
Operating on the cheap was not unique to landlords and managers in low-income areas. Owners of high-end properties, too, tried to augment their postwar revenue by cutting services, and wealthy tenants lamented the decline with the same fury as their poorer neighbors. On Chicago’s Gold Coast, elite tenants inhabited luxury “suites” that had been built during the city’s apartment boom of the 1920s. These tony residences were a short bus ride from the La Dolces, but in terms of status and space, they were a world away. While Odessa Wallington squeezed seven children into one room, an ad for a luxury apartment on Lake Shore Drive boasted “the clothes closets, even, are rooms in themselves.”71 But these pampered tenants, too, found that their postwar dollar did not go very far. Residents of a building on Astor, one of the most exclusive streets in the city, accused their real estate management company of cutting services while raising rents. Dr. John Delph’s letter to the OHE sounded a lot like those from West Elm Street tenants: “Service has fallen consistently,” he protested, citing poorly lit stairwells, general filth, and unreliable heat—bursts of hot air and then nothing. “I most emphatically do not favor another rent increase,” he told officials.72
The majority of Chicago’s tenants, however, earned much less than Dr. Delph. They were working class, and rent control was a simple matter of protecting what they had and reaching one more rung up the ladder. In fact, tenant claims echo the kind of “rights-conscious consumerism” Meg Jacobs found in her study of wartime and postwar meat consumers.73 But controlling the price of rent was different than regulating the price of a hamburger. The regulation of food (or any household item) took place at the store—a public space (although privately owned) where volunteer price checkers could spy inflated prices, invite an OPA inspection, and later see the evidence of their activism. The regulation of rent, however, was a much more invasive kind of state intervention, a point overlooked by scholars of price controls. Most reports of violations could be resolved only by a visit from an investigator, whose job it was to peer into bedrooms and bathrooms and make notes about dirty sinks, peeling paint, and broken furniture. Investigators looked at names on mailboxes and compared that with how many they found inside the apartment. They examined hallways, basements, and trash areas. They looked for rats and bugs. They knocked on doors and asked questions of whoever happened to be home during their inspection, and if no one answered, they walked next door to talk with a neighbor. Violators were summoned to the Chicago OPA/OHE office for a “compliance conference,” a face-to-face encounter where they had to make nice in the company of a government overseer. After that conference, a landlord could still make things unpleasant for a tenant in all kinds of subtle ways—just barely enough heat, a repair job that solved one problem but made another, or a constant scowl that made it a chore to ask for anything. Those who reported a grocer’s price gouging never had to face such nuisances—they could just leave the store and shop elsewhere. Not so for renters amid an enduring shortage. Price control of housing, then, necessitated an cozy clasp with the state’s regulatory arm. For owners and building managers, the reach was too long. For the tenant majority, the state was a welcome houseguest.
A return to Guy Le Pierres’s Lakeview building illustrates just how far in the state could reach. When OHE investigator Robert Sullivan went to the property in the summer of 1951, he found no one at home in any of the fourteen units. This was not unusual, as many tenant queries came from people who worked all day. In fact, one of the letters that brought Sullivan there in the first place was written by a married couple, who hoped a home visit might be an option because their jobs made it “impossible for us to appear at your office personally.”74 To learn if Le Pierres had done to others as he had to widow Effie Smith (demanded a bonus), Sullivan entered the building to copy names from the mailboxes, which he then used to send each tenant a complaint form. Normally, if tenants were on site and willing to talk, an investigator would enter their apartment to sketch a layout and record its condition. Although he found none of Le Pierres’s renters at home, Sullivan’s mass mailing yielded a whole paper trail of offenses, including a sad confession from one tenant about an off-the-books sublet from a “chronic alcoholic” brother whom she had to care for.75 This kind of candor seemed to pour out freely, as tenants in writing and in person told interviewers about illness, addiction, family stress, and finances. They were willing to share because they had to either plead a case or defend themselves, with both money and living conditions at stake, so we have to read their accounts with some discernment. Moreover, official complaint forms invited this disclosure—even required it—because tenant stories were legal testimonies used to render legal judgments.
Investigators had to determine how much of a complaint was fact or fiction. Yet when they pried, they often found the stuff of social work, not housing regulation. When Louis Klar needed some inside information to finish a 1948 case, he had to find a particular tenant, but his search took him deeper into the man’s life than he anticipated. When he did not find the tenant at home, he knocked on doors and canvassed the block, even peeking into local taverns, hoping that someone might point him out. He finally found a neighbor who explained that the man’s wife had died in that apartment, and so he had moved to another flat nearby, but she did not know exactly where. He asked the neighbor about children (so he could check school transfer records), and work (so he could check Social Security records), but she knew little more than his loss and then a departure. She could only tell Klar that the man “made a living doing odd jobs.” Klar even checked the Post Office, hoping for a forwarding address, again, coming up short. It was a series of legal dead ends for him, but a tale of deeply personal loss and likely economic insecurity for the man, given his sporadic work at “odd jobs.”76 The alcoholic brother, financial worry, the lack of options when things got hard, these were the real challenges of demobilization for the urban working class and poor.
Typically, an intrusive investigation like Klar’s was followed by another personal encounter, the compliance conference, where a rent control staffer would bring landlord and tenant together to help them find common ground. Here again, disclosure was part of the deal, because, after all, compromise is built on knowledge of another’s predicament. But in order to share mutual troubles, to tell the kind of stories that invite empathy, not enmity, safety and privacy were required, yet this was hard to find in such a bustling office. We can well imagine the awkwardness of telling a stranger with official power—and the inevitable eavesdroppers in the waiting area—about a personal financial or family problem. And we cannot assume it was only tenants who told tales of woe. As we have seen, small owners and building managers committed rent crimes because they, too, felt squeezed. The tact and steadiness required to hear shared suffering and broker a solution made it one of the harder jobs in the OPA/OHE. And this is why compliance staff kept rethinking the traffic flow and furniture arrangement, for they had a genuine sensitivity to the vulnerability that underlies all conflict resolution. “The lack of even the illusion of privacy lessens the dignity of the interview and decreases the chances of full disclosure by the person interviewed,” lamented one staff attorney.77 Compliance conferences usually lasted less than an hour, but they could feel interminable for tenants, and even when a judgment went their way, landlord retaliation back home was always possible.78
The case files show that OPA/OHE staffers were idealists and realists about this process. They believed in talk—that face-to-face conversation could bring mutual understanding and fair settlement. But when it did not, they never hesitated to take a landlord to court. Rarely did the compliance meeting become tense beyond what might reasonably be expected, but when it did, it could get weird. Milton Gordon recounted how one landlord snatched the required registration form from an investigator, “tore it in half, put it in his pocket, and made his getaway down the elevator before he could be intercepted.” Of course, they had carbons. One landlady tore up a compliance form that she had just signed, “jammed it in her mouth and chewed it up and swallowed it.” Unfazed, legal staff thought it was “more of an admission of guilt than
