something of landlords’ hostility to rent control. The accounts “reflect public attitude toward the agency and compliance with the regulations,” he lamented.79
The Plight of the Middle Manager
Landlords’ antipathy to state regulation was shared by their building managers, who did the dirty work of apartment management without the financial security of ownership. Their stories take us into the third and final part of the triangular relationship in Chicago’s apartment housing: the economic plight of the hired landlord. Here we can see how a class of custodians, essentially, came to embrace the antiliberalism of their owner-employers. When a rent investigator showed up, the building manager was often the first to run interference for the owner, and if a violation was uncovered, the restitution often took a bite out of the manager’s income. When Mr. La Dolce called Odessa Wallington a squatter, he cared not for the wear and tear of eight people in one room but about his lost income. As historian Paul Groth found for managers earlier in the century, unless an operator owned the building, “its revenue was not substantial.”80 Rent records suggest the same was true at midcentury. In working-class Chicago, managers were more like tenants than owners; they just happened to have found something a bit more secure. In times of scarcity and price inflation, it was a shrewd financial move to hire oneself out as a caretaker, for it provided a modest but steady income (one could still hold another job), and, in a time of rampant turnover, it offered lodging with minimal chance for eviction (a safety net no tenant had).
It was not easy work, though. On West Elm, Brugger had outsourced his responsibilities to the La Dolces, insulating himself from the chore of keeping humans suitably sheltered. This way, he could draw a profit without the drudgery. Not so for the La Dolces. As hired hands, situated between ownership and tenancy, they had to interact with Elm Street renters—listen to their complaints, meet their eyes, and weigh their own financial interests against others in their economic tribe. They had a fragile kind of economic security, for, in order to stay on as Brugger’s managers, they had to charge tenants enough to cover both their own rent to Brugger and the building’s operating costs—and then still more to support other needs and wants. And they had to keep tenants quiet while doing that. After all, the luxury of absentee ownership was refuge from the riffraff, so managers had to keep the building profitable without provoking an insurrection.
We can see how building management was more economic drain than windfall if we go just a few blocks south of Elm, to 211 East Superior Street, where OPA investigator R. S. O’Toole found people sleeping in “as many double deck bunks as the room will hold.” Here, the manager, Mrs. Lancaster, had annexed the basement as sleeping territory, trying to squeeze yet more rent from the bowels of the building. According to O’Toole, it was “mostly GI’s” who lived here in the fall of 1946, each paying $10 to $12 per week for the privilege of sleeping in bunks six to a room, accommodations roughly on par with their wartime barracks. Mrs. Lancaster promised breakfast and daily maid service to the vets, but O’Toole noticed that at the time of his 4:30 P.M. visit, the beds were still unmade. His observations were confirmed by an anonymous tipster, who identified himself only as “a government worker who is still looking for a room.” After touring the premises, the worker reported what he saw, mocking Mrs. Lancaster’s claim that a space divided “by a sheet of dirty comp-board” could actually be called a “living room.”81
True, Mrs. Lancaster broke her promises of a good first meal and a clean room, and she flagrantly overcharged for both, but there are clues that she was not living the good life either. When O’Toole confronted her about registration violations, she told him: “don’t blame me I have nothing to do with the registering,” adding she was in “no mood” to file the paperwork. Undaunted, O’Toole continued through the house, where he discovered a bunk bed in the basement, another slapdash accommodation that passed for a “room.” But he then spied another bed, which turned out to be Mrs. Lancaster’s. In fact, in order to get to their bunks, the “guests” (as O’Toole wryly called the vets) had to walk right through Mrs. Lancaster’s quarters. The location of Mrs. Lancaster’s bed—in the dank basement of an old building, adjacent to her own lodgers—suggests that her situation was little better than the GI tenants who slept stacked like firewood just a few feet away.82
Cases throughout the Near North Side and elsewhere suggest a precarious comfort for the city’s hired landlords. In one way, they were owners’ accomplices, trying to shift the costs of running a building to those under its roof. On the other hand, they faced real financial predicaments, akin to their tenants, which is why they either squelched or fought renters’ complaints so doggedly. Unlike absentee owners, they lived in the transactional world of the apartment building—fielding tenant demands, calculating their worthiness, and taking people’s cash—so they had an acute sense of how price controls affected the money (and effort) going into and out of a building. They shared their owners’ lament about government excess in the postwar housing market, and they, too, grudgingly accommodated rent control by trying to outsmart or obstruct it. In all three neighborhoods—and around the city—there was a whole world of rooming and apartment house managers who were gaming the system. Some merely tried to raise utility bills to pay for the electricity their tenants used for a new appliance on the scene: the television. Others, such as the La Dolces, were guilty of more egregious rent crimes, left alone by the owners to battle it out with tenants for the same scraps of reconversion. Certainly, Chicago’s building managers had some of the same tools as owners (overcharging or cutting services to the bone), and as we have seen they could and did use those tools to make life pretty miserable for tenants. But without the financial safety net of ownership, many used the modicum of power they had to grab what they could from even less powerful tenants. They occupied the middle floor of the upstairs-downstairs relationship between owners and renters, and this location gave them little financial certainty. In fact, it only gave them a front-row seat to see the instabilities of tenancy and the trials of ownership. Neither looked like the bounty that had been promised during the war.
The Debate in Washington
As tenants, managers, and owners debated controls in their apartment buildings and compliance conferences, a similar conversation was taking place in the hearing rooms and hallways of Washington, DC. Here, the stakes were more ideological than material; none of the wealthy policymakers had to worry about actual prices, but they did worry about the politics of prices—that is, about creating the political atmosphere in which their postwar vision could prevail. Liberal or conservative, they saw demobilization as a window—the window—of opportunity to advance an economic agenda for decades to come. Policy liberals inside the Truman administration, such as OPA staff, believed that an activist, regulatory state could spread the peace dividend widely to American worker-consumers. In the midst of the war, an OPA researcher warned that demobilization would “tax the nation’s ability to the utmost as surely as has the war. We must be ready for it.” At the end of the war, the OPA sounded a full alarm: “There’s danger ahead…. Housing shortages, increasingly severe since the war began, now total 10 million dwelling units…. It will take years for deficiencies to be wiped out.” That danger was described a month after Hiroshima in one of the OPA’s regular radio shows:
The place is Chicago…. The wild cheering has subsided…. The milling throngs that had jammed the Loop have all gone their individual ways…. The city has settled down to normal living again…. All of a sudden pandemonium breaks loose! Moving vans flood the streets. A mass exodus starts. Family belongings are piled up on the sidewalks. Distraught tenants who have been evicted sit glumly on their suitcases … wondering what spot they will next call home…. Discharged war workers are in a frenzy, wondering where they will get the money to pay the exorbitant rents that are being charged. Almost overnight the city has changed from calm serenity to wild confusion … and all because rent controls have been removed!83
These scenarios picked at a fresh scab. They deliberately aimed to evoke painful memories for a nation of poorly housed Great Depression survivors. The wartime OPA and the postwar OHE hoped to
