Landlords like Brugger had none of this data but sensed what they saw around them—that the numbers were in their favor when reconversion began. In fact, Brugger had already been nailed in 1943 for setting rents above the ceiling set on the maximum rent date, and the OPA forced him to refund his tenants. So after VJ Day, he was surely hoping that wartime migrants would stay and rent control would go, allowing him to hike prices without pesky OPA watchdogs. Hired landlords like the La Dolces hoped for the same, because a continued shortage would keep tenants desperate and pliant, more willing to accept increases and lousy conditions, which would increase their own bottom line.
Tenants, on the other hand, were feeling newly vulnerable to the forces of the market. In almost every building, they outnumbered their “bosses,” but they felt alone and exposed. They had the capacity to rebel together, which they did at times, but we cannot romanticize them as a collective. They had to depend on one another to share tight spaces with patience and decency, while retaining the right to report the drunken neighbor, the loud radio player, or the reclusive pack rat whose junk was a fire hazard. Wall to wall, floor to floor, literally on top of one another, they bathed, slept, washed clothes, cooked meals, and did all the other mundane tasks that made a day pass. Often, they had to share rooms, toilets, tubs, and stoves, as well as smells and sounds. Higher rent bought more privacy, but most working Chicagoans could not afford the luxury. City apartment dwellers thus lived private lives in intensely public settings. As long as the housing shortage remained, they would have to live as they did in wartime—cramped, familiar, and conjoined.30
Rent Crimes and Misdemeanors
In this forced intimacy of the postwar apartment building, disparate groups found themselves sharing the same real estate: Washington policymakers, Chicago rent administrators who applied the law, building owners, their managers, and tenants. Sometimes there was synchronicity and harmony, but more often there was conflict. We know more about the conflict because harmony leaves a smaller paper trail. Skirmishes, on the other hand, made their way to the local OPA office during and right after the war, and then to the OHE in 1947. Those with a grievance had to tell their tale by filling out a form, which, depending on the issue, asked them who they lived with and their relation to one another, the room or flat’s basic features (hot water? mechanical refrigerator?), the employment status and income of those in dispute, how they paid their rent (cash or check?), and the history of the building itself. And then there was blank space for storytelling, a rationale for the complaint that could elaborate on the checked boxes and short answers. Here, owners, managers, and, most of all, tenants, poured out personal stories about trying to make it after the war. These case files offer a rare and absorbing glimpse into the everyday hardships of demobilization. The volume of tenant voices in these records makes it tempting to cast these disputes as dramas of greedy landlords exploiting hapless victims, for the records reveal intentional corruption on the part of owners and genuine tenant suffering—made all the more poignant by their handwritten pleas, often in sentence fragments and crooked script, betraying an earnest exertion so as to be heard but with still failing language.31
The story is more complicated than this, however. To understand this triangular economic competition between owners, managers, and tenants—to really grasp what was at stake for each in the conversion to peace—we have to move into an apartment building, circa 1946. Only from the inside can we hear the perspectives of everyone in the rivalry, especially how they perceived what governance was and should be after the war. Starting with property owners, then, the end of the war marked what they hoped would be the start of a prolonged economic recovery for their ilk. They hoped fiscal policies would favor land and building ownership as the bedrock instruments of a national revival. Owners large and small felt the calamities of the last ten years had crippled them. The Depression had broken one leg, wartime regulation broke the other, and now, already on their knees, they could be knocked over completely by postwar controls. Just to stand up again, they felt they had to raise rents to recover long lost revenues. And to profit, to really thrive in the way they thought they deserved, they tried to undercut rent control by outsmarting its rules and cutting corners. As long as federal rent law remained, they were going to sabotage its implementation.
The most common landlord strategy to recoup earnings was simple: overcharge without getting caught. After Brugger’s 1943 attempt, he tried—and got caught—again, just a few weeks after Hiroshima. A tenant complaint summoned an OPA investigator to the premises on August 30, 1945, but he could not verify if anyone was being overcharged because Brugger and the La Dolces had failed to register the property.32 Thousands of owners did not register their flats (the OPA estimated that 15 percent of them were unregistered) so they could charge high above the OPA’s ceilings while flying just under its radar.33 The frequency with which tenants complained about mysterious overcharges suggests that it was owners and managers’ favorite tactic. The records are rife with stories of tenants who asked their landlord to see the registration form and were denied the right—either because it did not exist or because the landlord wanted to hide the price the OPA/OHE had set on the maximum rent date. As Brugger’s proxies, the La Dolces intermittently charged tenants ten dollars above the registered rent from August 1944 through August 1947. They told tenants the extra money was necessary for structural improvements and maintenance, and they craftily hid their price hike by providing receipts with only the legal rent recorded. If the OPA investigated, the La Dolces could open their books and shrug their shoulders.
Figure 3. Example of a form a tenant had to complete to file a grievance against a building manager or owner. OPA/OHE administrators used dozens of such forms to track and process every kind of transaction involved in the administration of rent control. This one, filed by an African American housewife on the Near North Side, shows how much the government could learn about a landlord’s building and a person’s living conditions. Here, we can see how typewritten bureaucracy met handwritten daily life in the small details. Mrs. Goins did not pay by check, for example, there are gaps in information (we do not know why she was locked out), and she attempts to tell her own story at the end. Courtesy National Archives at Chicago (RG 252, entry 110B, box 6, folder: 353-55 West Chicago Avenue).
Just to the north in Lincoln Park, Fred and Ingeborg Lundgren used the same tactic in their small rooming house. They first came to the OPA’s attention in May 1945, when a young woman complained that she could not get the Lundgrens to give her any toilet paper or hot water. “I hope my name isn’t mentioned in reference to all this as I wouldn’t want my Landlady to make it miserable for me. It is hard enough to find a livable place nowadays.” And this is precisely where the Lundgrens’ power resided—in a citywide housing shortage that enabled owners to withhold petty things, like toilet paper, and finagle increases they knew were illegal. The cash economy of tenancy made this easy to do. Most tenants did not pay by check, which meant the only record of their payment was kept by the one who was handed the money. Tenant John Mason described Mr. Lundgren’s shady recordkeeping: “he don’t give receipts as he says he marks it on his books and if you ask again they always say we will slip it under your door, but that has yet to happen.” Whenever Mason had an overnight guest, he had to fork over five extra dollars—again, cash out with no return receipt. Like Brugger, the Lundgrens were repeat offenders. Their case file shows that after they were caught, ordered to pay refunds, and told to register their units, they would try again months later.34 OPA/OHE statistics suggest most landlords held steady in this kind of violate, wait, and repay cycle. They banked on tenants’ resigned or fearful compliance, but they would