The Great Rent Wars
New York, 1917-1929
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- $40.99
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- $40.99
Publisher Description
Written by one of the country’s foremost urban historians, The Great Rent Wars tells the fascinating but little-known story of the battles between landlords and tenants in the nation’s largest city from 1917 through 1929. These conflicts were triggered by the post-war housing shortage, which prompted landlords to raise rents, drove tenants to go on rent strikes, and spurred the state legislature, a conservative body dominated by upstate Republicans, to impose rent control in New York, a radical and unprecedented step that transformed landlord-tenant relations.
The Great Rent Wars traces the tumultuous history of rent control in New York from its inception to its expiration as it unfolded in New York, Albany, and Washington, D.C. At the heart of this story are such memorable figures as Al Smith, Fiorello H. La Guardia, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as a host of tenants, landlords, judges, and politicians who have long been forgotten. Fogelson also explores the heated debates over landlord-tenant law, housing policy, and other issues that are as controversial today as they were a century ago.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fogelson (Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880 1930), a professor of urban studies and history at MIT, turns his attention to the rise and demise of "emergency rent laws" following WWI, during the interwar housing shortage, and in doing so sheds light on the history of rent control in New York. The book features a large and varied cast of characters: "rapacious landlords," and rarer, "highly compassionate" ones, along with various "real estate interests"; local, state, and national politicians; municipal, state, appellate, and Supreme Court justices; police and city marshals; and, of course, tenants wealthy, middle class, working class, and poverty stricken. In addition to Dickensian legal wrangling, the complexities in which the interested parties find themselves embroiled include ideological controversies about public housing and "reasonable rent," among many others. Threaded throughout are details about successful and unsuccessful rent-strike actions. Fogelson's book is chock-full of information and data, but his prolixity, copious quotations from letters and newspaper articles, redundancies, and digressions make for tedious reading. However, his thorough research and meticulous documentation will be a gold mine for fellow urban historians.
