The Great Rent Wars by Robert M. Fogelson

Author:Robert M. Fogelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300191721
Publisher: Yale University Press

PART FOUR

Rent Control

Without a Rent

Commission

11

A Question

of Coverage

A few months before the U.S. Supreme Court issued Block v. Hirsh, John H. Wigmore, dean of Northwestern University School of Law (and the country's foremost authority on evidence), wrote an article about how to curb rent profiteering without violating the Constitution. The most effective way, he said, was for the state legislature to establish an independent administrative agency that would regulate rental housing in the same way that other administrative agencies regulated other businesses “impressed with a public interest.” Appointed by the governor, its members would be empowered to fix rates for rent, make rules for service, and resolve other landlord-tenant disputes. The belief that regulatory legislation should be carried out by an independent (and presumably nonpartisan) agency was part of the conventional wisdom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1920 it had given rise to the Interstate Commerce Commission and a host of state and local railroad, public utility, and other commissions. It also led Congress to entrust the implementation of the Ball Rent Act to the District of Columbia Rent Commission. Aside from Wisconsin, where the state legislature authorized the Railroad Commission to regulate rents in Milwaukee, most of the states and cities that imposed rent control after World War I followed Congress's lead and set up an independent agency to implement it.1

Even before Congress passed the Ball Rent Act, a few New Yorkers had launched a campaign for an independent rent commission. Caught up in the growing concern over rent profiteering, many others joined them in late 1919 and early 1920. In the lead were the Socialists, among them Assemblyman Samuel P. Orr of the Bronx, Judge Jacob Panken of Manhattan, and Joseph E. Klein of Brooklyn. Allied with them were many of the tenants leagues, one of which insisted in November 1919 that all candidates for office spell out their position on a proposal that called for the appointment of a rent administrator for the state. Also in favor of a rent commission were several trade unions and religious groups. In response to this mounting pressure, a few legislators filed bills in early 1920 authorizing the creation of an independent rent commission. By far the most important was introduced by Assemblyman George N. Jesse, a Manhattan Republican, which called for two rent commissions, one for New York and the other for Buffalo and Rochester. Two other bills—one filed by Senator Henry G. Schackno, a Bronx Democrat, and the other by Assemblyman Sol Ullman, a Manhattan Republican—would have created a rent commission, but only for New York City. For a while it seemed that an amended version of the Jesse bill stood a chance. But in March, Speaker Thaddeus C. Sweet announced that the legislature had no intention of enacting any of these bills. Rather than establish a rent commission, it put the implementation of the April laws in the hands of the municipal court judges.2

The Jesse, Schackno, and Ullman bills were shelved largely because of the vigorous opposition of New York City's real estate interests.

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