Going Up

The rent-control bill was scarcely law before landlords pounced. Many a hotel promptly changed its permanent guests to steep transient rates. In Atlanta, one hotel slipped notices under the door at midnight June 30, ordering long-term tenants to vacate by midnight July 1 unless they paid by the day. Typical rate: a single room was upped from $82.50 a month to $7.50 a day ($225 a month).

In Chicago one hotel raised permanent guests from $70 to $150 a month, another from $32.50 to $71. In New York, increases ranged from 15% to 200%; in Denver up to 350%. In San Francisco, an old-age pensioner sharing a single room had his rent boosted from $25 to $40 a month. In Chicago, a third-rate hotel jumped rooms from $7 a week to $17.50. Even the flophouses along Detroit's grimy Skid Row upped dormitory beds from 30-c- a night to 35-c-.

Life in a Tree. Frantic tenants stormed the rent-control offices. After three boiling days, the Los Angeles acting area director wearily closed his desk for the weekend with a final word of advice: "Don't move. Stay where you are. Wait until your landlord takes your case to court before you obey any eviction notice."

Apartment landlords seemed to have misunderstood the "voluntary" character of the 15% rent hike authorized by the law. Tenants were put under pressure to sign leases with the 15% boost. After getting a letter from his landlord suggesting a 15% increase, an Atlanta Constitution editorial writer wrote: "Oh, it's all very voluntary of course. I can either agree to the increase or adjust myself to life in a tree. You can't bluff me, I should have said, it's a free country. I'm a citizen, I know my rights. O.K., I said, where do I sign?"

Everybody Else but Me. Only in Washington were tenants unharried. District of Columbia rent control was set up originally under a separate law which does not expire until the end of the year. A week after the Congress approved the bill for the rest of the nation, the House had quietly voted to extend the D.C. law, without change, until March 1948. The bill contained no 15% increase for landlords, no permission to raise the rents of permanent hotel guests. Many Congressmen live in hotels.

But Washington landlords were clamoring for the same concessions other landlords had won. This week the House's hold-the-line-in-D.C. bill landed with a thud in the Senate. The man on the spot was the District Committee chairman, Delaware's down-the-line Republican C. Douglass Buck.

As sponsor of the national rent-control law, he had favored a "voluntary" 15% provision for the rest of the country. As a tenant of the Westchester Apartments, he and several other Senators were fighting a 17 1/2% rent hike proposed by their landlord. The country's tenants would be watching Buck.

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