I had a good deal of help with The Great Rent Wars. Virtually all my expenses were covered by grants from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—from the Institute's Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Fund, the Center for Real Estate, the Dean's Fund for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. My thanks to Adèle Santos, Tony Ciochetti, David Geltner, Deborah Fitzgerald, Amy Glasmeier, Anne McCants, and especially Diane McLaughlin.
MIT's Rotch Library was very helpful, as were Harvard's Widener, Law, Loeb, and Baker libraries. Also very helpful were the New York Public Library, New York State Library, Brooklyn Public Library, Avery Library, New York City Municipal Archives, New York State Archives, Wisconsin Historical Society, and Library of the Bar Association of the City of New York. My thanks to Peter Cohn, Heather McCann, Jolene de Verges, and their colleagues at Rotch as well as to Alan Linder, who provided me access to the Bar Association Library.
Several students, friends, and colleagues helped out too. Holly Durso worked as my research assistant for two years. Besides Holly, Donald Gonson, David Handlin, and Lloyd Weinreb read the first draft and suggested ways to improve it. My thanks to them as well as to Nancy Kirk, who edited the book (and all but one of my other books) and the ever-patient Duncan Kincaid, who showed me that it might be easier to write if I learned to use a computer.
Thanks also to Ike Williams, Katherine Flynn, and Hope Denekamp of the Kneerim, Williams & Bloom Agency; Michelle Komie and Phil King of Yale University Press, and Nancy Ovedovitz and Lindsey Voskowsky, who designed the book; Julie Carlson, who did the copyediting; Ellen Chen, who did the proofreading; and Alexa Selph, who prepared the index.