Enter the State
Legislature
Down through 1918 the plight of New York City's tenants was not a matter of much concern in Albany. Not to the governor, Charles S. Whitman, a Republican who had been elected in 1914 largely on the basis of his reputation as the crusading Manhattan district attorney who had successfully prosecuted Lieutenant Charles Becker of the New York Police Department for the murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal. And not to the state legislature, both houses of which were firmly under the control of the Republicans, most of whom came from upstate New York. Under no pressure from the governor to do otherwise, the legislators dealt with bills to hold down the rising rents in much the same way that they dealt with bills to alleviate the coal shortage: they shelved them. A bill introduced by Socialist assemblyman Charles B. Garfinkel of the Bronx would have prevented the landlords from raising the rent for a year after the tenants moved in—or, if they had already moved in, until May 1, 1919. If the landlords wanted to raise the rent thereafter, they would have to give the tenants thirty days’ notice. Another bill, introduced by Socialist assemblyman William N. Feigenbaum of Brooklyn, would have created a housing commission and empowered it to acquire land, erect dwellings, and rent them for only enough to cover the cost of upkeep. Neither bill made it out of committee.1
With the conspicuous exception of the ten Socialist assemblymen, all of whom came from New York City, most legislators, Democrats and Republicans alike, did not view rent profiteering as a serious statewide problem. Although rents were going up in New York City, they were not rising at an alarming rate. Nor were they going up anywhere as rapidly in New York as in Detroit, Cleveland, and other cities. And even if rent profiteering was a source of concern in New York City, it was not much of an issue upstate, where most local officials felt “they had the housing situation well in hand.” Senator Peter A. Abeles, a Bronx Republican, recalled that when he arrived in Albany in January to start his first (and, it turned out, only) term, most of his colleagues believed that rent profiteering was not widespread in the city, much less the state. He therefore took it upon himself to persuade them that “the situation was growing more intolerable daily and that nothing could make for unrest more than the Legislature's indifference.”2
Even the few state legislators who regarded rising rents as a serious problem were not sure it was up to them to try to solve it. Like most Americans, they were aware that the problem was a national, even an international one. To deal with it Britain, France, and other European countries had already imposed rent control. It was time for the United States to follow suit, said many Americans, among them the leaders of the American Federation of Labor and the Greater New York Tenants League. Under the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, which was passed in March 1918, Congress had protected U.S. servicemen and their dependents from profiteering landlords. It should now offer the same protection to all Americans, many of whom were contributing to the war effort in other ways. Under the Saulsbury Resolution, which was adopted in May 1918, Congress had acted to stop rent profiteering in Washington, D.C. It should now take steps to stop it in other cities. Although Congress shelved two nationwide rent control bills in June 1918, there was still reason to believe it would do something about rent profiteering before long.3 Like other Americans, most New York State legislators were also confident that the problem would soon be resolved even if Congress did nothing. Once the war was over residential construction would surge, easing the housing shortage and ending most rent profiteering.
During the first half of 1919, however, the plight of New York City's tenants emerged as a matter of a growing of concern in Albany. As the housing shortage became acute, most New York landlords raised the rents, often by substantial amounts, and then in many cases raised them again. Contrary to expectations, rents in New York went up more rapidly after the war than during the war. They also went up more rapidly in New York than in most other big cities. Moreover, the housing shortage was no longer confined to New York City. As John Alan Hamilton, a lawyer from upstate and also the president of the Erie County Bar Association, pointed out, the problem had spread not only to Buffalo, Hamilton's home town, but also to Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. By mid-1919 it was becoming clear that despite the growing furor over the high cost of living, Congress was not going to do anything to curb rent profiteering. It came close in late August, when the House of Representatives voted by a narrow margin to put landlords under the Lever Act, which had been passed in 1917 to curb profiteering by coal dealers, retail grocers, and other businessmen; but under pressure from Republicans, the bill was shelved.4 It was also becoming clear that notwithstanding the law of supply and demand, the housing problem was not going to solve itself: residential construction, far from picking up after the war, was still stuck in the doldrums and would probably stay there for the foreseeable future.
Whether this concern would lead to action remained to be seen. But there was good reason to believe that Albany might be more sympathetic to the plight of New York City's tenants in 1919 than in 1918. As a result of the November election, the Republicans lost seven seats in the Senate and four in the Assembly, nearly all of them from New York City. Although the legislature was still “safely Republican,” wrote the Times, the GOP's working majority was down to four in the upper house and seventeen in the lower house, which was not enough to override a gubernatorial veto. The Socialists fared even worse, losing all but two of their ten seats in the Assembly. By contrast, the Democrats did very well, gaining four seats in the Senate and thirteen in the Assembly. Even more stunning was the defeat of Republican governor Whitman, who was running for his third term against Alfred E. Smith, a Democrat and president of the New York City Board of Aldermen. A lackluster campaigner, Whitman tried hard to smear Smith by stressing his ties to Tammany Hall. “Shall Albany be run from Fourteenth Street [the site of Tammany's headquarters]?” he asked the voters. But Smith ran very well in New York City, where he was supported not only by Tammany, but also by anti-Tammany Democrats, insurgent Republicans, and other urban progressives, and pretty well in the heavily ethnic districts of several upstate cities. In the end he won by fewer than 15,000 (or less than 1 percent) of the more than two million votes cast. The vote was so close, writes one historian, that Whitman “spent a month in futile litigation to obtain a recount and prevent Smith from taking office.”5
During the campaign Smith did not have much to say about the housing problem. Neither, for that matter, did Whitman. Only the Socialists made an issue of it. And Smith, who owed his political success to Tammany Hall, was not a Socialist—or a radical of any kind. At one point he even signed a bill making it a misdemeanor to display a red flag at any rally or parade. Yet Smith was a champion of working people. His father had been a workingman. And were it not for his political know-how and good fortune, he would probably have ended up one too. (During the campaign he reminded voters, “When Whitman was an Amherst College student, I was working at the Fulton Fish Market.”) During his many years in the State Assembly, first as a member and then as a leader, he had shown a readiness to regulate private enterprise in the interest of working people. As a legislator with an expansive notion of the police power, he supported bills to enhance the safety of factory workers and to limit the hours of labor for women and children. He also backed workmen's compensation and a minimum wage, though again only for women and children.6 It was not clear how far he would go to solve the housing problem when he took office in January 1920. But even if he would not go as far as the Socialists, he would almost certainly go farther than Whitman. And as governor from 1919 to 1921—and again from 1923 to 1929—he would be tested as much by the housing problem as by any other issue.
In the months after Smith took office, a host of committees, public and private, began to look into the housing problem in New York City. One of the first was the Advisory Committee on Housing, a committee of the State Reconstruction Commission, which the governor set up in January 1919 to study the state's postwar needs. (Chaired by Abram I. Elkus, a well-known lawyer who had played a prominent role in Smith's campaign, the commission ran into so much opposition in the Republican-dominated legislature that it was forced to rely on private donations.) A few months later the legislature formed a committee of its own, the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, which, as mentioned earlier, was commonly known as the Lockwood Committee, after its chairman Senator Charles C. Lockwood of Brooklyn. At about the same time the Merchants’ Association, which represented New York City's leading retailers, set up a special committee on housing, as did several civic groups, including the Bronx Board of Trade, and neighborhood organizations, among them the Washington Heights Taxpayers Association. “If a multiplication of committees will solve the housing problem in New York,” wrote the Globe in May 1919, “then the matter is as good as settled.”7
Like most New Yorkers, these committees disagreed on a number of points. But on one they all agreed, as did virtually everyone else, among them real estate men and tenant activists, Democrats, Republicans, and Socialists. And that was that the rising rents were a result of the housing shortage. Drawing on the findings of the Advisory Committee on Housing, Elkus told the Lockwood Committee that “rent profiteering was a symptom of a disease, and that disease is that there are not enough houses.” Or as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it, the profiteering landlords were “only an incident of the condition and not the cause of it.” The Merchants’ Association reached much the same conclusion, as did the City Club, which attributed the “acute rental situation” to “a sharp falling off in building operations.” Joseph A. Kellogg, counsel to Governor Smith, agreed that rising rents were due to “the absolute shortage of houses in the city.” With too many people and too few apartments, the competition for space inevitably drives up rents, he said. Clarence H. Kelsey, president of Title Guaranty & Trust Company, made the same point. So long as there are three families for each apartment, he told the Lockwood Committee, the landlords “will get all [they] can.”8
To Elkus, the solution to the problem was obvious: “build more homes and build them now,” he told the Bronx Board of Trade. Other members of the Smith administration agreed, among them Belle Moskowitz, secretary of the Reconstruction Commission, who declared, “Building is the only real solution to the problem of housing in New York.” Hylan and Hirsch agreed. So did the Merchants’ Association and the City Club. Richard M. Hurd, the country's foremost real estate economist, also held that “the only way to cure a housing shortage was to build more buildings[, especially] more apartment houses.” On this point, if on few others, Alexander Braunstein, a Socialist alderman from the Bronx, and members of the Bronx Board of Trade, found common ground. The press saw things in much the same way. “The only solution to the rent profiteering problem is to build more homes and build them now,” wrote the Times. “The rent situation will not be solved until several thousand more apartment houses have been built,” added the Eagle. Among the many New Yorkers who agreed with the Times and the Eagle was the governor. In August 1920, at which time he was under enormous pressure from the tenants leagues and other groups to call a special session of the state legislature to enact one or more laws to curb rent profiteering, Governor Smith insisted that “The crying need is more housing” and that “nothing short of an active resumption of building on a large scale will bring adequate relief.”9
Although there was a consensus that New York sorely needed more housing, there was no agreement about how much more. The Reconstruction Commission reported that the city was short about 40,000 apartments. Bruce Bliven, a well-known journalist, wrote that it needed 75,000 more. Frank Mann, the tenement house commissioner, and Lawson Purdy, the head of the Charity Organization Society, a citywide group that provided relief to the “worthy poor,” estimated the shortage at roughly 100,000. So did Mayor Hylan. The Lockwood Committee also came up with a figure of 100,000, but that was for the entire state. The estimates varied so widely because without data from the 1920 census, which had not yet been compiled, it was very hard to figure out how many people lived in New York. Given that thousands of apartments, most of them in old-law tenements on the Lower East Side, were more or less uninhabitable, it was also very hard to figure out how many dwelling units existed in the city. Indeed, drawing on a wide range of sources, Professor Samuel McCune Lindsay contended there was no housing shortage at all in New York. In a study done under the auspices of the Real Estate Board—which, he insisted, had made no effort to influence his finding—Lindsay concluded that the city's population had not gone up as fast as projected and by no means fast enough to deplete the surplus of housing that had been left by the great surge of residential construction before World War I. Lindsay's elaborate tables and charts notwithstanding, very few New Yorkers found his report credible.10
For New Yorkers other than Lindsay, it was less important to figure out how many more houses had to be built than to find a way to build them. Most of them took it for granted that this was a job for private enterprise—and, above all, for the speculative builders who had erected most of New York's apartment houses. But the speculative builders were not building. Driven by the soaring price of labor and materials, the cost of construction had gone up at least 80 percent in the past few years. Making matters worse, most well-informed observers saw no reason to believe that wages and prices were likely to go down anytime soon. “The present level of prices and wages will be maintained indefinitely,” predicted the Housing Committee of the Merchants’ Association, a blue-ribbon committee that was chaired by Burt L. Fenner of McKim, Mead & White. “I do not believe we will ever return to pre-war prices in building construction,” declared Senator William M. Calder. A few other observers were less pessimistic. But even they did not think there was much that the federal or state governments could do to reduce the cost of construction. For most builders, it was too risky to put up new apartment houses that would have to compete with old ones that had been erected for half as much money.11
Even the builders who were willing to take the risk often found that they were unable to raise the capital. Although there was “plenty of money in the country,” wrote Walter B. Stabler, controller of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, it was not available for mortgages on residential real estate. The savings banks and insurance companies were afraid that in the event of a postwar deflation, the apartment houses would be worth less than their outstanding debt. Moreover, many financial institutions were, in the words of Harry Fischel, a veteran Manhattan real estate broker, “loaded up with Liberty Bonds” and thus “unable to make [real estate] loan[s] even if they would like to.” Worst of all, said Stabler, “untold millions” of dollars have been entirely removed from the real estate mortgage market because mortgages were not competitive with other investments, a point also made by the Housing Committee of the Merchants’ Association. After taxes, they yielded less than gilt-edge corporate securities and tax-exempt state, county, and municipal bonds. Investors “cannot be expected to leave their money in highly taxed mortgages or make new investments of this kind,” Stabler pointed out, “when there are perfectly safe securities which will pay twice as much.”12
Stabler and other New Yorkers urged federal and state officials to act on one or more of several far-reaching proposals to attract capital back into real estate. (Hirsch even went so far as to call for the state legislature to enact a law requiring insurance companies to invest a portion of their assets in residential property.) Of these proposals, none generated as much enthusiasm as one to exempt mortgage interest from federal and state income taxes, a measure that would have made real estate mortgages competitive with other securities. The Reconstruction Commission and the Lockwood Committee endorsed this proposal. So did the Real Estate Board, the Merchants’ Association, and Mayor Hylan. And with the conspicuous exception of Robert E. Dowling, the president of a leading New York real estate firm who did not think it would have much of an impact on home building for low-income residents, so did many other New Yorkers. Although the proposal's supporters disagreed on some points—for example, whether the exemption should be temporary or permanent and whether a ceiling should be imposed on the amount of the mortgages subject to exemption—they all agreed that once mortgage interest was exempt from federal and state income taxes, what Tenement House Commissioner Frank Mann called “a flood” of capital would pour into residential real estate. When it did, the builders would rush to meet the huge pent-up demand for apartments—and, in Senator Calder's words, take advantage of a market that would be “unequaled in the last fifty years.”13
In response to mounting pressure, Senator Calder introduced a bill to exempt from federal income taxes the interest on mortgages up to $40,000. It was referred to the Senate Finance Committee. Representative James C. McLaughlin of Michigan filed a similar bill, which was sent to the House Committee on Ways and Means. Among the groups that testified before the Ways and Means Committee was the New York City Real Estate Board, whose spokesmen supported what became known as the Calder-McLaughlin bill, but pointed out that a mortgage of much more than $40,000 would be required to build an apartment house. Some observers, among them Isidor Berger of the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, were optimistic about the bill's prospects. But others, including Al Smith, doubted that Congress would act on it. And he was right. Once Congress failed to pass the Calder-McLaughlin bill, the New York State legislature saw no point in enacting a tax-exemption law of its own. The state income tax was so much lower than the federal income tax that such a law would not have done much to make real estate mortgages attractive investments. A few groups, notably the Washington Heights Taxpayers Association and the City Club, came up with a different tax-exemption proposal, one that did not require federal action. Under this proposal new apartment houses would be exempt from local property taxes for several years after they were erected. But it was not until mid-1920 that this proposal generated much interest.14
Even before World War I was over, it was widely believed that private enterprise could ease the housing shortage not only by erecting new buildings, but also by altering old ones. As Frank Mann pointed out in November 1918, there were thousands of three- and four-story single-family houses, most of them in Manhattan and Brooklyn, which had “outlived [their] usefulness” and had “no rental or market value.” They were “invariably of good construction, well lighted and ventilated,” he added. If they were converted into three- and four-family tenement houses, tens of thousands of apartments would be added to the city's housing stock. During the late nineteenth century a great many property owners had converted single-family homes into tenement houses. But after the passage of the Tenement House Act of 1901, they stopped. As Thomas A. Hart, secretary of the Tenement House Committee of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, explained, the provisions of the act were so “exacting” that these conversions were now prohibitively expensive. In some cases they were physically impossible.15 Hence many New Yorkers—especially, but not exclusively, many real estate men—came to the conclusion that it was time for the state legislature to amend the Tenement House Act of 1901 in ways that would facilitate the conversion of single-family homes into tenement houses. As the housing shortage grew worse, it seemed like an idea whose time had come.
Incorporated into a handful of bills introduced during and after World War I, the efforts to amend the Tenement House Act were supported by builders, property owners, labor unions, and real estate men and later by the Reconstruction Commission and the Lockwood Committee. But they were opposed by the tenement house reformers and their allies, who feared that the proposed amendments would undermine the changes for which they had fought so long and hard and bring about a return to the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions that had led to the enactment of the 1901 law. Speaking against the Dowling bill, which was designed to make it easier to convert three- and four-story private dwellings into three- and four-family tenement houses, John J. Murphy, a former Tenement House Commissioner and now secretary of the Tenement House Committee of the Charity Organization Society, argued that it did not provide adequate requirements for light and air, much less adequate safeguards against fire hazards. Fire Chief John Kenlon agreed with Murphy, saying that allowing the property owners to leave the wooden, winding stairways of the old dwellings in place in the new structures, as the Dowling bill did, “is, to my mind, inviting disaster.” And Lawson Purdy was not only opposed to the effort to facilitate the conversion of single-family homes into tenement houses, but also cynical about the motives of some of its backers. Referring to a bill that was introduced in 1920, he claimed that it was designed not so much to provide additional housing as to boost the value of otherwise worthless buildings.16
As a result of this opposition, the efforts to amend the Tenement House Act ran into a good deal of trouble. At the urging of the Brooklyn Board of Real Estate Brokers and the Tenement House Committee of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, which held that conversion was “an economic necessity” for many property owners, the state legislature enacted the Lawson bill in 1917. But as Frank Mann observed, the bill was “ineffective.” It included so many provisions that were designed for large tenement houses that it did not greatly reduce the costs of conversion. By virtue of these provisions, not to mention the shortage of capital, labor, and materials, only a handful of property owners took advantage of the Lawson bill. The Dowling bill, which was introduced a year later, fared even less well. Although supported by the Real Estate Board, the bill was so strongly opposed by the Charity Organization Society, the Fire Department, and other organizations that the state legislature shelved it. Like the Dowling bill, the Dodge bill, which was drafted by the Real Estate Board and filed early in 1919, would have allowed as many as four apartments in each of the converted buildings. Although the bill, which would have added from 20,000 to 50,000 apartments to New York City's housing stock, was backed by the Buildings Trades’ Employers Association and the State Federation of Labor, it too went nowhere, again largely because of the opposition of the tenement house reformers.17
Also filed in early 1919 was the Burlingame bill, which was backed by a coalition that included the Real Estate Board of New York and the Tenement House Committee of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities. The Burlingame bill was designed to do what the Lawson bill had failed to do—reduce the costs of converting single-family homes into tenement houses without jeopardizing the health and safety of the residents. In an effort to soften the opposition of the tenement house reformers, the bill's sponsors drew the line at the conversion of three-story single-family homes into three-family tenement houses. By drawing the line, wrote the Eagle, “precisely where the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities and other supporters of the tenement house law draw it,” they prevailed on the legislature to pass the Burlingame bill in the spring of 1919. And Governor Smith signed it. There was no doubt, said Thomas Hart, that the Burlingame bill would be “a godsend” to many property owners, who would now be able to convert a three-story house into a three-family tenement for only $2,000–$2,500, charge their tenants a fair rent, and still earn a reasonable return on their investment. At a special session called by Smith in June, the legislature enacted a revised version of the Dodge bill as well. Only the two Socialist assemblymen spoke out against it. But in August 1919 Belle Moskowitz reported that no one had yet taken advantage of the Burlingame and Dodge laws.18
As early as 1918 some New Yorkers were skeptical that private enterprise could do much to ease the housing shortage. And as the shortage went from bad to worse, the skepticism grew. By far the most skeptical were the Socialists, who had little faith in private enterprise and even less in speculative building. To them, the solution was obvious. If private builders were unable to supply the sorely needed housing, wrote one, “what else is there left to do except for the state or municipality to step in?” By stepping in, he meant acquiring land, building houses, and renting them to what the Call referred to as people of “moderate means.” Alderman Alexander Braunstein agreed. Pointing out that the only way to bring down rents was to put up houses, he declared, “Private enterprise finds it unprofitable to do so. The City of New York will find it unprofitable not to do so.” The problem is “too gigantic for other than collective action.” Public housing “is a new proposal,” said Judge Jacob Panken, “but it is the only one that will solve the problem effectively.” In an effort to alleviate the housing shortage, several Socialists introduced legislation authorizing the city or state to go into the housing business. Following the lead of Assemblyman Feigenbaum, Assemblyman Charles Solomon submitted a bill that would have enabled the city to create a housing commission and empower it to acquire land, erect houses, and rent them at cost. Not long afterward Alderman Braunstein filed a bill to create a municipal housing bureau to build apartment houses on vacant city-owned land.19
Of the New Yorkers who sided with the Socialists on this issue, most were far from enthusiastic about public housing. But they saw no other way to alleviate the housing shortage. Typical was Belle Moskowitz, who told the Lockwood Committee, “If it cannot get housing in any other way, if it cannot get housing through the speculative builder, if it cannot get it through cooperative associations or any other fashion, the city [of New York] will have to build it.” Al Smith, Moskowitz's boss, came out in favor of public housing in early 1920, less than a year after he had declared that “no legislation could make houses grow on empty lots.” So did Stewart Browne, president of the United Real Estate Owners Association (and a maverick in real estate circles), who said in late 1920 that while he opposed public housing in principle, “it was the only practical measure to meet the situation.” A few New Yorkers, the most important of whom were Fiorello H. La Guardia, president of the Board of Aldermen, and Henry H. Curran, borough president of Manhattan, were more enthusiastic about public housing. So were some progressive periodicals. The housing situation was “alarming,” wrote the Nation. “People are robbing themselves of food in order to pay the landlord who robs them in excessive rent, and families already indecently crowded are taking in lodgers.” Private enterprise offers no hope for relief because capital “must have its interest” and landlords “will exact the utmost farthing.” Only the government “can give homes to the people who need them now and provide the homes that will be needed in the immediate future.”20
Public housing was much more controversial than tax exemptions for mortgage income and revisions of the tenement house laws. From the start it aroused a great deal of opposition, especially from real estate interests and tenement house reformers, two groups that were ordinarily at odds with each other. Public housing was un-American, its opponents charged. It was a form of socialism that had no place in a country that had been built by private enterprise. Asked by the Lockwood Committee if the state should put up houses, Jacob Leitner, a Bronx real estate man, replied, “No, no more than I think the State should feed its people.” If the state provided housing, why not food, clothing, motorcars, and even theater tickets, said Lawrence Veiller, the nation's leading tenement house reformer. For the state to tax one class of citizens for the benefit of another “is bad principle and worse policy,” added E. R. L. Gould, another tenement house reformer and president of the City and Suburban Homes Company. It was a form of paternalism, a type of what Lawson Purdy called “charitable relief, however disguised,” that would demoralize the tenants. Not the least, public housing would create new opportunities for skullduggery. Given the sordid history of machine politics in New York City, “it would in all likelihood result in a veritable orgy of political favoritism and corruption,” warned Samuel Untermyer, a prominent lawyer and chief counsel to the Lockwood Committee.21
According to its opponents, public housing was objectionable on practical as well as ideological grounds. It was, in the words of the New York City Real Estate Board, “economically unsound.” Public officials could not put up housing “any cheaper, better or quicker” than private builders, the opposition argued. Hence it would be impossible for the cities to build apartments and rent them at cost. They would have to charge market rents, which most low-income tenants could not afford, or run a deficit, which would have to be picked up by the taxpayers. Even if New York was inclined to give public housing a chance, where would it find the money? “Even if the grave economic and governmental objections to putting the city into the housing business were ignored,” said Clarence H. Kelsey, “it is perfectly plain that the city could not provide the $600,000,000 [needed] in the next five years for housing, or anything like that sum.” The City Club agreed, arguing that even “the most lavish expenditure of public funds” would not provide enough housing. New York “has enough on its hands now” without going into the housing business, added Frank Mann. To emphasize the point, the opponents argued that public housing had been a failure in England and other European countries. Indeed, said former tenement house commissioner Murphy, their experience demonstrated “the economic futility of attempting to solve the housing problem that way.”22
Rather than alleviate the housing shortage, public housing would exacerbate it, the opposition contended. Underlying this position was the conventional wisdom that if public authority went into business it would drive out private enterprise. Thus when it came to housing, said Gould, “municipal regulation, not municipal ownership, is the best watchword for American policy.” Kelsey explained the logic of this position as well as anyone. “The only reason for taking the city into the [housing] business is to furnish space at a loss,” he said in 1920. But how, he asked, could a builder be expected to compete with the city “as long as it furnishes space at a loss?” A builder “will not take the risk of so building if the city stands over him with power, whenever it pleases[,] to go into the business of producing space for less than it is worth and destroying the value of his property.” The Daily Eagle, a conservative newspaper that subscribed to the conventional wisdom, warned that if New York went into the housing business it might ease the shortage for a while, but it would drive out private builders. And once the city had outgrown “the new municipal construction,” the situation would be as bad as ever.23
Opponents also claimed that public housing was unconstitutional. Relying on an opinion submitted by Corporation Counsel William P. Burr to Mayor Hylan in May 1919, they argued that under the New York State Constitution the city was barred from spending money for anything other than a public purpose. And as Burr told the Lockwood Committee, to erect buildings and rent apartments was “a private purpose.” Even if it had incidental public benefits, municipal housing could not be regarded in the same way as municipal water and sewer systems or even municipal electric light and gas plants. Burr's successor, George P. Nicholson, concurred. So did Louis B. Marshall, an eminent New York lawyer and one of the nation's leading constitutional authorities. The constitution, Burr noted, could be amended to permit cities to incur debt for the purpose of building houses. But as the opponents of public housing pointed out, a constitutional amendment would have to be approved by two successive sessions of the state legislature before it could be submitted to the voters. Even if all went smoothly, which in view of the widespread opposition to public housing seemed highly unlikely, it would take at least three years before construction got under way. Given the acute housing shortage, few New Yorkers were willing to wait so long. Thus noted Mayor Hylan's Housing Conference Committee, any plan for public housing, “even if it were not objectionable from an economic and governmental point of view,” would be delayed “too long to be of any practical value.”24
These objections were groundless, responded the backers of public housing. To some of the many New Yorkers who held that rent profiteering was largely to blame for the spread of radicalism in the city, it seemed preposterous to attack public housing as a form of socialism. If anything, public housing was designed to help prevent radicalism from taking hold. Some New Yorkers also dismissed these charges as beside the point. A good example was Dr. Royal S. Copeland, who had moved from Michigan to New York, where he served as dean of Flower Hospital and Medical College until 1918, when he was appointed New York City's health commissioner. Deeply concerned by the impact of the housing shortage on the city's health, he became an outspoken advocate of public housing. Testifying in 1920 before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Reconstruction and Production, Copeland declared, “It may be socialistic or communistic or idealistic, but I say that if we can not get houses any other way they must be built with public funds.” Another good example was John V. Van Pelt, a New York City architect (and a Cooper Union faculty member), who told the National Housing Conference in 1918, “I have always been intensely conservative; but if providing houses, schools, [and] recreation buildings for the needs of [working] men and women, the sinews of our country, is Socialism, then up to this point I am ready to be called a Socialist.”25
Public housing was not impractical either, its supporters claimed. Although it had not yet been tried in the United States, a point emphasized by the New York City Real Estate Board, it had already been adopted in many Western European countries. Indeed, said Copeland, public housing was widely accepted in “every other civilized country in the world”—though in the wake of World War I, it was not clear that some of these countries were all that civilized. Moreover, said La Guardia and Curran, public housing worked well in European cities. And there was no reason to think it would not work as well in American cities. Most American cities now did many things that were once regarded as inappropriate. They built public schools, public markets, public piers, public parks, public playgrounds, and public baths. Most provided water, and some furnished transportation. A few even operated ferries, Stewart Browne pointed out. And they did so without demoralizing the riders. (This remark was aimed at Edward P. Doyle, the manager of the Real Estate Board's Bureau of Research and Information and an outspoken opponent of public housing, who rode the Staten Island ferry to Manhattan every day.) Where private enterprise failed to provide health care for poor New Yorkers, the city established hospitals, clinics, and dispensaries, wrote the Outlook. Now that private enterprise was apparently “on the verge of failing to provide shelter” for thousands of New Yorkers, the city should supply housing as well.26 As for the charge that public housing would be grist for Tammany's mill, its supporters evidently thought the less said the better.
To the charge that public housing would exacerbate the housing shortage by driving private enterprise out of the field, its supporters responded that “the field is large enough for everybody.” Some even took the position that it would not be much of a loss if private enterprise were driven out. As the New Republic wrote in 1920, “Competitive building for profit has never worked, works abominably now and will certainly never work tolerably well in the future.” Clarence S. Stein, an architect and planner and secretary of the Housing Committee of the Reconstruction Commission, explained why. The speculative builders, who erected the apartment houses that lined the streets of New York for miles on end, “built to sell, not to house.” And they built badly, putting up houses “without any thought of permanence or comfort.” The result, wrote Stein, was that “there have never been houses enough for the poorer workers.” Moreover, the way things were going, it would not be long before “there will not be houses enough even for the moderately well-to-do.” Even the Reconstruction Commission's Housing Committee, which was no friend of public housing, acknowledged that “it has been economically impossible for many years to provide a large part of the population of this State with decent homes according to American standards of living.” Even at prewar prices, said Edith Elmer Wood, a leading authority on housing, it was not possible for private builders to put up decent housing, charge reasonable rents, and earn a reasonable return. “It simply cannot be done.”27
By far the strongest argument against public housing was that the state constitution barred the city from going into the housing business. Corporation Counsel Burr's opinion was well thought out. It was based on a careful analysis of municipal law, not on a personal hostility to public housing. (Indeed, he told the Lockwood Committee that he would rather have reached a different conclusion.) And most legal authorities found it persuasive. Even so, a few backers of public housing, of whom La Guardia was the most outspoken, challenged Burr's opinion. La Guardia, who had studied law at night at New York University, was not a legal scholar. But that did not stop him from arguing that the New York and Massachusetts cases on which Burr based his opinion were not on point. New Yorkers “have the right to meet this crisis by building immediately and not waiting for any constitutional amendment,” he argued. Like Senator Peter A. Abeles, the only member of the Lockwood Committee who favored public housing, La Guardia believed that the city was facing an emergency, one that was as serious as anything the country had faced during World War I. Unlike La Guardia, however, Curran and most other backers of public housing were resigned to amending the constitution. And the sooner the better. Hylan, who had initially opposed public housing, claimed in mid-1920 that if the state legislature acted quickly the city might be able to begin building as early as 1922, a claim that was more than a little far-fetched.28
The debate over public housing, which started before World War I, picked up in the immediate postwar years when its advocates put forward several proposals to authorize the city to go into the housing business. Corporation Counsel Burr's opinion notwithstanding, State Senator John D. Doyle introduced a bill in early January 1920 to empower New York to build houses on city-owned land in the Bronx. As many as 25,000 families could be housed under this plan, Doyle said. Shortly thereafter La Guardia called on the Board of Aldermen to ask the Board of Estimate to authorize housing on municipal property at Jamaica Bay and other sites for New Yorkers of moderate income “who cannot find homes except at extortionate rentals.” At least twenty thousand families could be housed there before the end of the summer, he claimed. An ingenious idea was also put forward by George Donnelly, president of the Fair Play Rent Association, one of the conservative tenants leagues that was formed in early 1920 as an alternative to the radical tenants unions. In an effort to get around the constitutional constraints on public housing, he suggested that the city sell the Jerome Avenue Reservoir site in the Bronx to Fair Play and authorize the association to build houses on it. In the meantime, Curran urged his colleagues on the Board of Estimate to appropriate $10 million to build housing on city-owned land. At his request the board also instructed Corporation Counsel Nicholson to draft a bill amending the state constitution, but the bill was introduced too late in the session to be acted on. Shortly afterward Curran implored Governor Smith to call a special session to enact this bill and other housing legislation.29
Given the deep-seated opposition to public housing, these proposals had little chance of success. What little chance they had was severely weakened by the widespread belief that the authorities could do more to ease the housing shortage by lending money or extending credit to private builders than by going into the housing business. The members of the Reconstruction Commission's Housing Committee favored making loans to builders—provided that they were “well secured and made upon a business basis, without expense or risk of loss to the State.” Other New Yorkers supported extending state credit to builders, though in some cases only to limited-dividend companies and in other cases only for the construction of moderately priced homes. Many real estate men were far from enthusiastic about what were in effect subsidies for private enterprise, but most found them less objectionable than public housing. Yet the extension of state credits had serious drawbacks of its own. One was that the state and its cities could no more lend money or extend credit to private interests than they could go into the housing business. To do either required a constitutional amendment. The other was that some supporters of public housing viewed this approach as outrageous. It would be “a vicious insult to the people,” said Judge Panken, for the authorities to issue bonds and then turn the proceeds over to the very builders who were to blame for the housing shortage. If the state or the cities supplied the capital, they should build and manage the houses.30
By early 1919 many New Yorkers—even many who held that the long-term solution to the housing problem was “to build more homes and build them now”—had come to believe that neither private enterprise nor public authority could do much to alleviate the housing shortage in the near future. From this belief it was only a short step to the conclusion that the state legislature had to take action to stop the city's rapacious landlords from raising the rent and then bringing summary proceedings against the hard-strapped tenants who could not pay it. The legislature, it was assumed, had two options. It could impose rent control on residential property, preventing the landlords from raising the rent above a certain amount or even from raising it at all. Although a draconian measure, rent control was not unprecedented. It had been enacted in many European countries during World War I. Under what was known as the Saulsbury Resolution, Congress had regulated rents in the District of Columbia. And Assemblyman Garfinkel had filed a rent-control bill in February 1918. The legislature could also revise the state's landlord-tenant laws (under which, said Charles Solomon, “the landlord can do anything”) in ways that would make it more difficult and more expensive for landlords to bring summary proceedings. After all, said Judge Harry Robitzek, summary proceedings had not been designed to enable the landlords to use the courts “for the purpose of increasing rents beyond a fair and reasonable amount.”31
Shortly after the state legislature convened in January 1919, several senators and assemblymen filed bills to protect the city's tenants from profiteering landlords. One bill, which was introduced by Senator Abeles, provided that a landlord who brought summary proceedings against a tenant for nonpayment of rent would have to show that he had not raised the rent above a rate that would yield more than 10 percent of the property's assessed value. Another bill, which was introduced by Assemblyman David Dreschler of Brooklyn, would have made it a misdemeanor for a landlord who provided heat to charge a rent that brought in more than 12.5 percent of the assessed value. If the landlord did not provide heat, he would be allowed only 10 percent. Neither Abeles nor Dreschler went as far as Samuel Orr and the other leaders of the Greater New York Tenants League, who called for legislation authorizing a board of municipal court judges to rule on proposed rent hikes in much the same way as public service commissioners ruled on proposed transit fares—that is, unless the board found the hike reasonable and necessary, the landlord would have to rescind it. Nor did Abeles and Dreschler go as far as Judge Panken, who favored legislation that would have allowed landlords to raise the rent only once a year and then only with the approval of a commission appointed by the governor, a commission that would have been authorized to fix rentals for each building according to its location and improvements.32 Still, Abeles and Dreschler went a good deal further than any legislator other than Garfinkel.
Several other bills were filed to amend the state's landlord-tenant laws. Perhaps the most important was the Lyons bill, which was designed to repeal the Ottinger Law. Enacted in 1918, the much-criticized law provided that unless otherwise specified in writing, all tenancies would run from month to month. The Lyons bill provided instead that in the absence of a written agreement to the contrary, all tenancies would expire on May 1 of the following year. Under a bill introduced by Assemblyman Joseph V. McKee, the landlord would have to give a tenant twenty-one days’ notice before a rent hike could go into effect. Under another bill filed by Assemblyman M. M. Fertig, the landlord would have to give not five days’ notice, as required by the current law, but ten days’ notice before attempting to oust a tenant who refused to move out after his lease expired. Senator Charles E. Russell offered an amendment calling for thirty days’ notice, but indicated he was willing to settle for fifteen. Yet another bill, which was filed by Senator Henry G. Shackno, gave a municipal court judge who issued a final order in favor of the landlord the discretion to grant the tenant a stay of up to twenty days, as opposed to five days under the current law, provided that he deposited the old rent with the court for the period of the stay. Shackno also introduced another bill providing for a stay of up to sixty days for tenants who were evicted from buildings that housed three or more families.33
Spokesmen for the tenants leagues, all of whom held that the state's landlord-tenant laws were, in the words of Morris Gisnet, “antiquated,” supported these bills. So did leaders of the Socialist Party, who wanted even more stringent legislation. Also in favor were the Bronx Democratic County Committee and many municipal court judges, one of whom, Jacob S. Strahl, called on legislators to forbid rent hikes for six months. It could be justified as a war measure, he said, even though the war had ended six months earlier. Having been forced to issue eviction warrants against thousands of tenants, these judges were fed up. With their support, the McKee bill was passed by the Assembly and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. And the Abeles bill, which limited rents to 10 percent of the property's assessed value, was approved by the Senate. But much as Gisnet predicted, most of these bills went no further. Only the Fertig bill, which required the landlord to give ten days’ notice in holdover proceedings, was enacted before the legislature adjourned in-mid April. But the governor could only sign it if the mayor gave his approval. And Hylan refused.34
As Gisnet pointed out, most of these bills were shelved largely because of the vigorous opposition of New York's real estate interests, especially the city's Real Estate Board, which kept a close eye on what went on in Albany. Spokesmen for this formidable lobbying group contended that the proposals to regulate rents and revise the landlord-tenant laws were unfair, if not unconstitutional. Most landlords were not profiteers. If they were raising the rents, it was not so much to gouge their tenants as to cover their expenses, which had doubled since 1914, and to offset the heavy losses of the prewar years, when, said Douglas L. Elliman, no one gave any thought to “whether the owner was securing an adequate return for his money.” The city was undergoing “a proper adjustment of rents,” said a title insurance company executive. There was “not enough rent profiteering to get excited about,” much less to justify revising longstanding landlord-tenant laws. Spokesmen for the real estate industry acknowledged that a few lessees and speculators were taking advantage of the housing shortage to raise the rent. But in their view it was not fair for the legislators to punish the large majority of reputable landlords for the abuses of a small minority of rapacious ones. Nor was it fair for them to single out the landlords when manufacturers and retailers were raising the prices of food, clothing, and other items, which were increasing even more rapidly than the cost of housing.35
Spokesmen for the real estate industry also charged that the proposals to regulate rents and revise the landlord-tenant laws were impractical. “You can no more legislate the cost of living up and down than you can stop the tide by building a sea wall,” declared Leo Day Woolworth, secretary of the Advisory Council of Real Estate Interests. Rents were a function of supply and demand. They would go down only when the cost of labor and materials fell to a level at which it was profitable for builders to put up apartment houses. Legislative efforts to meddle with the housing market would only make things worse, argued many real estate men. As I. Montefiore Levy, a leader of the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, advised Governor Smith, regulating rents would drive builders and investors out of the residential real estate market and thereby exacerbate the housing shortage. Revising the landlord-tenant laws would not work either, said Robert E. Dowling, president of the City Investing Company. The legislature could amend the summary proceedings law, but the unscrupulous landlords would find ways to get around the amendments. The legislature could also increase the discretion of the municipal court judges, but that would leave landlords and tenants alike “dependent upon the whim of the men on the bench, who may be sober or drunk or half drunk or straight, or half-straight,” ready to do almost anything to stay on good terms with the voters in their district.36
Even many New Yorkers who were not in the real estate business had reservations about the proposals to regulate rents and revise the landlord-tenant laws. A case in point was Leopold Prince, a German immigrant, graduate of NYU Law School, member of Tammany Hall, and former state assemblyman who had served for thirty years as a municipal court judge in Manhattan. (As well as a judge, Prince was a violinist and the founder and conductor of the City Amateur Symphony Orchestra, a 110-piece ensemble that gave free classical music concerts on the mall in Central Park.) Prince decried his colleague Jacob Panken's proposals to ease the plight of the city's tenants as “Socialistic.” “Why pick on the landlords?” he asked. “Why all this hue and cry?” The housing problem would be solved as soon as wages and prices fell to prewar levels, he declared. Even Judge Aaron J. Levy, who was more outraged by New York's profiteering landlords than Prince, was not sure that the legislature could do much to help the city's tenants “without do[ing] violence to well defined and well-settled rules of law.” Nor was he sure that legislators could curb profiteering landlords without imposing an unreasonable burden on reputable landlords. And Judge Robitzek, who was deeply troubled by the plight of the city's tenants, had doubts that rent control was constitutional, a view that was shared by many other New Yorkers.37
Many state legislators, especially upstate Republican legislators, had the same reservations about the proposals to regulate rents and revise the landlord-tenant laws. They also saw no point in taking on the city's powerful real estate interests. What is more, the legislature had only recently appointed the Lockwood Committee to look into the housing shortage and come up with ways to deal with it. It made no sense to take action before the committee issued its report, and the committee would not even begin its hearings until after the legislature adjourned. The executive office was in much the same bind. Governor Smith, who was far from convinced that new laws were needed to ease the tenants’ plight, had set up the Reconstruction Commission early in 1919. He was inclined to defer action until its Housing Committee issued a report. The committee, it turned out, was skeptical that legislation, however well intentioned, would increase the supply of housing, which it believed was the only way to bring down rents. Indeed the committee was critical of the enthusiasm for “rent regulating and landlord-baiting,” which were “at present the most popular indoor and outdoor sports.” The proposed laws to curb the power of the landlords to raise rents and evict tenants would only “aggravate the already unhappy state of the average tenant,” the committee declared: “We cannot very consistently urge capital to build houses at the same time we are threatening to take away all incentive to build.”38
A week or so after the state legislature adjourned in mid-June, several New Yorkers launched a campaign to persuade Governor Smith to call a special session to deal with the housing problem. In the lead was Charles Solomon, who told a mass meeting at the Brownsville Labor Lyceum that it was time for the legislature to set up “legal barriers” between “the rent profiteers and their helpless tenants.” Hylan jumped on the bandwagon. After a mass meeting at City Hall, which adopted a resolution in favor of a special session that was introduced by Edward I. Hannah, a member of the Mayor's Committee on Rent Profiteering, the mayor appointed a committee of five to urge Smith to summon the legislators back to Albany. One of its members was Nathan Hirsch. Although he had told the Lockwood Committee a month earlier that he supported revision of the landlord-tenant laws “only as an emergency measure,” Hirsch was now in favor of a special session. So was Lockwood, who insisted, “There is no reason why the people should [have to] wait until January [for relief].” The legislators represent their constituents all year, he said, not just during the few months when in session. Also in favor of a special session were many tenant activists, some municipal court judges, and a few newspapers, among them the New York Call and Brooklyn Standard Union, which wrote that unless conditions improved soon, which seemed highly unlikely, “it might be necessary to call the Legislature into extraordinary session.”39
At the outset the governor made it clear that he was reluctant to call a special session to deal with the housing problem. Instead he was inclined to wait until the legislators returned to Albany in January 1920. (New York's Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, the industry's foremost trade journal, commended Smith for refusing to get carried away by the “hysteria” of the mass meeting at City Hall and joining in what it called “the indiscriminate attack on landlords.”) In defense of his position, the governor stressed that it was far from clear that new laws were necessary. “Many people have the mistaken idea that all reconstruction problems pressing for solution need an immediate change in our laws,” he said. “As much can be done to solve some of these difficulties without new laws as with them, if we can bring about a spirit of cooperation.” Smith's reluctance to call a special session may also have stemmed from the belief, as the Reconstruction Commission's Housing Committee put it, that the current housing shortage, “although sufficiently distressing, is temporary.” Far more serious was the lack of suitable workingmen's houses, which was “a condition that has long existed,” wrote the committee, “and that offers no prospect of improvement in the future, unless radical measures are taken.”40 If so, Smith may well have wanted to spend his political capital not so much on short-term schemes to curb rent profiteering as on long-term efforts to stimulate working-class housing.
For a month or so the governor withstood the pressure to call a special session. But it was not easy. Many landlords continued to raise the rent, and thousands of tenants responded by going on strike. There was even talk of a general rent strike in Brownsville, where a group of militant tenants demanded that their rents be reduced. The courts were inundated with summary proceedings, prompting Robitzek and other judges to insist that something had to be done sooner rather than later. The sidewalks were cluttered with furniture and other household goods, the belongings of the many tenants who had been ousted from their homes. In an effort to call attention to rent profiteering, the United Hebrew Trades, a federation of Jewish labor unions, began mobilizing trade unions, tenants leagues, and Socialist groups. And mass meetings held in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx attracted thousands of tenants, some of whom vowed “War to the death” against profiteering landlords. As bad as things were in the spring, they would be even worse in the fall, said Judge Peter A. Shiel. Robert L. Moran, president of the Board of Aldermen, agreed. When New Yorkers returned to the city at the end of the summer—and when servicemen came back from Europe—New York would face “an acute crisis,” he warned.41 And the crisis would reach a peak on the eve of the 1919 election, an election in which the Socialist Party was certain to make rent profiteering the centerpiece of its campaign.
As Governor Smith weighed the pros and cons of calling a special session, the U.S. Senate made a momentous decision that brought the matter to a head. Following the lead of the House of Representatives, it approved an amendment to the Constitution that gave women the right to vote, a right for which many had been struggling for more than half a century. For Smith, who very much wanted New York to be one of the first states to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, the issue was now not whether to call a special session, which he did a few days later; it was whether to add the housing problem to the agenda. Both Hirsch and Lockwood urged him to. So did the Greater New York Tenants League, whose leaders asked Smith, “Why not kill two birds with one stone?” Why not support suffrage for millions of women and at the same time provide relief for millions of tenants? Smith informed Hirsch that he was well aware of the gravity of the problem and was willing to consider concrete recommendations for “remedial legislation.” If he deemed these recommendations advisable, he would submit them to the legislators. To find out whether there was a consensus about what should be done—and thereby avoid a long-drawn-out discussion of the housing problem—the governor met with Hirsch, Lockwood, Elkus, and Tenement House Commissioner Mann as well as Senate Minority Leader James A. Foley and Assembly Minority Leader Charles D. Donohue. Shortly thereafter he put the housing problem on the agenda of the special session.42
On the eve of the special session another meeting was held at which Elkus, Lockwood, Hirsch, and Foley were joined by Republicans J. Henry Waters, president pro tem of the Senate; Thaddeus C. Sweet, speaker of the Assembly; and John J. Murphy, secretary of the Tenement House Committee of the Charity Organization Society. Drawing largely on the findings of the Lockwood Committee and the Reconstruction Commission, they came up with a legislative program to deal with the housing problem. It consisted of four bills and two resolutions. These proposals were introduced on the night of June 16, shortly after the state legislature—first the Assembly and then the Senate—unanimously adopted a resolution making New York the sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. As the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide reported, “There was not a hitch in the proceedings.” The bills, all but one of which were approved unanimously, were rushed through both houses. So were the resolutions. The Real Estate Board protested about the haste with which this “ill advised legislation” was enacted, but to no effect.43
Two of the four bills, both of which were signed by Governor Smith after Mayor Hylan gave his approval, were designed to ease the plight of New York's tenants by amending the landlord-tenant laws. One, which was a revised version of the bill that was introduced by Assemblyman Fertig at the regular session, provided that a landlord who elected to terminate a tenancy at the end of the month would have to give the tenant twenty days’ notice. Under the previous law the landlord had to give only five days’ notice—and under the Fertig bill only ten days’ notice. The other bill, which was similar to one that Senator Schackno had filed at the regular session, empowered a municipal court justice who had issued a final order to grant a stay of up to twenty days—provided that the tenant deposited with the court a sum equivalent to the old rent prorated for the length of the stay. Taken together, wrote Harold M. Phillips, counsel to the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, the new laws gave the tenants forty days, as opposed to only ten under the old laws, “within which to find other premises from the day when notice to remove is served to the day when the warrant of dispossess may be executed.” Although the new laws were “wholly favorable” to the tenants, Phillips commended the legislators for enacting them and predicted that as they became better known “the wisdom of the Legislature will be more and more appreciated.”44
The other two bills, which were signed by the governor within a week, were designed to ease the plight of the city's tenants by increasing the supply of housing. One, which was modeled on the Dodge bill that had gone down to defeat at the regular session, amended the Tenement House Act of 1901 in ways that facilitated the conversion of four-story single-family houses into four-family tenement houses. To win the support of the tenement house reformers, the bill included provisions to ensure that the new houses would have adequate ventilation, insulated stairways, and fire escapes. The other bill, the only one that applied to the entire state, amended the Banking Law, according to which savings banks were not allowed to provide mortgages to builders worth more than 40 percent of the value of the property. Under the new law, which was meant to increase the flow of capital into residential construction, these banks would now be permitted to lend up to 60 percent of the value. The two resolutions, which were also designed to increase the supply of capital available for new construction, urged Congress to enact two laws, one to create a federal building loan bank along the lines of the federal Farm Loan Bank and the other to exempt the bonds of the New York State Land Bank from federal income taxes.45 (Oddly, the legislators did not ask Congress to exempt income from residential mortgages from federal taxes, a measure that had been called for by many New York real estate men and supported by both the Lockwood Committee and the Reconstruction Commission.)
Many New Yorkers were pleased—even, in some cases, “elated,” wrote the Telegram—by the results of the special session. Mayor Hylan praised the revisions of the landlord-tenant laws as “the best [such measures] that have come before me,” stressing that they would provide much-needed relief to the tenants without imposing excessive burdens on the landlords. He also dismissed as “groundless” the charges of spokesmen for the real estate industry that the new laws would give tenants so much time to move that if so inclined they could destroy the apartment houses from which they were about to be evicted. If a tenant “deliberately destroys property,” Hylan said, he will be subject to arrest and prosecution. Commending the legislators for doing “a splendid piece of work,” Judge Robitzek said that as soon as the new landlord-tenant laws went into effect, he expected to see “a decrease of more than fifty per cent [in the number] of dispossess cases.” Governor Smith, who some had feared might bow to pressure from the tenement house reformers and veto the amendments to the Tenement House Law, claimed the new Dodge Law would not only ease the housing shortage, but also relieve the intolerable congestion on the Lower East Side and in other working-class neighborhoods. Senator Lockwood, one of the strongest supporters of the new Dodge bill, agreed, predicting that the law would spur the renovation of thousands of vacant buildings and thereby provide accommodations for as many as forty thousand families on the Lower East Side.46
Other New Yorkers were far from pleased with the results of the special session. Some complained about the changes in the landlord-tenant laws. Others, notably the Real Estate Board, objected to the revised version of the Dodge bill. In a protest filed with Governor Smith and the legislative leaders, it declared, “You can amend the tenement house law [of 1901]. You could repeal drastic and costly regulations, enacted in a period of hysteria at the instance of parlor socialists.” But it would not do much good. “As a matter of fact,” it added, “if you will leave the situation alone, it will remedy itself.” Residential construction was already under way. And once capital realized that even at the current prices of labor and materials “houses can be built and sold or rented profitably, there will be abundant funds to do all the building necessary.” Also displeased with the results of the special session was the Greater New York Tenants League. In a letter to Smith its leaders pointed out that the new laws would not curb rent profiteering. What was needed was rent control, specifically legislation to bar the landlords from raising the rent more than once a year even if the property changed hands. Nor would the new laws stop landlords from bringing summary proceedings “upon the slightest provocation.” What was needed was legislation to make the process more expensive—by, say, raising the cost of a precept to five dollars and banning the marshals from representing the landlords in court, a measure that would force them to retain a lawyer.47
As one scholar has suggested, the special session was noteworthy less for what it did than for what it did not do. The legislators did not impose rent control on residential property, not even a temporary freeze that was recommended by some municipal court judges. Nor did they empower the judges to take into consideration whether a landlord was charging a reasonable rent before issuing a final order, a measure supported by Senator Abeles. The legislators did not reconsider the Ottinger Law, which, said Bronx Senator Abraham Kaplan, who had filed a bill to repeal it in January 1919, left many thousands of tenants at the mercy of profiteering landlords and lessees. Despite the growing support for public housing, they did not even discuss amending the constitution to allow the state and its cities to go into the housing business, a step that had been taken by the Massachusetts legislature three years earlier.48 But for all that the special session did not do, it did do two things of great importance other than enact four laws and adopt two resolutions. It revealed that the state legislature, a conservative body that was dominated by upstate Republicans, was prepared to revise the landlord-tenant laws over the objections of New York's powerful real estate interests. It also gave the city's hard-pressed tenants reason to believe that if rents continued to soar in the months and years ahead, the legislators might well be willing to take even more drastic action.