Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890-1943 (review)

“Very little is known about exactly how tenement landlords operated, who they were, or how they influenced public policy, and this lack of understanding is due largely to scholars’ failure to tell the landlord’s story on so many basic historical levels,” Jared Day tells us at the outset of his curiously titled Urban Castles. (2) What is so remarkable about Day’s book is that it uncovers the significance of the landlord’s story on so many basic—and unexpected—historical levels. The book focuses on New York City’s exceptional housing situation in the first half of the twentieth century, but it charts transformations in property relations that reached well beyond that city. Day explains how and why landlords were made legally accountable for the condition of their buildings, and he explains how and why tenants made new concessions to landlords, including paying rent in advance through “security deposits” and accepting regular, if also regulated, rent increases. It is always an achievement when a scholar historicizes “market” practices that have been ideologically naturalized. But Day goes further and shows how the political dialectic between small landlords and working-class tenants not only altered their own relations but played into the ascendancy of professional real estate managers who in effect capitalized on a half a century of conflict. He thus also historicizes regulatory practices that have been said to have no market logic (or benefit).

Day’s study foregrounds the owners and operators of tenements, which sheltered the vast majority of wage-earning New Yorkers in the early twentieth century. The production and distribution of rental housing was handled within the city’s ethnic communities. Immigrant bankers oversaw the construction of tenements by entrepreneurs who aimed to build and sell quickly. Working-class landlords were largely amateurs or “passive investors” in their own neighborhoods who often leased their buildings, worked other jobs, and made their small margins of profit by putting little into the upkeep of tenements. In 1913, The Real Estate Record and Builders Guide announced that 65 percent of all buildings in Manhattan “were neglected ‘as a matter of custom and regular business practice.’” (56). The traditions of landlord-tenant law did not hold landlords liable for harm that came from poorly maintained buildings; nor did that law protect tenants from landlords’ unilateral powers to raise rents and evict those who could not afford the new price of housing. The minimal building codes on the books were not often enforced.

When middle-class reformers secured the Tenement House Law of 1901 (itself a significant political defeat for the building trades), landlords organized politically. Day does a terrific job of charting the political contests between reformers and landlords and then between grassroots (and often Socialist-led) tenants’ movements and landlords’ new trade organizations, especially the Greater New York Taxpayers Association (GNYTA), whose organizers aggressively defended the individual and collective interests of tenement landlords. With new tenement laws, judges started holding landlords liable for injuries caused by “negligence” in maintaining their buildings. Historians have missed this mirroring of the liability claims that led to workmen’s compensation laws, but the significance of state enforcement of a warranty for safe and healthy housing is difficult to overstate. GNYTA responded by insuring landlords and, not incidentally, enforcing housing standards through private inspection. But, as Day notes, the balance of power between landlords and tenants was shifting, and with it, the laissez-faire, small property regime of the nineteenth-century city was coming to an end.

Housing politics were already turbulent when inflation and the drastic coal and housing shortages of World War I prompted widespread rent strikes and pushed even middle-class tenants to join legislative campaigns to limit rent increases and regulate the eviction process. Rent control laws passed as “emergency measures” in 1920 lasted nearly a decade and established a precedent that New Yorkers reclaimed in 1943. Once the laws were passed, politicians...