The Great Rent Wars is a compelling and richly detailed chronicle of the fierce battles between New York City's landlords and tenants from the end of World War I to the cusp of the Great Depression. Though fueled by longstanding antipathy between the property-owning class and the city's tenanted population, these clashes derived principally from swiftly rising rents during a severe housing shortage following the end of the war. Facing tenant pressure, state legislators took the unprecedented step of imposing controls on rental housing. Fogelson's work is less argument driven than it is a meticulous narrative about the short life of these regulations. Relying on judicial proceedings and decisions, newspapers, and municipal and state reports and administrative records, Fogelson has produced a thorough account of this significant period in the history of housing and state regulation.

The late teens were a frightening time for New York's tenants. Housing construction had essentially ceased, as the war caused steep increases in construction costs and limited access to capital. With the city's population continuing to rise, the vacancy rate in 1920 fell to an astonishing 0.3 percent. Rents increased across all five boroughs, affecting tenants of all social classes, ethnicities, and races. Tenants flung accusations of gouging and profiteering at landlords while they cut back on food, took in boarders, and sent their children to work. Tenants also turned to a relatively new tactic: the rent strike. In response, landlords took tenants to court; these disputes so overwhelmed the municipal court system that “it seemed the judicial system was on the verge of collapse” (p. 100). With tenant-landlord conflicts further enflamed by differences of ethnicity, religion, race, and politics, they seemed to be bringing the city to “the verge of civil disorder” (p. 106).

In Fogelson's telling, these “rent wars” occurred as much in legislatures and court systems as in apartment buildings and neighborhoods. Fogelson documents the range of proposals city and state officials considered for how best to stem this housing emergency. Officials struggled to enact legislation that might have actually spurred construction and alleviated the housing shortage that all observers agreed was behind the crisis. Increasingly organized tenants willing to engage in militant protests augmented the pressure to take legislative action. In response, in 1920 the state legislature, comprised principally of conservative upstate Republicans, passed what became known as the emergency rent laws, which enacted controls over rental housing and made evictions much more difficult to achieve. These measures, the Nation believed, amounted to “the most socialistic legislation in the history of the commonwealth” (p. 198).

Despite this tenant victory, New York's property owners remained a powerful force. Fogelson judiciously balances the perspectives of both tenants and the city's property holders, parading before the reader landlords’ troubled tales as well as their adamant defenses of the right to receive market-value rents. Most landlords, real estate industry representatives proclaimed, sought only to make a modest profit; they too faced significant increases in operating and living expenses, which necessitated rent increases. Led by the state's Real Estate Board, property owners flooded the courts in the early 1920s with lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the laws. Fogelson, laboriously and often with excessive detail, chronicles these legal challenges as they rose up and down the state and federal court systems that ultimately found the controls constitutional. Here, as throughout the work, Fogelson vividly depicts the characters, claims, and stakes of the rent wars, but too often, the book is weighed down by unnecessary detail and repetition. Prudent trimming across the book's five sections would have enhanced The Great Rent Wars.

Though real estate men's lawsuits failed to overturn the laws, their continued political pressure did result in several measures that weakened the laws and their reach, such as the ability to evict a tenant in order to use a dwelling for the landlord's immediate family. Landlords also developed a creative array of (often nefarious) tactics to circumvent the laws and increase rents. These included making tenants who challenged rental increases appear repeatedly in court (losing a day's wage each time), refusing repairs until an exasperated tenant left and could be replaced by a higher-paying renter, and falsely inflating expenses to justify a larger rental increase before the court. These tactics and loopholes meant that, despite the emergency measures, the 1920s largely continued the longstanding pattern of the private market failing to provide adequate and affordable housing to indigent populations—conditions that continue to this day.

Although landlords persisted in challenging the emergency measures, the laws did keep significant portions of rental housing below market rate for much of the 1920s—that is, until the most alarming elements of the housing emergency subsided. Though some of the emergency measures were permanent—such as a law that “made it a misdemeanor for landlords to deprive a tenant of heat and other vital services”—its “core” provisions, including controls, required legislative extensions (p. 414). While tenants had little trouble convincing legislators that they continued to face a housing emergency into the early 1920s, political support began to subside at mid-decade once new construction accelerated again and vacancy rates rose to prewar levels. Tenant pressure retained regulations for the lower end of the housing market for several additional years, but controls were finally allowed to expire in 1929.

The Great Rent Wars would have benefited from an introduction that situated the work. Similarly, a conclusion that reflected on the narrative's findings and contributions, addressed how the end of controls was connected to housing conditions and reforms during the Great Depression and New Deal, and perhaps commented on the reinstitution of controls during World War II would have likely made the work all the more potent. Fogelson nonetheless has recovered a fascinating moment in the history of state regulation and the entrenched conflict between property owners and tenants.