Landlord’s Chance

In Manhattan, an apartment-house tenant last week was handed an ultimatum from his landlord. He could either buy his apartment for $10,000 or he would have to move out to make room for someone who would. When the tenant took his troubles to the Office of Rent Control, he found—along with hundreds of others—that the new rent-control law had a loophole. And landlords, chafing under rent ceilings, had found it. They could sell their apartments to tenants—or outside buyers—as “cooperatives,” without so much as a by-your-leave from ORC.

The co-op method of getting around rent ceilings had started over a year ago (TIME, March 25, 1946). Then it had been nipped by OPA’s ruling that 80% of the tenants in a building had to agree before a building could be made a coop. Even then, the holdouts could not be evicted for six months to a year. But the new law said nothing about that. It provided that tenants could be evicted if the owner of an apartment or house 1) needed it for himself, or 2) had sold it to someone who needed a place to live. Last week, as both tenants and landlords consulted their lawyers, the chances were that the exact size of the co-op loophole would have to be determined by a test case* in court.

* In a letter to the New York Herald Tribune, a reader suggested a prayer for landlords, taken from the Book of Common Prayer of England’s Edward VI, who died in 1553: “We heartily pray Thee to send Thy Holy Spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds and pastures of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be Thy tenants, may not rack or stretch out the rents of their houses or lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines or money after the manner of covetous worldlings, but so to let them out that the inhabitants thereof may be able to pay their rents and to live and nourish their families and remember the poor.”