Work

Good Landlords Make Good Neighbors: Tenant Complaints, Social Policing, and the Responsibilities of Landlords in Interwar Chicago

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: By the 1920s, apartments were among the prototypical living arrangements for urban tenants in cities like Chicago. These tenants found their domestic lives constrained by the spatial realities of apartments and the landlord-tenant relationship. Through an examination of complaints filed with one landlord across multiple apartment buildings in Chicago, this article explores how tenants wrestled with constrained domesticity and the responsibilities of landlords. In doing so, tenants took up a long-running debate about the obligations of landlords, including to regulate the social world of buildings. Through complaints, tenants leveraged the property rights of their landlord to their own ends. They pushed for their landlord to police their neighbors as a means of enforcing gender and sexual norms, while upholding racial categories and segregation. This article argues that tenants worked to shape, contain, and harness the power of their landlord in ways that offer new perspectives on tenant activism and urban domesticity.

Source: Journal of Urban History

DOI: 10.1177/00961442261423513

Author: Nathalie Barton

Institution: Vanderbilt University

Language: English

Topic: Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Sustainable cities and communities, Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,650