The Union Times

OPA Wins Victory Against Profit Hungry Owners

OPA Victory Of Paramount Importance In Fight To Protect Workers

WASHINGTON—Landlords seeking to chisel higher rents from war workers in the boomtown Seattle, Tacoma and Bremerton, Washington areas were soundly defeated in a court decision upholding OPA's right to freeze rents.

OPA officials are hailing the decision, handed down by the emergency court of appeals, as a victory of paramount importance in OPA's fight to protect workers throughout the country from profit-hungry landlords.

The decision upheld maximum rent regulation No. 20 freezing rents at the April 1, 1941, level in the Puget sound defense rental area. The regulation was challenged by eight Seattle landlords on the ground that OPA was authorized to prevent only excessive rent increases, not normal increases.

Disposing this phony argument, which drew a hairline distinction between normal and excessive increases, the court said that if "normal" increases in rents threaten to cause inflation they must be suppressed and that in an area strongly affected by abnormal defense and war activities, even very small increases in prices and rents may be described as abnormal.

The landlords in contesting the rent freeze complained they were unable to operate at a reasonable profit or to meet their mortgage payments. To this the court tartly answered that the emergency price control act was not designed to assure them profits so large as to enable them to pay either in part or in whole for the purchasing price of their properties.

The court also held that in setting maximum rates for the area OPA was not required to allow higher rents because of increased costs of operation. It pointed out that cost of operation was only one of many factors to be considered, and added "profits in the industry are quite as relevant to the establishment of fair rents as are general increases in costs of operation."

Most telling answer to the landlord's plea of poverty was given in an OPA survey on rental housing operations in Seattle which showed that operating income of Seattle apartment house operators was 58.7% greater in 1942 than it was in 1939. This survey also showed that new operating income during the second half of 1942 under rent control was slightly higher than during the first six months of 1942, not under rent control.

Pointing to these profit statistics the court concluded that: "So far as the record shows, Seattle landlords, because of increased occupancy of their demised properties, and for other reasons, are enjoying net profits as satisfactory as those they enjoyed before the advent of defense activities."