Whether gambling is a more dangerous cause of demoralization of a community than are disorderly saloons, buffet flats and dissolute women is an often discussed question. Gambling is a man's game, is more open, and the connection between it, the police, and politics easier to trace. In order to gamble the police must be evaded, which is difficult, or made blind by a peculiar remedy for itching palms or by orders from political powers that be. However, it usually is the same police and the same politicians who are protecting both classes of vice.
The contamination of these influences depreciates property and casts a blight upon all who live within their unrestricted range. The taint extends beyond the blocks in which they exist and serves to promote prejudice and ill feeling against the Negroes who are the unwilling sufferers from these vicious resorts.
There are many landlords who exact high rentals from Negroes for the use of run-down houses. All investigations of Negro housing on the South Side indicated that as a rule the rents are excessive, considering the inferior dwellings, their disrepair, and unsanitary conditions. This neglect by the landlords not only directly depreciates the property but encourages a careless use of it by tenants that leads to the same end. One can hardly expect tenants to respect property that is not respected by its owners.
Owners and agents of property occupied by Negroes differ in their opinions of Negroes as tenants and in their ways of handling them. Of course there are differences in character, standing, and responsibility among Negroes as among whites, and this fact partly explains the following differences of opinion expressed by experienced real estate men:
One real estate firm, on Indiana Avenue, that makes leases to both white and Negro clients, said that property occupied by Negroes was more likely to run down. Another firm on East Fifty-first Street reported that it rented to Negroes on regular leases and had no trouble about collections. A young Negro real estate agent on Indiana Avenue said that he had no difficulty with collections: about half of his tenants came to the office, and collectors called upon the other half. When a building supports a janitor, he said, there is no trouble about repairs, but if the responsibility is upon the tenants it is difficult to keep a building in repair. The office manager for a firm on Cottage Grove Avenue said that the majority of its Negro tenants are on leases; all pay the rent at the office; if they fall in arrears collectors are sent.
A firm which for many years has conducted a real estate business on the South Side reported that 75 per cent of its Negro tenants are on a month-to-month basis with thirty days' notice to terminate; and 95 per cent of them are north of Thirty ninth Street. A firm on Indiana Avenue requires its tenants to sign leases; and in districts where there is much shifting about, or where the property is for sale, a sixty days' notice clause is inserted. It usually sends a collector, so that proper supervision may be kept of the property. Its head expressed the opinion that Negroes are just as good tenants as whites whose wages are on about the same scale.
The office manager of an owner with about 1,400 Negro tenants said that on the whole they compared very favorably with the white tenants who preceded them; while some Negroes are careless and ignorant, they all paid their rent promptly; his office did not average one eviction a month, and when Negroes are evicted they rarely cause trouble. Quite the contrary was the report of the office manager of a real estate firm on East Thirty-first Street, which does an extensive business with Negroes. Much depreciation, he said, can be attributed to Negro tenants; they are much harder on houses than white tenants of the same station in life; they do not take proper care of the furnaces or plumbing, and the higher rents paid by them merely cover the cost of the additional repairs; the recent comers pay their rent promptly when they have brought money with them or when they receive good wages, but later on become difficult to manage because they find it hard to adjust themselves to city life.
A firm on East Forty-seventh Street reported that it has a large number of Negro tenants, makes leases to them, has no difficulty in collecting rents, and considers them more desirable than the whites who preceded them; a firm on Indiana Avenue expressed the opinion that depreciation is very great in houses rented to Negroes. That Negro tenants pay their rent promptly was the experience of a real estate agent on Cottage Grove Avenue. He has many Negro tenants on leases and is well satisfied with them, although he does not think they take as good care of the property as do the whites; Negroes are usually occupants of old buildings, which are more difficult to take care of.
Another real estate dealer on Cottage Grove Avenue who leases to Negroes finds that usually they adhere to the terms of the lease, although they sometimes move without notice. A dealer on Wabash Avenue, who rents flats to Negroes, said that he looked up the housing record of Negroes carefully before letting them in, yet he sometimes had trouble with them. Once he rented a flat to a mother and daughter, and the next day he found another family living in it; but on the whole he was well satisfied to have Negroes as tenants.
A prominent official of the Grand Boulevard district of the Kenwood and Hyde Park Property Owners' Association, which seeks to keep Negroes out of Hyde Park, stated that a fundamental fault in connection with the strained relations between whites and Negroes was the failure of white owners to keep their property in good condition so that it might be occupied "efficiently," that is, by white persons. Another official of that organization said that Negro tenants could not be expected to repair white men's property; that there are a great many dwellings in the South Side Negro district that ought to be condemned by the city health department, and that Negroes are compelled to live in them because they can get nothing better.