Rent at Ten Cents a Month?

Indeed, an account in Daily Independent, Volume 1, Number 16, 9 August 1923 relates the experience of passengers on the liner Muenchen sharing news from Germany. They

described conditions in Germany as approaching complete chaos. . . . Gustav Van der Loo, a steel merchant . . . said that the price of steel had skyrocketed since the occupation of the Ruhr. "I can’t tell what is going to happen to Germany," he said; "the people don’t know themselves." The landlords who are forbidden by law to raise rents, he added, were in a bad way. In some German cities, he said, tenants are paying the equivalent of ten cents a month in American money for an apartment.

This occupation of Germany by French and Belgian forces in 1923 was occasioned by Germany defaulting on reparation payments from the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. While a bit beyond the scope of our short blog format, this description of the worsening conditions in Germany was a foreshadowing of events to come, with the occupation credited to the growth of radicalized elements in Germany and a rearmament movement, contributing to the disastrous effects which unfolded in World War II. You may want to visit 1923: How Weimar Combated Hyperinflation for more on how the Occupation of the Ruhr directly caused a period of hyperinflation which wrecked Germany's economy.

Frans Masereel, Political Drawings, 1923. View the collection on Archive.org.

Other resources have explained the effects of the hyperinflation of buying things like loaves of bread in Germany in 1923. But can we gain an understanding of how this cost of rent over a hundred years ago would feel for us today? According to an online inflation calculator, ten cents in 1923 equates to the princely sum of $1.78 in 2023. That seems unbelievably low. Our next mission: can we find out what rent for a similar apartment in America was in 1923?

Indeed, reporter Frank Carpenter wrote an article for News Leader, Number 8046, 27 March 1923 in which he made some comparisons. His average for a big city apartment of a size comparable to an 8 cent a month apartment in Germany (about five rooms) is $50 a month (about $890.94); he cites a more modest apartment at $10 a month ($178.19). 

What we can glean from this is not that the ten cent a month rent was terrible for the people - it was, actually, beyond fair when compared with the costs an American renter paid, and at this period of hyperinflation, it may have been the one cost of living that was not allowed to increase exponentially. The hand-wringing in these articles was over the landlords not making enough money off their tenants to keep up with inflation.

There are downsides with rent control. Most notably, perhaps, is that higher-income renters may disproportionately benefit financially over lower-income renters, and that maintenance of the building is usually deferred to intolerable degrees. But in this case of hyperinflation in this particular setting, as long as the tenants could keep up with their rents, at least they may have had some stability in their living situation. After all, a single loaf of bread would cost 2 million Marks. 

For the more mathematically-inclined, you may find Historical US Dollars to German Marks a valuable resource as you further compare and contrast the cost of living in Germany.

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