How Housing Needs may be Met

Abstract

P RIOR to World War II and the year just past, we have had sporadic periods of a housing shortage but never until now have so many people in every walk of life been faced with the grim problem of finding shelter. Formerly housers were interested in the lowest income third. Nowadays, adequate income does not of itself insure an adequate home. Everyone has a housing plan. We must plan housing for everyone. Even in an inflationary period income remains a basic factor. Eventually, either through black market methods or as production more nearly approaches demand, the higher income groups will be able to satisfy their wants. Our problem is the middle group as well as the lower third. Unless we solve it, not one-third but two-thirds of the nation will be ill-housed. It seems to be fundamental that we need good housing but we have taken better care of our animals than we have of our citizens. Good husbandry proved the need for good barns but it took the war to demonstrate to the nation at large that good housing paid dividends in increased production. Prior to the war, good housing was a social problem and model mill villages and low-income projects provided samples of how homes affected people. The demand for war material made adequate housing an economic problem. Lost man hours and labor turnover were directly related to poor homes. Industry soon realized this and the pressure for Lanham housing was intense. So much so that the civilian worker had a housing priority above and beyond the military. The employer sought good housing. The employee insisted on it. Much of the pressure behind the veteran demand is due to an unwillingness to return to substandard and over-crowded homes. I believe that as a nation, we are going home. We have passed through a stage where, because of industrial activity and inventive genius, housing was merely a covered bed and our conscious interests were elsewhere. Now, we are not returning to a walled manse but rather to the fulcrum of our life. We are becoming more aware of a need not to retire from mechanistic living but to integrate the fundamental emotional needs for a home with products of the machine in a design for happier living. The programs such as the temporary 200,000 units rebuilt or converted from war housing or Army and Navy facilities and the prefabricated homes and the like, to be provided by private builders for the veteran, are important. They are emergency poultices, however, and are intended only to arrest the housing cancer and not to remove it. We must-plan further. A mathematical correlation between good homes and good citizens is not possible. That there is a relationship, we do know. We know inadequate financial resources breed slums, disease, crime, and broken families. How much of this we can cure by providing decent housing is still debatable. We do know that even discounting the fact that tenants in low-income housing are a selected group, there is less disease, crime, et cetera, where there are good homes even though incomes are similar. Studies in Cincinnati, New Haven, Newark and the Davisville section in Hopewell, Virginia are prime examples. The long term program to meet housing needs is S-1592, the NVagner-Ellender-Taft bill.