Urban Housing and Land Use

Abstract

An impression has spread that, in our great altruistic surge toward better housing and toward decent living places for the low-income groups, the principal opposing influence has been what is often enough referred to editorially as the selfish real estate interests. In this paper I have been asked to give the point of view of those interests. The truth of the matter is that the surge toward a new day in housing began to rise, markedly, some time before the depression. It has back of it the whole real estate and construction industry. It is the life-force of the industry. Real estate boards have consistently opposed the method of governmental subsidy where subsidized projects would overload a neighborhood and further disorganize local values. The point of view of real estate has been this: You cannot bring in low-cost housing or take out slums, in a way that is economically sound, unless you attack the job in the light of the city's whole need: its whole housing problem, and its whole problem of land use and land values.