Housing

In Manhattan, at a symposium in connection with an exhibition of "international style" architecture (TIME, Feb. 22) Lewis Mumford, famed author-critic, spoke up last week and said U. S. architects are "unfit to build houses for the America of the future unless they are able to plan as if working for a Communist government." Amplification of his remark was less dramatic. He explained that he meant the building of the future will be large-scale slum reclamation and large-scale cheap housing rather than work for the choosy individual.

Critic Mumford was followed by Henry Wright, foremost U. S. authority on housing conditions, who astonished many by saying that apartments on semi-fashionable Riverside Drive are "slums or potential slums." Reason: They admit light only to the front of the building.

Almost ignored for the past decade, the U. S. housing problem has come rapidly to the fore since President Hoover's Conference on Home Building & Home Ownership last December. The U. S. is poorly housed. Probably less than half of its homes measure up to "minimum standards of health and decency." Its slums are among the worst in the world. Only one out of four farms has central light and heat, running water, a bathroom. One source of improvement will come from putting attractive homes within the reach of the small wage-earner who hitherto has given 20% of his income to a landlord. Low construction costs make the present opportune for such a movement, and building materials companies with little business on hand watch eagerly for straws.

A straw was seen in the one-man show Joseph Urban is giving in Manhattan of his works. The straw was not in his arty designs but prizes which were awarded by the Architects' Emergency Committee with money collected from admissions to the Urban exhibition. They were for small houses suitable for mass production. If the design which won first prize ($100 plus employment) should be typical of the home of the future that home will be factory-fabricated at $3,000, will have a steel frame, modern simplicity of design. It will have no basement and part of the ground level will be open except for supporting stilts so that cars may be driven right into it. It will have the large glass areas typical of current European architecture but still claimed by some architects to be unsuited to U. S. weather. Second prize was for another home of essentially modern design. Its architect stressed an arrangement for a garden, saying people leave apartments for homes chiefly to plant and grow. Prizes three and four went to "orthodox" homes, the kind whose slated roofs and gables never cause the home-buyer to murmur, "it doesn't look like a home to me."

Alert architects and housers also noted last week that:

P:Standardized materials without standardized homes were suggested by Frederick J. Kiesler who has done much work on European municipal housing projects. He suggested that every home have a standard nucleus of two rooms, kitchen, bath and garage. The owner could then add to these as his fancy and pocketbook allowed.

P: Government aid for small wage-earners who want homes was suggested by Eugene Henry Klaber of American Institute of Architects.

P: A survey showed vacancies in Manhattan apartments (including tenements) have increased from 7.41% in 1927 to 14.93% in 1932. Heaviest vacancy percentage was 26.38% in the lower East Side and the lowest was Park Avenue's 7.68%. Vacancies in the tenement district do not indicate an oversupply of rooms but rather that Depression has caused families to take fewer rooms, in many cases to share their overcrowded quarters with other families.

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