First Loan

Last week Reconstruction Finance Corp. announced its first loan for slum-eradication. To Hillside Housing Corp. in New York's Bronx went $3,957,000. Pending was a similar loan of $800,000 to a Brooklyn group. Since New York is so far the only State with laws and a commission to regulate rents, profits, capital structures, interest charges and methods of operation of housing corporations, it alone is eligible for R. F. C. housing help.

The Hillside development, for which ground was to be broken instanter, will provide 5,378 rooms for 1,581 families at an average of $11 per room per month. Designed by Architect Clarence S. Stein, who built a famed model colony at Radburn, N. J., the Hillside community's buildings occupy only 34% of their 697,000 sq. ft. site. There is a 2 1/2-acre playground. Dead-end streets, footpaths and an underpass to the school across an arterial highway from the development safeguard children. Most of the buildings will be four-story walk-ups. Some will be six stories high, have self-operated elevators.

The R. F. C. loans provided two-thirds of the Hillside capital. The other one-third came from Starrett Bros. & Eken Inc., building contractors, and Nathan Straus Jr., who provided the land, an old farmsite on the Boston Post Road, at a fraction of its appraised value.

New Yorkers were not surprised at Charitarian Straus's participation. Carrying on his late great father's good works, Mr. Straus, onetime State Senator and a leader in the U. S. Zionist movement, has long led a civic-minded group of park planners.

Unperturbed by a protest brought before the R. F. C. by the Board of Estimate and New York realtors, many of whose boxlike Bronx apartment houses are tenantless, Mr. Straus, Architect Stein and Andrew Eken announced: "The granting of the loan . . . marks, we hope and believe, a milestone in better housing for people of limited means. Governmental encouragement of such work will provide immediate employment for more than 1,000 men on the Hillside housing operation. . . . Further similar action on the part of Reconstruction Finance Corp. will provide the greatest possible stimulus to employment, as well as create a lasting monument to the desire for better housing throughout the country."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.