Sammy the Sweeper

One of the biggest New Deal messes has been the housing program. The mess finally got so frightful that even Franklin Roosevelt, who can stand more clutter around him than most men, waved his arms and shouted for his chief housekeeper. Rotund little Judge Samuel Rosenman grabbed dustpan and broom and waded in.

Sixteen government agencies-for planning, building and financing houses-were heaped together in a formless pile. Somewhere under all this trash was a record of eight years of peacetime housing bungling, of a year and a half of defense housing bungling. Hundreds of thousands of badly needed houses were still being drafted or just being argued about.

qedRecent WPA reports showed that available housing was more than 95% occupied in all but 25 of 287 war-industry areas surveyed. In most cases, less than half of the vacant houses were habitable or for rent.

qedIn Connecticut, of nine areas surveyed, eight were almost 100% occupied.

qedBy summer, when vast new war plants opened up, the U.S. would really feel the housing shortage. Baltimore, where shipbuilding, oil and chemical workers looked in vain for nearby houses last week, was an indication. Officials wondered what would happen when the expected 18,000 new workers moved in.

qedBy the end of the year, Detroit expected that its worker population would be swollen to 600,000, nearly double normal times. The area around Ford's vast Willow Run plant, which will take 100,000 workers, was already overtaxed.

"Amazing Executive." With OEM's Wayne Coy holding the dustpan, Judge Rosenman went to work with his broom. In spite of the gestures of hydra-handed Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones (among many other things, administrator of housing loans), the Judge swept up the 16 Federal agencies. Mr. Roosevelt announced last week that the mess was cleaned up.

A new bureau, the National Housing Agency, will manage all Federal housing activities. One new boss, John B. Blandford Jr., will take the place of the many bickering bosses in the old setup. Under Administrator Blandford the innumerable divisions are settled into three sections: 1) building; 2) guaranty of mortgages placed by private banks; 3) financing of home ownership.

Blandford, an Assistant Budget Director, is leathery, square-faced, married, childless. At 44 he is a veteran administrator. As general manager of TVA for six years, he helped bring order out of confusion. Mr. Roosevelt called him an "amazing executive."

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