Two Scandals

Two of the sorriest stories yet told about the U.S. Government's muddled attempts to provide cheap housing for war workers turned up last week.

The first concerned a 700-unit Winfield Park (N.J.) development built to house Kearny shipyard workers, which the Senate's Truman Committee has been investigating. Started in June 1941, the project will cost nearly $4,500,000 v. initial estimates of $3,200,000, is now only half rented because cellars flooded, roofs caved in, floors buckled, kitchen and plumbing equipment failed to turn up, doors "not operating" needed refitting, porches sagged, and --in some cases--furnaces were so installed that heating pipes blocked basement entrances.

An idealistic mutual-ownership project dreamed up by Federal Works Agency's Colonel Lawrence Westbrook (TIME, June 2, 1941), Winfield Park's history was so deplorable that Colonel Westbrook could count himself lucky that he is now on active duty, reportedly in Australia. Less lucky was red-faced Contractor Clifford F. MacEvoy, who squirmingly admitted last week that subsidiaries of his MacEvoy Construction Co. had furnished bonding service, excavating equipment, trucks, etc. to the project at third-party profits. He also admitted that his $40-a-week secretary was put on the project (i.e., U.S. Government) payroll at $75 a week as an "accountant," his brother's son John (whose "business record" up to then was "school") got $30 a week "checking cutting lists over in the carpenter's cutting yard," etc.

A like story came from the town of Tonawanda, N.Y., where the U.S. Government has been backing and filling over a 1,200-house project (for workers at Curtiss-Wright and Buffalo Arms) for more than a year. Main stumbling block was that water, sewage and incinerator facilities were scarcely adequate to serve Tonawanda even before it was glutted with war workers, and the town was willing and able to pay only about one-quarter of the $488,000 estimated cost of enlarging them. Town Supervisor Roy R. Brockett beat his brains out on this problem, with "more than 35 persons (from the Federal Government) claiming some authority," only to have the whole thing abandoned just before Pearl Harbor. Frantically reinstated last January, the Tonawanda project cannot now be completed until after Easter and the water supply is still in question. Said Roy Brockett last week, in despair over his housing problem: "We've been told the stuff is going to come through but nothing has been done yet."

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