180DEG Turn

One morning last week a 24-year-old Navy veteran named Jay Ramsey star tled city officials of Englewood, Colo, by dragging a divan into the City Hall.

Ramsey's young wife sat down on it, began feeding a seven-month-old baby.

While three other Ramsey children stood by, the ex-sailor began lugging in chairs, bedding, stacks of other household goods.

The mayor rushed out of his office, demanded an explanation. He got it. Bitterly, Veteran Ramsey told how he had been ejected from his house, could find no shelter, was therefore moving into the City Hall. The Ramseys squatted until the city promised to find them a new home.

The same sort of thing, in greater or less degree, was happening all across the land. Every major U.S. city was jammed to its last trailer camp. More than a million families were doubling up; thousands of servicemen in search of a home were returning to the U.S. An army of luckless people, most of them with adequate funds, engaged in a desperate competition for shelter. In Atlanta, 2,000 of them answered an ad for a single apartment. In freezing Minneapolis, a man, his wife and baby spent seven nights in their automobile.

Snafu. To make all this worse, the housing muddle was no nearer a solution than it had been on V-J day. With Government controls removed, the bulk of available labor and materials were going into industrial building. Only 37,000 houses had even been started; many had not got beyond the foundations.

Last week OWMR Director John Snyder finally got cold feet, admitted that his policy of giving the housing industry its head had failed, asked that the policy be completely reversed.

President Truman immediately asked Congress for price ceilings on both new and old houses, called for priorities which would channel 50% of U.S. building materials into the construction of houses costing $10,000 or less. The ceilings are provided for in a bill by Texas' Wright Patman, now under consideration by Congress.

To administer the new policy, to try to get a half million new dwellings built by the end of 1946, the President picked Louisville's lanky, jug-eared ex-Mayor Wilson Wyatt as federal housing boss. It was immediately apparent that Wilson Wyatt was going to have trouble. Real-estate boards and construction men all over the country forthwith set up an outraged howl over the President's request for ceilings.

In Manhattan, gravel-voiced Robert H. Armstrong, vice president of the New York Building Congress, gave vent to what he termed a fundamental economic principle: "The cure for high prices is more high prices. . . ." Frank W. Cortright, executive vice president of the National Association of Home Builders, damned price controls as "unrealistic."

Back to the Barracks. Whether or not this controversy simmered down, home building on any scale would not really get under way for months: the effects of the lumber strike, shortages of labor and other materials were still very real. Last week, as winter deepened, the Senate voted unanimously to turn 75,000 units of war housing over to veterans and their families, remodel Government dormitories to house 11,000 more, find room for 14,000 in Army barracks. The University of Washington planned to put up student veterans in portable houses shipped from the Hanford atomic bomb project. In Cleveland, a federal auditor suggested that old B-29s and Liberator bombers be turned into homes.

One thing was certain: the U.S. would be using makeshift housing for a long time. The country was short at least 4,660,000 dwellings, would have to build at top speed for ten years to catch up.

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