Boom Again?

By last spring the housing boom had turned into something close to a bust. By last week, it looked like a boom again. The Department of Commerce said that nearly 860,000 new dwelling units would be started this year, up more than 100,000 over predictions earlier. Next year, predicted the department, the number of starts will probably increase to 950,000. Although industrial building is tapering, off, the department estimates that the total volume of new construction will be $15.2 billion, about 20% above this year. (Half of the increase will be due to higher prices.)

To the building industry the outlook did not seem so rosy. The Producers' Council, Inc., a national organization of manufacturers of building materials and equipment, put the increase in starts next year at only 40,000 units. Thomas S. Holden, president of the F. W. Dodge Corp., the construction industry's top factfinders, guessed even lower. The dollar volume of residential building, he predicted, would rise only 4% while the increase in the number of units would be somewhat less because of the rise in building prices.

Prices Down? Did anyone think prices would go down? The most optimistic observation came from Robert W. McChesney, president of the National Electrical Contractors Association. At a meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's construction industry advisory council, McChesney said that "the price of houses seems to have reached a plateau and there is a reasonable expectancy that the price will decline."

Despite the pickup in building, Standard & Poor's Corp. estimated that the U.S. was still falling behind its needs. The demand for new houses is currently growing at the rate of more than 1,000,000 dwelling units a year.

Triple Up? Nevertheless, members of the National Apartment Owners Association who met in Cleveland to plot a campaign against rent controls talked as if the housing shortage were over. Why, said one delegate from Boston, he knew of 18 apartments for rent in the top brackets--and right in Boston, too.

A common lament of the apartment owners was that "stenographers and clerks" were now making enough money to live alone in apartments formerly occupied by two or three. Removal of controls, said real estate men, would force tenants to double up again. "In Los Angeles," said John E. Owens, the association's president-elect, "housing could be provided for at least 80,000 more persons by removal of controls. There are simply too many people occupying space they don't need. A rent increase would take care of a lot of that."

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