Children, Dogs & Wall Street

"Our housing shortage," cried Harry Truman last week, "is almost a fatal one." He told the National Conference on Family Life a bitter little story about a man and his wife, their baby and dog who could find no place to live in Washington and weren't even allowed to stay in their car on a parking lot. Said Harry Truman: "Children and dogs are as necessary to the welfare of this country as is Wall Street andthe railroads, or any one of them."

The President was childlikely and doggedly right. Thirty-three months after V-J day, U.S. housing needs were, if anything, greater than they had been at war's end. At least 2,500,000 families were living doubled up (more than twice the number in October 1945). Building costs had made $10,000 houses of $5,000 ones.

Broken Noses. By & large, the cramped U.S. population had become as resigned as Chinese coolies in a Shanghai doss house. Yet here & there a savage temper showed through. In New York, a landlord was sent to jail for breaking a woman tenant's nose after she complained to the rent-control board that he was overcharging her (her rent: $40 a month for one room).

In Kansas City, Mo., 25-year-old Danny Matthews, an Air Forces veteran, was ordered out of an attic room (no children allowed) with his wife and infant son. In quiet fury he hired a plane (for $6), had 15,000 circulars printed (for $31), flew over the city and dropped them. They read: "Bailing out with no place to land. Had an heir. Got the air ... Anything, anywhere . . ." He managed to get a three-room apartment.

The situation was so tight that a man's home was no longer his castle--it was his fortress. In Brooklyn, James Stanfield, 21-year-old Marine veteran, and his wife Betty barricaded themselves in their newly rented room-and-a-half flat, dared the building superintendent, the owner, and a second veteran who had also rented the apartment, to throw them out.

Broken Dreams. In no large U.S. city had the postwar dream of one home to one family been achieved. Last week TIME correspondents reported that:

P:In Atlanta 1,917 dwelling units (houses or single apartments) had been started in 1948; but there were 10,000 applicants.

P:In Detroit "the situation ... is now worse than it has ever been," according to Housing Director James Inglis. He said that 46,000 families were living in "substandard conditions," that 37,360 more were doubling up.

P:St. Louis issued fewer building permits (802) last year than any U.S. city of 500,000 population or over. The Veterans' Welfare Association, which has 14,000 applications for homes on file, said: "We place one family and placate 19."

Whatever the reasons, private industry had not met the nation's requirements in housing. But there was at least a partial solution in a program on which Harry Truman and Bob Taft could agree. It was the Taft-Ellender-Wagner bill, calling for U.S.-aided slum clearance, federal guarantees in the next year of up to $1.6 billion on private mortgage loans, and construction of 15 million dwellings in the next decade (500,000 in five years under federal public housing). The Senate had passed the bill. At week's end it was bottled up in Representative Jesse Wolcott's House Banking Committee.

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