Room Shortage

A space race is on in Western Europe, but the goal is not some distant planet: it is a down-to-earth place to live. Europeans are suffering from the tightest housing squeeze since the immediate postwar days. Rentals have soared, and the price of private houses has shot out of reach for millions of people. Last week, as government officials everywhere stewed over what to do, France's overbuilt bureaucracy took a few steps to ease its Crise du Loge-ment. It freed some state lands for housing development, announced a major slum-razing and rebuilding program, and sliced back the paperwork that now stymies building permits for up to two years.

Halfhearted Efforts. A recent Common Market survey shows that the monthly rent for a three-room apartment in a lower-middle-class district averages $65 in Diisseldorf, $70 in Brussels and a skyscraping $180 in Paris, Europe's toughest town for housing. In Italy's cities, unskilled workers have a hard time finding one-room flats for $50, which represents one-half of their monthly income. The co-op apartment is also a high-level proposition; a two-bedroom flat in a middle-class district markets for $12.000 in Amsterdam, $14,000 in Hamburg, and $30,000 to $40,000 in Paris--not counting monthly maintenance payments. Costs for private houses commonly run much higher than in the U.S. A typical two-bedroom bungalow in Germany sells for $15,000, exclusive of extra charges for the land it is built on and for such simple amenities as built-in closets. Trying to deflate prices, municipal authorities in Britain and other European countries are helping to promote the sale of prefab houses that can be erected in an hour or less.

There are plenty of reasons for the overall scarcity. Wartime bombers destroyed much of Europe's housing, and most of what was left was not much good. At least 12% of the houses in France, Germany and Britain were built more than a century ago, and are without indoor plumbing. The shortage has been worsened by massive movements of people to the cities: Eastern refugees into West Germany, dispossessed Algerians into France, and job-seeking Southern Italians into the industrial hubs up north. Instead of constructing moderately priced housing, builders have catered to the lucrative luxury markets, putting up Miami-style apartments that now command as much as $125,000 in Rome. National governments have made halfhearted efforts to create space for the middle class, but have been snarled by endless red tape, inadequate budgets, and a shortage of private capital that has lifted the common mortgage interest rate to 10% to 15% a year.

Upper Levitt. The incredible demand for space has permitted fly-by-night entrepreneurs to debase Europe's reputation for quality craftsmanship. Many new houses and apartments have cracker-thin walls, minimum soundproofing, unpainted interiors. On a recent tour of Europe, 20 top U.S. construction experts were shocked by the high prices and lack of standards. Said Tacoma's Daniel Brown, research director of the Douglas Fir Plywood Association: "There's no comparing quality here with the U.S."

Some U.S. builders are beginning to take advantage of this remarkable seller's market. The most famous U.S. builder, William Levitt, has won preliminary approval from the French government to construct a Levittown of 500 houses near Versailles. For a three-bedroom house, he will charge $20,000 to $25,000--which is 25% to 50% more than the price of the same Levitt house in the U.S.

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