HOUSING: Slum Clearance

Well aware of the filth, crime and disease spawned in New York City’s sprawling slums, Manhattan’s square-headed Robert Ferdinand Wagner proposed a bill two years ago seeking to eliminate such surroundings. The embryonic law died in the Senate Education and Labor Committee. Last year Senator Wagner’s seasoned measure passed the Senate with little debate but Congress adjourned before the House could consider it.

Fortnight ago, Bob Wagner’s veteran slum-clearing measure came to bat for the third time. Backed by such assorted powers as President Roosevelt, the conservative New York Times and the tory New York Herald Tribune, the bill looked like a sure thing. Sponsor Wagner crowed: “There is practical unanimity throughout the country in favor of the measure. . . . There was practically no opposition to the bill in the hearings before the committee.”

His Housing Bill, 1937 edition, was modeled closely after a popular British slum-clearing act. It provided for $700,000,000 to be loaned by the Federal Government to a U. S. Housing Authority for pulling down noxious tenement houses and erecting low-rental dwellings in their stead. The Authority would then reimburse the Treasury by selling their own 60-year bonds (guaranteed by the U. S.) to the public. If income from the necessarily low rents fell short of paying off bonds & interest, the Government would chip in up to $20,000,000 a year—an outright subsidy, but a trifle compared to the cost of other Federal efforts to aid the underprivileged. Only tenants qualifying for the new houses would be the rock-bottom 15% of the lower third which President Roosevelt has labeled “ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed”—about 175,000 families earning some $50 a month and paying about $5 rent per room.

From the start Bob Wagner was worried about only one thing: how much damage would the Senate do to his bill before finally passing it? He had been on his feet less than an hour when sniping began. George of Georgia wanted to know what was in it for the farmers. Bob Wagner, instead of appealing to rural magnanimity, claimed that his bill benefited everybody. This palpable dodge angered the Southerner into damning the bill as “a fraud because it cannot be administered in rural areas.” Snapped Senator Wagner: “I’ll compare my character with that of the Senator from Georgia.”

In spite of such wrangling Majority Leader Barkley predicted passage of the bill by the middle of the second day of debate. At the end of the fifth day Senators wearily voted, 64-to-16, for a Housing Bill gutted by conservative amendments. Anti-Administrationist Harry Byrd called attention to Resettlement Administration’s Greenbelt in Maryland, which cost $16,000 per family unit, and Hightstown Project in New Jersey ($20,000 per unit). Then he demanded a construction limit of $4,000 per family unit and $1,000 per room. “A spokesman for the Administration,” he cried, “said . . . that this was an experiment, and that all experiments were costly. . . . Why, may I ask, is the building of a house an experiment? People have built houses from the beginning of time.”

Strengthened and not weakened was Senator Byrd’s argument for his amendment when Senators found on their desks what newshawks considered one of the boldest pieces of lobbying ever seen on the floor—mimeographed sheets from New York Housing Authority’s Langdon Post maintaining that the per-room limit should not be less than $1,750. Senators owning homes in Washington figured that that was more than their own houses had cost; a comfortable 10-room, brick & stone dwelling even in Washington, they thought, ought not to cost much over $16,000 to $17,000.

Senator Byrd squeezed through his amendment, 40-to-39. When the Administration moved for reconsideration, he won again, 40-to-39. The Byrd Amendment 1) holds down the costs of construction to somewhere near the level that $50-a-month families can pay for, and 2) practically cuts out slum clearance for some sections which need it most, for high metropolitan construction costs exceed $1,000 per room.

Maryland’s economical Millard Tydings, who thinks with Virginia’s Byrd, slipped through an amendment limiting any one State to 20% of the total to be spent. His argument: “I furthermore predict New York will receive practically all the money this bill contains.” Senator Tydings found support in Robert Rice Reynolds, playboy but astute politician. Sang out Senator Reynolds: “. . . If $700,000,000 of the people’s money is to be expended, I want North Carolina, God bless her, to have her part, although she does not need it particularly.”

Words spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt last January ironically contributed to Bob Wagner’s last ignominy. Hadn’t the President plugged for consolidation of independent agencies as part of his Reorganization Plan? Yes, thought the Senate, and placed Bob Wagner’s potent, three-man U. S. Housing Authority not in a separate agency but under the thumb of Secretary of the Interior Ickes. Thus altered, Bob Wagner’s Housing Bill, which now looked as though it would never provide houses for any New Yorkers, was tossed into the lap of the House.