HOUSING: Facts & Slide Rules

Housing Administrator Wilson Watkins Wyatt, a great hand for optimistic statistics, found some more of them last week. He reported that in August more than 100,000 “dwelling units” had been begun and 62,800 finished. Thus, he added, 708,000 had been started in the year and 350,000 had been completed. Said Expediter Wyatt: “The housing the country needs is definitely on the way.”

There was no doubt that the building of houses, apartments, barracks, etc. had come along with fair speed, despite the months of confusion over prices, black markets and materials shortages. But it had not come nearly far enough, or quickly enough.

Hundreds of thousands of veterans waiting out the emergency in plumbingless shacks or dark basements could see little real progress. Hundreds of builders and real estate people were not as sure as Wilson Wyatt that something more than a fair start had been made.

In Seattle many a family was living in a garage back of an uncompleted house. In Cambridge, Mass. a Harvard professor was making over his story-and-a-half deluxe doghouse into a three-room apartment for student-veterans (it had a bathtub, designed for dog-dipping). In Montana, Idaho and Wyoming families prepared to live out the winter in basement excavations, with roofing paper overhead.

Progress? Last week TIME correspondents in every major U.S. area reported on housing. Sample reports:

>Atlanta: 4,000 new houses completed, 4,000 to be completed “fairly soon.” But lack of pipe, furnaces and gas & electric meters will delay actual completion of hundreds. No real progress made in getting veterans out of shacks.

>New England: no large apartment buildings built; some progress in converting old houses. Veterans’ leaders estimate that 42,000 will be homeless in metropolitan Boston before the end of the year.

> Detroit area: 10,000 units under construction; many have been delayed for months by lack of materials. Hundreds of otherwise completed houses cannot be used for lack of plumbing pipe.

>Chicago area: 13,266 permits issued for apartment and private units, but most are just licenses to hunt materials. Few apartments have been begun and none is likely to be completed by year’s end.

>Denver: hundreds of new houses stand empty for lack of plumbing equipment; other hundreds of new, occupied houses lack doors, toilet seats, light switches.

>Southwest area: in Corpus Christi, Tex., 350 completed houses cannot be occupied because there is no plumbing pipe. In Houston, less than half of the units started have been completed.

>California: San Francisco, which needs 41,500 units, has issued only 2,234 permits. In the Los Angeles area, some progress has been made in mass housing but without evident effect on the need.

Samplings. The 708,000 starts listed by Expediter Wyatt was a little better than one-half toward his 1,200,000 goal for the year. He was still optimistic about getting close to it. But national organizations of builders and real estate men were far from optimistic; they were also far from sure that 350,000 was the correct figure for completions. Some accused the National Housing Agency of inaccuracy. There had never been a national system of reporting completions before. Wyatt based his figure of 350.000 on samplings taken by the Department of Labor’s bureau of statistics in selected areas. Then NHA applied its slide rules and came up with nice, round totals.

NHA’s figures made it look as if a sizable dent had been made in the housing shortage. But outside of statistics-minded Washington, the hopes of ordinary people to get the kind of place they want to live in were far down. In Manhattan, Communist-line Michael Quill, head of the C.I.O.’s Transport Workers Union, saw his chance to create unrest and political capital. He urged veterans to squat in boarded-up Fifth Avenue mansions, as the Commies had done in London.