HOUSING: Cash for Lustron

The RFC placed a bet of $12.5 million last week on a new kind of house to help lick the shortage—a prefabricated one of enameled steel. The cash, in the form of a loan, went to Chicago’s Lustron Corp., which had asked RFC for a maximum, of $52 million last fall to finance building of veterans’ houses (TIME, Nov. 11, et seq.). Then, RFC had turned Lustron down flat on the grounds that Lustron was putting up too little of its own capital ($36,000), stood to make a 14,000% profit. Lustron also tried and failed to get the Government-owned Chrysler-Dodge plant in Chicago.

So Lustron made a deal with WAA to use part of the Curtiss-Wright plant at Columbus, Ohio. Then it went back to RFC and offered to invest $3.5 million of its own cash, along with another $6 million from private sources. RFC agreed to lend the $12.5 million.

Lustron promised to produce 100 houses a day by September, sell them, erected, for approximately $7,100 apiece. Lustron’s No. 1 model, the “Esquire,” contains two bedrooms, living room, dinette, kitchenette and bath (see cut).

Skeptical (but hopeful) veterans wondered whether they would like living in an, enamel house. Other prefabricators, who have fallen way behind schedule, were dead sure that for a long time few veterans would have a chance to find out.