THE CABINET: Whole Hog

Ever since President Roosevelt went into office he and his advisers have agreed that, for three good reasons, housing is a keystone to Recovery. These reasons were: 1) construction, as the balance wheel of industry, creates a market for thousands of types of manufactured goods; 2) a widespread public housing program, while more expensive than the dole, has the advantage of yielding in the form of public improvements some concrete return on the Government’s money; 3) the poor of city and country have a real need for better housing.

But of all the fronts along which the President has attacked Depression, the housing sector has been the scene of fewest victories, most defeats. Impressive headlines have heralded impressive programs which have quickly petered out in obscure failure. Congress has passed laws and the Treasury has passed out millions but the heavy industries have continued to lag and the jobless have waited in vain for the “Roosevelt Building Boom.” It is not the habit of the Administration to acknowledge a violent shift in basic policy but last week certain things were said and done in Washington which made it quite plain that the Government’s housing program was about to make a 180° turn.

Under Secretary of the Interior Ickes, Public Works Administration has been trying to get action through two subsidiary agencies. Both have proved equally “disillusioning” to the impatient Secretary.

To date PWA has earmarked $146,000,000 for the Government itself to tear down slums in 33 cities, build places fit to live in. Of a total of 39 projects, not a spadeful of earth has been broken. Only in eight cases have steps been taken to acquire the ground. To blame: greedy landowners, hostile landlords, pettifogging politicians.

Earliest of the Administration’s housing programs was the set-up whereby PWA would advance money to private limited dividend corporations to erect model housing communities. Results have been almost grotesque. Two projects are under way in New York City, one in The Bronx called Hillside, one in Queens called Boulevard Gardens.

Hillside will have to charge about the same rents as RFC-financed Knickerbocker Village (TIME, Oct. 15), $12.50 per room per month. As a result its apartments will be taken over by white-collar tenants since the poor for whom it was intended cannot possibly pay that much. One of the prime reasons for high rents is the cost of labor on the job. At Hillside, bricklayers get $13.20 a day, plasterers and stonecutters, $12; carpenters, masons, electricians, $11.20. As every contractor knows, there can be no low-cost housing at such a wage scale for the building trades.

Report to Secretary Ickes from the $4,400,000 Boulevard Gardens job last week was enough to turn what is left of his hair snowy white. No work had been done for two months, cost of the building was mounting daily, idle workers were swelling relief rolls. Reason: carpenters and steam-fitters cannot agree who will cut recesses in the floors to lay steam pipes in the ten six-story buildings.

Utterly disgusted with the limited dividend scheme. Secretary Ickes has rescinded all but $11,000,000 of the $50,000,000 allocated for that purpose. He announced: “From now on we go whole hog. No more assistance to these corporations. They have trouble raising money for their equity. There has been too much kiting of land values. Now we’re going ahead on straight out-and-out slum clearing and housing. The results show that we can construct so that the rent per room per month in the new housing will be $3 less under the Federal plan than under the plans of the limited dividend corporations.”

Next day at his press conference President Roosevelt took up, as if by prearrangement, the housing ball Secretary Ickes had tossed into the air and ran it far forward into the future. The President would consolidate all the Government’s housing activities under one authority for a mighty push against slums, urban and rural. Congress would be asked to appropriate many more millions of dollars. (Later estimates ran to nearly two billions.) Half-hearted assistance to private construction would cease and the Government would buy and build on its own. on such a scale as the country had never before seen.

The general terms of this latest White House program once more made huge hopeful headlines about housing. Whether the execution of the program would make equally large headlines remained to be seen but certain it was that the Administration was off on a new tack in the matter of housing. To be successful, it was agreed, the Government would have to march into a city, exercise its right of eminent domain to obtain land at a reasonable price. When its low-rental apartments were up, it would have to be the target for the brickbats of other landlords who would accuse the Government of unadulterated State Socialism in thus invading a field of private enterprise. But last week it looked as if President Roosevelt and Secretary Ickes were primed to defy such difficulties in their determination to move the poorest stratum of the population out of miserable tenements and hovels into something better.

Last week Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins announced that he had twelve rural-industrial communities (his new name for subsistence homesteads) well under way. In all, 50 such colonies are planned. “Some day we’ve got to have housing in America where people can pay 25% of their income for a decent place to live.” declared Administrator Hopkins. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s coming damned soon.”