Housing Holdup

From President Truman to the Republican-controlled Congress, backtracking, sidetracking, and just plain indifference to the number one domestic problem of housing has been the order of the last few months. But with the reintroduction of the Wagner-Ellender-Taft public housing bill, Congress has another opportunity to alleviate this universally deplored condition in the nation.

When Wilson Wyatt and the Veterans Emergency Housing Program were thrown out in December, it was proclaimed that now something could be done to stimulate building, that now that "these bureaucratic restrictions" were in the federal ash-can, private enterprise would get to work and provide the necessary housing. Even the President had said in his opening message to Congress that one million homes would be built this year, as matters then stood.

Today, this is the gloomy picture: less than three month's later, Housing Expediter Creedon's staff has informed him that no more than 825,000 homes will be begun this year, and if existing federal controls and aids are removed only 750,000 will be built. Passed by the Senate last year but pigeonholed in the House, the Wagner-Ellender-Taft bill is once more running the gauntlet of Congressional consideration, this time with the same House members that led its defeat last year now completely running the show at their end of the Capitol.

Taft himself has emphasized the importance of the situation when he said recently that "nothing is closer to the welfare of the people" and that "private enterprise has never provided necessary housing for the lowest income groups." The bill which he co-authored provides for a forty-year program of low-rent urban housing, slum clearance, rural housing and federal aid for private projects. In the next four years, five million new homes will be constructed under this program at a federal outlay of $150 million a year. Besides helping the veteran's problem, it will go some distance to rid the nation of the six million dwelling units which the 1940 census showed were so sub-standard that it said children ought not to be brought up in them.

Opposition to the bill from powerful industry groups may again be successful in strangling this housing hope. The "complete callousness to human values and needs" which is involved in this opposition (in the words of the bill's co-sponsor, conservative Senator Ellender) must be answered now and unequivocally by the actions of the people in behalf of this indispensable housing measure.