Up-&-Down Projects

Like most other expanding U. S. cities, Fort Wayne, Ind. (Pop.: 115,000) suffers from growing pains.* An up-&-coming industrial community (automotive, agricultural, electrical equipment), its increasing land values have kept some of its poor underhoused, encouraged some of its rich to hold available outlying land for development. Mightily impressed by this contradiction has been William B. Hall, Yaleman, son of President Arthur F. Hall of Lincoln National Life Insurance Co., head of Lincoln's mortgage department. A onetime flying teacher, inventor of a revolving neon sign, 33-year-old Bill Hall is not a stodgy real-estate man. Last week he was promoting a unique private-&-public housing project hopefully aimed at solving Fort Wayne's problem by pleasing rich and poor alike.

Announced by young Mr. Hall was a Fort Wayne Housing Authority, with $1,500,000 capital put up by his own company, Lincoln National Bank and Trust and Fort Wayne National Bank, underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration. Next month F. W. H. A. will start buying idle outlying land from tax-ridden owners, paying them $1 a lot and giving them an option to repurchase at any time at the same price. The Authority will set up on the land four-room prefabricated houses which are to cost $900 apiece and rent to Fort Wayne's poor at $2.50 a week. In return for relieving slum conditions, the State makes F. W. H. A. land and buildings taxfree. WPA labor will put the houses together, clear the land of present slum buildings, if any. When any owner buys his land back, WPAsters will pull down the collapsible houses and put them up on another $1 plot, a job that can be completed in 24 hours. The up-&-down houses will be small (32 ft. by 20 ft.), have modern kitchens and bathrooms, but no gadgets. Declared enthusiastic Promoter Hall: "Our project is the only one in the world which will rehouse the same family in the same location at the same rent at no cost to the taxpayer!"

*For an account of city growing habits, see p. 32.

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