75,000 Tanks, 414,000 Houses

To see an exhibition as ugly as Sin, as shocking as a Coney Island horror house, small-town mayors, housing officials, clubwomen and school kids trooped into Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week. The museum had caged and displayed the "Housing Crime."

As they enter this show visitors are greeted by the insistent voice of President Roosevelt demanding ". . . 125,000 planes, 75,000 tanks. . . ." The voice from the loudspeaker pursues them down a corridor where newspaper headlines blazon the depressing progress of the war. They emerge into a still uglier room with blown-up photographs of men sleeping on benches, in cars.

There are pictures of disheartened workers trudging the roads, looking not for a job but a place to live. A recorded voice intones: "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. . . ." From the walls placards answer: "For want of housing the worker is lost, for want of the worker production is lost." Then, a hot blast of air and two great, blood-red pictures --one of the burning U.S.S. Arizona, the other of a little girl wringing her hands over her bullet-riddled sister in Poland.

Stricken visitors hurry on, only to find themselves in a dark corridor where the hands of a big clock whirl madly and a voice cries over & over: "The task is long --the time is short."

Then the lights brighten, the ceiling lifts, the cheerful noise of hammer and saw is heard. The show winds up with photographs of the U.S. trying to make up for lost time, already, in some places, building wartime housing in the pattern of the world of tomorrow --well-planned communities of airy houses, parks, playgrounds, schools.

Though lack of housing still threatens to be a serious bottleneck in war production, the U.S. at least is doing better than in World War I, when labor turnover in some areas ran as high as 1,000% a year because of the housing shortage and the Government began building so late that most of its houses were not finished until after the Armistice was signed. Now the Government is engaged in a $1,052,000,000 program, building 414,000 homes for workers' families. But only a third have been completed. Private builders are supposed to be building twice as many, but so far have come nowhere near expectations.

Worst housing shortage is at Detroit. With Ford's Willow Run bomber plant nearly ready for 70,000 workers, there are virtually no houses near the plant and it is almost impossible to rent a house in Detroit, 25 miles away. Now plans are afoot for 45,000 new dwellings in the Detroit area but pipe for water lines is still lacking. And by year's end Detroit must house 190,000 more war workers.

Reasons for World War II's housing delays are the same as in World War I: wrangles over Government v. private building, permanent houses v. temporary, renting v. home ownership. Sixteen different Government housing agencies have thoroughly messed up the job. A new, effectively remodeled National Housing Agency has now been created to coordinate all housing efforts. To avoid leaving war plant workers high & dry after the war, most Government houses (cost about $3,500) will be rented to their occupants.

The bulk of this housing is mass-produced and some of it is "demountable" (i.e., it can be taken apart and moved wall by wall). But housing experts know well from the experience of World War I that "temporary" houses often are found still standing on their original site 20 years later (see cut, p. 42). In the Museum of Modern Art exhibition last week the nation's ablest architects tried to show the U.S. how to plan its communities, how to build houses for the emergency of 1942 without creating the slums of 1962.

Gist of their demonstration: it costs no more and takes little more time to build a town properly designed for traffic, parking, shopping, and community services; in the long run such a town saves money. In a few places where U.S. housing officials let architects experiment (e.g., Vallejo, Calif.; Windsor Locks, Conn.; New Kensington, Pa.), there stand already well-planned communities which are a pointed rebuke to the dreary acres of checkerboard wartime housing that still predominate. Against conventional Colonial houses with immovable shutters, tiny windows peering into their neighbors' bedrooms, phony oil lamps and fussy decorations, the show contrasted equally cheap houses of modern design with big areas of glass, built for privacy and airy living (see cut, p. 42).

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