Preview of '46

In Tuckahoe, Westchester County suburb of New York City, there were strange goings-on at the high school. On Monday morning, pupils reporting for home-economics class, in a model apartment on the first floor, discovered two open suitcases on the studio couch, a pair of trousers in a closet, a rich smell of coffee in the air.

Superintendent John C. Goff, just out of the Navy, had solved his housing problem the ingenious way. He and his wife, tired of sleeping on a sofa in a friend's living room, had set up housekeeping in the classroom, were finally enjoying a little privacy (after the kids went home).

But by week's end John Goff, like many a returned serviceman, found that his solution was strictly temporary. The school board, horrified by the publicity, sent him packing. Another kind friend with a sofa took him in.

Up & down the nation, John Goff's dilemma was repeated over & over again usually without even the temporary mitigation of a friend's living room. In Chicago, Veteran William E. Wimberly moved his wife and four children into a one-room filling station without heat or plumbing. In Yonkers, N.Y., Frank K. Richardson, Purple Heart veteran, and his wife and child were evicted from their three-room flat, had to separate and live with friends. In Los Angeles, an ex-marine pitched a pup tent in Pershing Square.

2,000,000 Losers. The plain fact was that the U.S. had finally been hard hit by a war-born shortage. Already 1,200,000 families have doubled up with friends or relatives. The National Housing Agency estimates that about 3,000,000 additional families--newly weds and veterans rejoining their wives--will look for homes next year. At the most optimistic estimates of new construction and vacancies, only a third of them will succeed. The other 2,000,000 will be the John Goffs and the William Wimberlys.

Here & there a city got to work. Example: Newark planned 300 temporary houses (needed: 7,000). Here & there a voice spoke out in alarm: Sociologist Louis Wirth, chairman of an emergency Chicago housing committee, prepared a careful report urging the city to convert factories, office buildings and war plants into makeshift shelter. But mostly the problem was just talked about.

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