Calling All Carpenters

It was a bad year to build houses. Inflationary clouds filled the sky; an old growth of building restrictions lay matted like vines all across the nation. There were shortages of skilled labor and materials. But thousands of veterans were roaming the streets looking for a place--any place --to live.

Quiet, jug-eared Housing Expediter Wilson Wyatt surveyed the dismal prospects and the crying need. Then, in a breathtaking announcement that sounded like the start of the greatest domestic crusade since NRA, he asked the nation to build more houses in the next 22 months than it had put up in the last six years--an unbelievable total of 2,700,000.

Wyatt's bold plan, which bore the President's enthusiastic approval, called for an enormous expansion of the nation's building industry, for the recruiting and training of an army of 1,500,000 new workers in the building trades. It also proposed a means of making this vast, dislocating effort acceptable to labor and industry. Borrowing from the techniques of war, Wyatt asked Congress for $600,000,000 to be used in underwriting the risks of expansion and plant conversion, in assuring overtime wages when necessary, in raising wage levels in low-pay industries.

Problems. To clear the way for his enormous new crop of moderately priced houses--built to sell for a maximum of $6,000, rent for no more than $50 a month --Wyatt called for a halt to virtually all other construction. He would need rigid price controls, priorities, ceilings. And he urged passage of the Wagner-Ellender-Taft Bill, which would authorize down payments of as little as 5% and allow a buyer up to 32 years to amortize his mortgage.

Wyatt accepted the inevitable fact that his program would have to start slowly. He proposed to begin by channeling labor and materials into temporary, makeshift housing--50,000 trailers, 200,000 living units in rebuilt war-housing. He scheduled early construction of 250,000 prefabricated dwellings.

But his plan was basically concerned with permanent conventional building to assure first veterans, then non-veteran hardship cases, of real homes. Of the 1,200,000 houses planned for 1946, at least 700,000 would be permanent. No temporary dwellings of any kind were included in the 1,500,000 which he planned to build in 1947.

Applause. Energetic Wilson Wyatt, 40, had drawn his blueprint in five fast weeks. He had come to Washington virtually a stranger--a corporation lawyer whose only experience in public life had been gained as mayor of his home town, Louisville, Ky. But by virtue of driving himself all day and half the night he had managed to discuss and argue his theories with scores of Administration officials, men in labor and industry.

At week's end he reaped the first fruits of his labor. Congress, in its first show of enthusiasm for a major Administration proposal, promised him wholehearted backing. Millions of home-hungry private citizens applauded.

But the biggest part of Wilson Wyatt's man-killing job lay ahead. He had to make his blueprint work. Thousands of cities and towns would have to be talked into waiving antiquated building codes, backing Wyatt's startling theories. Congress, despite its initial enthusiasm, might balk at ceilings, might hesitate at handing out the vast sums Wyatt wanted. The inertia of decades would have to be overcome--both building labor and the building industry would have to be sold on all sorts of newfangled ideas.

Wyatt's answer: a nation which can build 50,000 airplanes can do anything.

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