A Huff & Puff

The roof was about to fall in on Housing Expediter Wilson Wyatt, while his latest blueprints to tackle the housing emergency gathered dust on a White House shelf.

The ex-mayor of Louisville had undertaken a backbreaking job with breathtaking plans: 1,200,000 new dwelling units in 1946, another 1,500,000 next year. His latest figures counted approximately 895,000 already started. But nearly half of this paper shelter was still uncompleted; over a third was makeshift housing, not permanent building. Home-hungry veterans hunted in vain for the $6,000 house of Wyatt's first dreams.

With each stroke of the hammer Wyatt hit his own thumb. He quarreled with other agencies, ran afoul of the powerful real estate lobby. Congress had backed down on price ceilings, had failed to enact the Wagner-Ellender-Taft bill for low-cost housing. Wyatt went overboard for prefabricated homes, which would use vast quantities of still-scarce sheet steel. When he asked RFC to underwrite this assembly-line program he bumped smack into RFC's roly-poly George Allen (TIME, Nov. 25).

Last week nervous Wilson Wyatt took his troubles to the President. It took days to get the appointment. When Wyatt was finally admitted, he spread new demands on Harry Truman's desk. Their substance: all-out Government lending, stricter controls on nonresidential building, top priorities for veterans' housing. The President promised to think it all over.

At week's end the White House was still significantly silent. Washington dopesters guessed what the answer would be: to sweep the emergency housing program into the new catch-all agency for the ragtag ends of CPA and OPA. That would leave Wilson Wyatt standing in the rain.

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