More for Less

In a thoroughly detailed report, opening with a ringing declaration (see box), a group of technical experts in the home-building industry and Government last week gave notice to all concerned that the people of the U.S. can have better homes at 20%, 30%, and even 40% less cost than now. These percentages measure the waste caused by out-of-date methods, irrational building codes, featherbedding, etc.

The report is published in the current issue of The Magazine of BUILDING. It is based on a brass-tacks, technical round table* held under the sponsorship of that magazine. The report has already received unanimous endorsement from the heads of every important U.S. building association, including architects, home builders, mortgage bankers, savings and loan leagues, producers and retail lumber dealers. Said the round table: "Without the pressure of some national emergency, the home-buying public might well have to go on year after year paying billions of dollars extra as the price of these wastes . . . [Now] we hope obvious reforms which might otherwise be delayed a half century can be put into immediate effect." If the building industry can cut its own notorious wastes, it will help transform the economic life of the nation.

Some of the specific examples cited by the round table:

P: Most cities' plumbing codes require twice as much pipe as the new national code, and most cities' electrical codes are equally wasteful.

P: More than a billion dollars a year could be saved by standardizing the industry's crazy quilt of odd sizes of materials. P: Foundations required for one-story houses are far in excess of any real need. P: Practically every small house is structurally overdesigned (i.e., wastes lumber). P: Standard, prefabricated plumbing assemblies could save millions of pounds of pipe and millions of man-hours now wasted piecing together special assemblies. P: Ceiling heights and sill heights could be further standardized so that lumber and wallboard producers could supply materials precut to fit. P: Millions of pounds of copper wiring, steel pipe and cement are wasted by excessive street widths imposed on most low-cost developments.

The round table hoped these and many other wastes could be cut by voluntary cooperation, but if not, it proposed that the Office of Defense Mobilization and the Defense Production Authority "allocate scarce materials only to projects for which codes, ordinances, union regulations and finance requirements have been brought in line with a national program for minimizing waste."

*Members included Ralph Walker, president of the American Institute of Architects, Clark Daniel, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders' Design & Construction Committee, James Price, president of the National Homes Corp., Richard Kimbell, technical director of the National Lumber Mfrs. Association, B. L. Wood, director of research for the American Iron & Steel Institute.

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