Housing Woes

To the Editors:

Read your article "Housing: It's Out-asight" [Sept. 12] with much interest. For years now consumers have read about the "poor, depressed" housing industry. Now it has picked up tremendously, and as you indicate, so have the prices. I have yet to read in an article of this type about the shortcomings of the housing industry: poor workmanship, inability to get builders to correct defects, and the suits brought in an effort to correct same.

Luther A. Mathias

Baltimore

After hearing our friends' woes of rising mortgage payments, taxes, insurance and repair costs, we wonder if the prestige of owning one's home is worth it.

What's wrong with mobile homes? We own one and find it quite comfortable. We pay $96.07 a month for "mortgage" and $45 for lot rent. We pay no taxes, no water or sewage. Our insurance is minimal, and the only "taxes" we pay are $50 a year for a license tag.

Judie Tillman

Tampa, Fla.

In your story on housing costs you mention that some couples, upon hearing the purchase price of a home, decide that they must choose between having a home and having a baby.

Could it be that "the Bill" can act as a safe and effective aural contraceptive?

David L. Wright

Oshkosh, Wis.

Your story failed to mention the contribution that real estate agents' fees have made to soaring real estate prices. Such fees on a $70,000 home are between $4,200 and $7,000 (6% to 10% of the selling price). Because the seller pays the agent to sell his property, he adds an additional 6% to 10% to the selling price of the house. As a result, housing prices are inflated by thousands of dollars every time a house is sold. Since we Americans are moving at an increasing rate, currently once every three years, it is easy to see how real estate selling fees are a definite factor in increasing real estate prices.

Philip J. Bryce

Grass Lake, Mich.

Sorry I didn't know Bobby Phillips was looking for a home in northern New Jersey--we might have been able to strike a bargain.

My 18-year-old, well-maintained two-story, seven-room colonial (three bedrooms, 1 1/2 baths, one-car garage), attractive, heavily treed property, quiet residential area, listed in low $60s, has been on the market since April--many lookers, several binders, still unsold!

Marion V. Mackel

Hillsdale, N.J.

Tell all your readers to come to El Paso. You can find a nice three-bedroom, two-bath home in a good neighborhood for around $35,000. Furthermore, our taxes--state, county, school district, hospital, city--run about 1% to 2% of the market value of the house. There are no state or local income taxes.

(Mrs.) Betty Kennedy

El Paso

Creeping Deserts

So the world's attention was only drawn to desertification [Sept. 12] in the early 1970s? Where was the world in 1960, when botanists warned the National Science Foundation Academic Year Institute that the earth had already lost 20% of its arable land in a century due to man's activity?

Even with belated U.N. attention, the reported measures taken and proposed are but a fac,ade of token gestures. They ignore the basic driving force of population pressure' and the dissipative effects of ever-fragmenting "sovereignty."

David Sand

Minneapolis

Your correspondents missed one vital point concerning the political aspects of desertification. The peregrinations of the Tuareg in Niger, Mali and Upper Volta and the nomadic Masai in Kenya and Tanzania frighten their respective governments, who would prefer to see them sedentary and hence politically under control. So to keep them in place, we have the permanent pumping stations in the Sahel and the "ranches" of East Africa, destroying irreplaceable elements of the human mosaic and creating new deserts, all in the name of "progress."

Jo Daniell

Malmsbury, Australia

Man must combat desertification, agreed. But some deserts need to be protected from man. For instance, one of the world's most remarkable deserts: the geographically confined Namib. Its flora and fauna are unrivaled, in part because of the great diversity of ultra-psammophilous adaptations. It is a great pity, therefore, that the South West African department of water affairs is now hellbent on pumping dry the underground water resources of the Kuiseb River to satisfy the corporate hunger for uranium.

Chris H. Bornman

Munich

Violence and Rape

Re your story "Rape and Culture" [Sept. 12]: I am both dismayed and disgusted by the gross lack of humanity and wisdom displayed by Judge Simonson. Even if that poor girl were walking the halls naked, it still would not give anyone the right to touch her.

Condoning or excusing violence is more indicative of a declining morality than is a vanishing dress code.

James Holland Jr.

New York City

When the victims of rapists range from toddlers to grandmothers, it should become apparent that it is not a "teasing female" that falls prey to the rapist but instead a female who happens to be accessible and appears to be vulnerable that becomes an object that can easily be overpowered to vent displaced feelings of anger and hostility.

Vicki Gaynor

Honolulu

The New Philosophers

Your story on France's New Philosophers [Sept. 12] should have been titled "The Noble Savage Rides Again." France's young philosophers may have read Arthur Koestler, but they have certainly studied Karl Popper. Their philosophies, as described in your article, sound like Pop parodies of selected chapters from Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (first published in 1945), plus a generous admixture of disconcertingly old-fashioned Weltschmerz.

Charles Santoro

Vienna

So some clever philosophers of France have discovered now what was known by every child and village idiot in Germany more than 30 years ago: the evil of Marxism. Marxist dogma is hostile to human nature and always implies repression and, ultimately, terror. Marxism is not likely to fade away soon, however. Some people will always repress and terrorize others in the name of some far-off Utopia.

Heidi Hillgarter

Uppsala, Sweden

The New Philosphers' point is precisely that the men who have, and have had, leadership fail to examine the frailty of their own humanity and only succeed in crushing the lives of those who must follow.

R. Wylie Johnson

Baden Baden, West Germany

Despite the perversions of Stalinism and its perpetuators in certain pseudo-socialistic nations, socialism has done more to improve the living conditions of the masses during the past century than the delusion of free enterprise or religion.

Frederick F. Fullerton

Marburg, West Germany

I am pleased to tell you and the sophisticated French philosophers, with their sophisticated language, that Marx is not dead at all. I think he is very much alive all over this land, and he doesn't have time even to take a nap here.

Marta Arbelaez

Monterrey, Mexico

In the 1930s, when early Eurocommunism caught on in my native Czechoslovakia, my grandfather came to the following conclusion: "In capitalism man exploits man, in Communism it is the other way around." France's New Philosophers have successfully recycled that piece of old conventional wisdom.

Frank Meissner

San Salvador

Abuses of Power

TIME's criticism of Victor Lasky's It Didn't Start with Watergate [Sept. 12] is unjustified and completely ignores the author's premise. While, according to the book, F.D.R., Kennedy, Johnson and the like committed infractions of far less magnitude and quantity than Richard Nixon, the fact that they got away unscathed only allowed succeeding Presidents to abuse their power further. Lasky is right: it didn't start with Watergate--Nixon's list of abuses was only a sum total of what had been going on for years.

Thomas G. Welshko

Baltimore

Valiant Lady

So poor, dear, dead Martha Mitchell [Sept. 12] is to blame for Watergate. I didn't think it possible for Richard Nixon to sink lower, but he surely has hit rock bottom this time. God indeed rest and refresh the soul of this valiant and martyred lady.

Nolan Nix

Denver

Redheaded League

As an officer of the Brown University chapter of R.A.S.P. (Redheads Are Special People), I would like to respond to your article on Psychiatrist Michael Bar [Sept. 12].

If the high frequency of redheads in Ireland and Scandinavia has helped determine world history with their temperament and adventurousness, think what potentialities lie in a well-organized international of redheads.

Redheads of the world unite!

You have nothing to lose but your tempers. '

Peter Kobs

Providence

As the wife of a redhead, the mother of a redhead, the daughter-in-law of a redhead, the aunt of a redhead and the teacher of many redheads, I would like to say that I am sick and tired of hearing about the stereotype that connects red hair and hyperactive behavior!

Unfortunately, what might be labeled symptoms of "hyperactive syndrome" may, in truth, be assets. They may be the signs of a healthy, talented, exceptionally bright, energetic child who is impatient to learn and eager to get things accomplished.

Bernadette Dignan

Chesterfield, Mo.

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