America's Housing Challenge Resources for the Future

...Who should test it...

...RESOURCES FOR THE FUTURE Determining modes of ownership and tenure to fit the several needs of social housing is merely the first step m developing a national housing pohcy It must be followed by an accounting of the pertinent resources and a strategy for marshaling them to best advantage Resources for housing can be classified conveniently under five headings First, existing housing To the extent that the existing stockpile is satisfactory, it eliminates the need for demolition and conserves other resources To the extent that it is unsatisfactory but reclaimable, it may itself supply the basic resource for improvement To the extent that it is beyond economic reclamation, it constitutes only an apparent asset, in reality, it is an obstacle to be overcome What is worse, it provides a ready rallying point for those who oppose the dedication of national resources to help the un-derhoused Housing policy must draw these distinctions Second, land New housing can be constructed only if satisfactory locations can be found for it Our definition of housing as one bundle consisting of three packages—the utility, the social and the relatively simple shelter—tells us that the national investment is minimized when new housing can be built in existing communities Naturally, the desire for economy must be weighed against the danger of adding to the load on facilities that are over-utilized, obsolescent, politically unadaptable to the needs of the prospective new residents, or irrelevant to employment, industrial or commercial trends Third, building materials and technology The design of housing the world over reflects the prevailing climatic conditions and the availability of specific raw materials The highly industrialized economy of the United States permits regional differences to continue, and takes some account of variations in the availability of materials Nonetheless, American technology has tended to produce a homogenization of housing expectations This imposes a demand for architectural designs that are sometimes inappropriate for particular locations and involve the use of matenals more expensive than those in local abundance Fourth, a pool of labor capable of constructing housing on site, manufacturing its components off-site and providing the necessary transportation Despite many technological changes introduced over the past half-century and an apparent growing dependence on factory-made and partially preassembled components, the housing product continues to require a rich infusion of local labor This has complicated the development of industrial unionism, the several crafts involved have maintained their separate identities, and the local unions within the craft internationals have sustained their own rules for apprenticeship and admission of members The courts have lately intervened to widen the labor pool and to eliminate racial and hereditary barriers to union membership But the local unions may well have a certain practical justice on their side when they limit boom-time membership expansion in recollection of the cyclical ups and downs of the past At the very least, the maintenance of a consistently high level of activity in cognate fields (hospital and school construction, for example) is probably essential to the supply of an adequate labor force for housing Fifth, economic development The economy must be able to provide the goods and services demanded by those who work in the construction and related trades The housing industry makes a long-lived product that is not immediately valuable in satisfying the consumer desires of the work force, and there are limits to labor's willingness to sacrifice consumption goods for the production of capital goods, as even the directors of Socialist economies have found Hence a healthy credit market is essential to housing development Many housing programs have foundered because the nature and use of these resources have been insufficiently understood, resulting in ill-conceived strategies that inevitably misfired Before proceeding further, then, it behooves us to examine each of the resources for housing in greater detail I. EXISTING HOUSING Perhaps the easiest of all housing resources to misunderstand is that afforded by buildings already standing The demolition of those structures seems clearly wasteful, not only of physical assets but of human and community relationships Making inadequate homes more nearly habitable would appear to avoid the need to relocate people and permit that 20th-century monster, the bulldozer, to remain chained in its garage With the passing of its initial enthusiasm for slum clearance, the Federal government has increasingly given preference to the reuse of existing housing Special mortgage interest subsidies have been offered for rehabilitation in urban renewal areas (the FHA 312 program), and public housing authorities have been allowed to rent and sublet renovated buildings State and local laws have also been extended to provide government mortgage loans for upgrading purposes as well as for new construction New York, m particular, has led the way by authorizing municipal loans for the renewal of multiple dwellings, and by encouraging the installation of central heating and modern plumbing and electrical systems through special tax breaks But dissimilarities in the type and condition of buildings occupied by the deprived in urban America has made it difficult to formulate a uniform national rehabilitation scheme The six-story tenement house of Manhattan's Lower East Side, where the density of development reflected the high land value of the 1870s and '80s, is not found in most other cities In Boston and Chicago the poor have typically been housed in wood-frame "four-flatters " The low-income populations of Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore have traditionally occupied small, single-family brick row houses In addition, whole sections of large Northern cities built for the middle or upper classes have been taken over by the poor And the flight of the original occupants to the suburbs has been followed by a gross disintegration of the social package, which has in turn discouraged new investment in the shelter itself Policymakers must decide how, if at all, new resources can be put into the old structures to maintain them in comparative decency It has been argued that the automobile offers a paradigm tor American housing In its primal state, the automobile gives its original purchaser high-quality transportation, but it continues to provide satisfactory service to subsequent owners of successively lesser means, presumably at correspondingly lower cost, until eventually the expense of repair exceeds any possible residual worth for transportation and the car is junked This model reflects the course of the one-family house with some accuracy—except for the crucial fact that the value of a used car does not drop when its neighborhood declines, and the value of a private home does Moreover, as a house shifts to lower-income ownership, covering its basic costs is likely to make overcrowding inevitable This will raise the cost of maintenance, while the increased density will make the area appear less stable to the bank that might be asked to renew or extend a mortgage FHA home-modernization loan insurance represents a governmental response to the threat of one-family home decay, but the scope of the problem far exceeds any single institutional remedy If the used-car analogy only approximately describes the economics of the one-family house, it is even less applicable to the multiple dwelling filtering down through the hands of less and less affluent tenants, where the interests of owner and occupants are competitive Here, to begin with, those who design public policy must devise ways to maintain the landlord's concern for the relatively long-term soundness of his property Unfortunately, this now frequently dissolves into panic with the changing demography of a neighborhood Frightened by what he sees taking place, the owner caught in the shift begins looking for a buyer Most hkely, he will have to settle on someone with an opposing point of view—namely, someone who does not care about long-range prosperity and will accept the higher maintenance costs simply because he does not intend to pay them This buyer, eager for the quick dollar, will happily take a higher weekly or monthly income at the price of allowing his building to go downhill (Lower maintenance standards, many writers on housing have concluded, may be the only rational economic response to a drop in the income level of tenants ) The long-range perspective is also discouraged by the refusal of most banks to increase mortgages m areas where they perceive the kind of social change that they interpret as presaging the arrival of short-range owners The bank's response to an implicit threat thus helps to make it explicit Concomitantly, government efforts to control matters by imposing a higher level of maintenance expenditures through housing code enforcement and fines for noncompliance all too often lead to more rapid disinvestment and even abandonment If the marketplace is to keep up the standards of older multiple dwellings, the government must somehow bring about bank lending for purposes of repairs and rehabilitation in sagging neighborhoods New York, so far without visible results or a fair test, is experimenting with a program that will partially insure bank loans for building improvements m areas that are sipping but have not fallen altogether Government intervention of another kind is essential in neighborhoods where incomes are simply too low to support the level of rent necessary to meet a building's operating and capital expenses Experience has shown, however, that public assistance payments to sustain family income do not of themselves improve the quality of housing Rental grants have to be accompanied by the subsidization of rehabilitation plus—and this is perhaps most important—a sound management program for the renovated building And sound management requires the freedom to purge (admittedly a horrid word) the destructive tenant Similarly, a sound public policy for arresting or restoring the deterioration of multifamily housing must include provisions for bringing a realistic threat to bear against both owners and occupants Theoretically, the market takes care of this The landlord knows that if he allows his building to deteriorate too badly, he will be able to attract only the least desirable tenants, the destructive tenant faces the prospect of being forced to move to less desirable quarters Though such an idealized market probably has never existed because of the stickiness of housing as a commodity—its relentless adherence to land narrows the lessor's and the lessee's choices?government efforts to approximate the sanctions are quite instructive The available penalties for an owner who fails to maintain his building in accordance with the law are either too mild, and have little deterrent value, or too severe, and deter reinvestment more effectively than they encourage compliance with the housing codes As for the regulations against unruly tenants, they are virtually unenforceable Peer group pressure is unquestionably the most effective sanction Which brings us to the task of promoting high expetations for neighborhoods under renewal Since this falls into the sphere of public relations and political promising, officials have pursued it assiduously, designating neighborhood development plans, neighborhood preservation districts, neighborhood conservation districts, and the like Sometimes, even with little or no direct government intercession, certain areas succeed in "trickling upward" from low-rent to high-rent occupancy (presenting horrendous problems, it should be realized, for the people displaced in the process) But most of the traffic is in the opposite direction, so the crucial question is how to improve a neighborhood without uprooting the nondestructive majority who five there All rescue plans have depended primarily on providing money for rehabilitation So-called "moderate" rehabilitation leaves the interior partition walls and room arrangements as they were, and seeks merely to restore the building to minimum habitability by replacing fallen plaster, eliminating infestation, and repairing the plumbing, heating and electrical systems Or, the process may involve reducing an old building to a skeleton and starting from there In both cases, the high rate of failure indicates that new investment capital is not enough to breathe life into substandard housing The real difficulty in resuscitating an older building begins after the plasterers and painters have departed, when the manager selects his new tenants For the hard truth is that some people are incapable of meeting minimum standards of housekeeping or neighborly behavior, and the presence of any considerable percentage of unruly residents in an apartment house makes it unacceptable to other residents Most rehabilitated multifamily buildings are not large enough individually to justify the cost of efficient full-time superintendent and janitorial services In the smaller structure of four units or less, the resident owner can be expected to handle much of the repair and maintenance work himself But this leaves open the question of who or what is to replace the janitor's wife in the typical 24-unit apartment house The Human Factor Many housing students have suggested that a wholly new form of enterprise is needed, directed by young people with a demonstrated emotional commitment to the improvement of living conditions for low-income families in the central city and possessing as well a practical sense of how to get things done Such enterprises might fill the gap, if they could be made to work But initial funding would have to be provided on a scale that private foundations are unprepared to meet, and the possibility of a large and embarrassing failure deters government agencies from trying to find ways around current legislative and constitutional prohibitions against making grants of public funds While the idea seems promising, the few experiments that have actually been tried have yet to become self-supporting The costs of providing management services, together with the physical services that must accompany them, have not been reduced very much by the elimination of the need to show a profit Apparently the nonprofit entity will have to remain the vehicle for continuing subsidies to housing needing such services It is unlikely that the buildings involved will ever receive a rent roll large enough to sustain management equal to that of the better public housing agencies Still, the emerging social institutions of the urban ghettos—groups like the Housing Development Corporation of the New York City Council of Churches—are determined to provide these services and in special cases, choosing their customers with care, they may succeed Apart from technical services, managing an apartment house requires the gift of empathy, and the ability to distinguish between those with whom a touch of patience will be highly productive and those who merely will take advantage of any sign of weakness in order to live free of rent Sometimes these gifts are possessed uniquely by a single resident, sometimes jointly by a small leadership group capable of eliciting tenant discipline to minimize wear and tear m the rehabilitated building The Upper Park Avenue Community Association of Manhattan is an outstanding example The challenge for public policy is to find a way to duplicate achievements that depend on the face-to-face ability of talented leaders to deal with tenants and manage buildings Too often, these are the very qualities that disappear or he unused when the government seeks to multiply the size of a successful enterprise, the proven gifts of the original leaders are set aside so they can become administrators on a larger scale, a role that may call for different skills, while their strongest aptitudes are rendered useless by their successes For all these reasons, then, the nation's older urban buddings re-main an ambiguous resource for improved housing To the extent that the social package surrounding and permeating them can be repaired and strengthened, they become highly valuable, to the extent that the social fabric remains torn beyond mending by any of the means currently available to housing policymakers (social work, antinar-cotics therapy and, above all, the dignifying gift of productive and amply paid work), existing substandard housing probably constitutes a negative asset It is easier to start from nothing...

...Must each city establish its own laboratory...

...If the resource value of America's existing housing is ambiguous, that of its land is even more so Certainly the land is there In relation to the total population, the United States enjoys an abundance of land practically unheard of in any other industrialized nation Taking the country as a whole—not necessarily the most relevant way to gauge the scope of useful land resources?the general population density is about 56 people to the square mile This is roughly one-fourth the density of France, one-tenth that of the United Kingdom, and one-fifteenth that of Belgium Even in comparison with the nonindustnalized world, the U S is remarkably well-favored in land per person The vast expanse of Asia, for example, has more than three times as many people per square mile The history of civilization is, in one sense, the record of increasing intensity of land use Farming and herding produced a greater quantity of edible food per acre than did hunting, the gathering of previously dispersed cottage workers in factories greatly enhanced the potential of industrialization, once a means had been found to tap manufacturing energy from sources other than men and their beasts The concentration of factories and special services that makes high-level production possible has, of course, resulted in the agglomeration of people in cities to build in what has been a wheat field, than to reconstruct the physical matrix that holds the sundered but living survivors of poverty and racial discrimination This perception, though not always consciously recognized, probably makes the notion of New Towns seem so attractive to many dedicated improvers of the species Convinced that the existing social package cannot be repaired at any price, they are prepared to assume the financial cost of creating a new utility package to escape the inner-city quagmire In recent years a remarkably flexible, if expensive, transportation system has developed in the industrial countries, and together with the public highway and the private automobile it has extended the useful land around the central cities Housing, industry and commerce have spread into areas that were formerly more suitable for farming alone In many cases, the fertility of the farms had been less important even to their agricultural value than ready accessibility to the city market This accessibility—vastly expanded at the cost of highway trust funds, railroad subsidies and land utilized for transport purposes—has led to a striking increase in the value of suburban property Indeed, the locational value (supported by public investment and a measure of private intervention) has risen to the point that the land is worth far more as a platform for housing than as soil for crops The prospect of inheritance taxes on the illiquid capital value of the land, combined with higher property taxes (sometimes diminished by special agricultural concessions to preserve open space), has accelerated the shift from agriculture to housing The intensified use of outlying land for housing purposes has been accompanied by a reduction in the intensity of inner-city land use for housing Though the number of households is not declining, America's central cities are losing population steadily A trick of political boundary-drawing often conceals the full impact of the trend To take an outstanding case, New York City—as a whole—remained practically constant in population between the 1960 and the 1970 Census But this broad statement conceals the fact that the city swallowed a large part of its suburbs when it incorporated Queens, the Upper Bronx and Staten Island 75 years ago Manhattan itself has been losing population steadily since 1910 and is now down to about 60 per cent of its all-time high Manhattan's present population also differs significantly from that of only 30 years ago The public schools are currently about 75 per cent nonwhite, and if the city were confined to its 1898 boundaries, it would be as markedly nonwhite today as Newark has become Over the years reformers have directed their most persistent criticisms of urban slum housing against the effects of high density High density means correspondingly little open space, it limits the play of sunlight on the windows of the living rooms, impedes the circulation of air, degrades all of the sanitary facilities, promotes the spread of disease and, perhaps most significant of all, cheats families of their sense of privacy and undermines their belief in their own importance and potentialities Many of these defects have been cured by means other than the reduction of density, medical advances, for example, have made moot the argument that crowded living conditions encourage the spread of bacterial disease Tuberculosis, cholera, yellow fever, and diphtheria no longer take a regular toll of America's urban poor as they did a century ago The outcry against high housing density has softened, too, with the growing awareness that propinquity to others is an urban value treasured by at least part of the population The concentration of minority group members in close physical proximity is also seen as a source of political power, enabling them to elect their own local representatives, something they could not do if their numbers 2. LAND were dispersed over a wider geographical area Nevertheless, the majority of Americans would undoubtedly express a preference for low-density housing development This is evident in the widespread opposition to high-rise apartment houses or multiple dwellings generally found in local zoning ordinances Residents often take action scarcely stopping at the threshhold of violence to prevent increases in the housing density of their neighborhoods or political communities Thus our inquiry into the usefulness of the land resource for improving conditions tor the housing poor dicoupled with the wave of despondence that followed the initial victories of the civil rights movement, has made many people more sympathetic to the suburban point of view If, as it now appears, a sense of ownership is actually important to good housing maintenance, and if pride is an important ingredient in the sense of ownership, then it follows that the suburbanite's concern about neighborhood values, about moderate densities that do not strain the natural resources of a location, about excess traffic and the environmental impact of too much development, are not simply to be dismissed as a snobbish determination to keep vides into two interlocking questions How can the resisting suburbs be made to accept a larger population, consisting in part of lower-income people who now live in the most crowded and deteriorating city neighborhoods...

...The battle against suburban exclusivity and the struggle to loosen the white noose that threatens to strangle the central city were causes whose ultimate virtue was taken for granted by progressive Americans until a few years ago But the recent surge of interest in the environment, out strangers, particularly those with less money and, perhaps, a different religion or skin color To be sure, in many cases the suburbanite's concern with environmental quality does contain elements of class pride and racial prejudice, but rarely is it solely the product of unworthy motives For perhaps the first time in American history, the value of growth itself has become subject to legitimate debate Unfortunately, the effort to discriminate between the growth that fulfills human needs and the growth that thwarts them is in danger of sinking in a flood of mutual recriminations between advocates of limiting development and those who feel the suggested limits are often intended to keep the poor and non-white in the central city This, whether intentional or not, would be the inevitable consequence of severely restricted suburban development Meanwhile, Congress has responded to rising tears about the quality of the environment by adopting the National Environmental Policy Act, and the courts have handed down a long list of decisions affecting land use under its terms The legislation, as applied by hud, has had the effect of reducing the amount of land available tor the construction of social housing Meeting environmental criteria also makes housing more expensive to build and operate on sites that fall within the ambit of official discretion Among other things, the National Environmental Policy Act discourages the use of land that is subject to environmental influences deemed adverse to human health and comfort For instance, urban locations are excluded from Federal subsidy benefits if they are afflicted by traffic noise during more than a certain number of hours per day If the decibel level exceeds the standards only mildly and the site falls into the doubtful zone, hud may prescribe remedial measures to bring it into the acceptable range The remedies frequently include double-paned windows, expensive to install and to replace when somebody throws a baseball through them, and air conditioning—which, besides being expensive, obviously adds to energy consumption Though the solution may thereby contribute to other environmental problems, they fall into the lap of a different Federal agency Anyone who spends much time watching hud in its cumbersome weighing of potential environmental shortcomings and their remedies will soon conclude that the department is far more careful in its appraisal of these matters when it thinks its decision may be challenged by a party inimical to the construction of housing Should, unhappily, the combination of environmental defects and possible opposition move hud to demand not merely an environmental fact sheet but a full environmental impact statement, the housing project under consideration will probably be delayed at least a year, with a consequent inflationary escalation of its basic costs as well as the imposed added expense of installing internal environmental protection devices After further contending with the issues arising from sanitary sewer loads, school population patterns and transportation load factors, the supporter of social housing programs may be forgiven for suspecting that the environmental movement has been conceived primarily to prevent the construction of housing for those who need it most An even greater confusion descends on the housing sympathizer who attempts to forge from the decisions of the Federal and state courts a consistent land use policy In some jurisdictions, local lownships have been upheld in "zoning out" projects that might produce low-income housing at moderate densities The courts have noted that the towns have not provided adequate sewers and sewage treatment plants for the increasing population and, in reality, rewarded their neglect by restraining the growth the majority did not want The local government therefore continues to fail to install these facilities in the happy knowledge that so long as it refuses to spend tax money on sanitation, it need not fear the arrival of unwelcome neighbors Other courts, in the same state, have taken diametrically the opposite point of view, ruling that the zoning restriction against moderate-density housing, or low-rise multiple dwellings, was not a reasonable protection of the environment Instead, the restrictive zoning was construed as an effort to limit the constitutional right of other Americans to live where they choose One court undertook to provide equitable relief by establishing its own zoning pattern for the offending town, with the help of professional consultants A leading test case on the rights of suburban townships to limit growth emerged from a plan devised by the town of Ramapo, New York, to prevent "premature" development within its boundaries New construction was made conditional on the installation by the town of necessary public improvements scheduled over a long period of years But the zoning ordinance provides that if the town fails to complete the improvements on schedule, a developer may undertake them at his own expense and claim a tax credit for the cost In this way a balance was struck between the need of land for housing purposes and the rights of the present townspeople to protect themselves against the deterioration that might follow unwise development The Ramapo ordinance was upheld by New York State's Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state Busting Zoning The current uncertainty regarding the availability of suburban land for housing people from the cities, particularly those of low income, reflects the unsettled conflict of interest between those who already live in the suburbs and those who want to move there Local control of land use, subject only to rather cursory court review—usually confined to procedural questions—is the general rule in the United States Appeal of local actions on substantive grounds has been almost impossible in the past, although the courts are beginning to move in this direction In the absence of a national policy to guide the allocation of land for social housing and serve as a basis for judicial review of local decisions, land availability will be determined less by regional considerations than by uncoordinated private efforts Many varied organizations throughout the country will continue their separate campaigns to "bust" local zoning and free space for the urban population to live in imitation of the suburban dweller One such group, the Suburban Action Institute, is at this writing deeply involved in an attempt to break local zoning patterns in the vicinity of Candlewood Lake, near Danbury, Connecticut, so that this middle-class, suburban-rural area might become available to low-income families for permanent rather than recreational residential purposes Unfortunately, it is not clear where they would find employment The lack of a suitable governmental vehicle empowered to weigh the desirability of retaining the rural environmental quality of Candlewood Lake against that of providing home sites for low-income families constitutes a fatal defect m American institutions bearing on the land question Among other things, it forces on the Suburban Action Institute and similar agencies elsewhere a commercial interest in land value that compromises their social arms Obviously, the Institute lacks standing from which to mount an attack on zoning patterns unless it owns an interest in land Equally obviously, the social idealists who comprise the group's leadership are unlikely to be furnished with the necessary cash Accordingly, they have allowed investors to assist them by purchasing options on part of the land The investment serves something more than a social function, however In its present zonning envelope, the land will permit perhaps one dwelling umt per acre If the courts find the ordinance to be exclusionary and order the local government to permit 10 dwelling units per acre, the land will become 10 times as valuable, not only will fewer square feet be required for each unit, but utility services, highways and water facilities will be greatly reduced in cost per unit by virtue of the closer clustering of the houses The investors, having served their social function, will be able to sell then options at a highly leveraged profit Last June, Congress failed to pass a National Land Use Policy Act by a mere seven votes While it would have helped to meet the financial problems of land use planning, its bureaucratic overtones were acutely heard by those who generally oppose Federal intervention in local affairs The New York Daily News, for example, in an editorial applauding the bill's defeat, said local officials who accepted such Federal grants would wake up to find that "a corps of bossy, brassy, we-know-what's-best-for-everyone bureaucrats is running around braying orders Once that starts, home rule and private property rights would be trampled into oblivion " Not long ago, most progressives would have disagreed with that view in every respect, but recently there has been an increasing fear of government size and uncontrollabihty, and a growing insistence on the priority of the individual over the institution By the same token, many erstwhile supporters of public housing have, so to speak, rediscovered the value of individual ownership Still, progressives of all persuasions —those most strongly in favor of more land for low-income housing as well as those most concerned The natural resources of any nation shape its architectural tastes, particularly m housing The United States is, like Finland, especially rich in forest resources, and lumber has consequently become a preferred building material m both countries It has the virtue of being self-regenerating, provided that men harvest it with restraint At any one time and in any specific region, though, it may be available only in hmited quantities These limits are frequently approached or exceeded by demand when housing production rises Smce most of America's one- and two-family homes are constructed predominantly of lumber, its price usually moves in phase with the contemporary demand for housing In 1973, when the production of new housing units peaked at about 2 6 million, lumber costs rose to all-time highs Even so, as building materials go, wood is not only comparatively cheap, but unusually versatile and easy to work with American technology long ago became adept at exploiting it For example, the invention of the balloon-framed house—based on the theory that about preserving natural resources and open space—are agreed on the need for a national land use policy, even if they remain widely divided on what that policy should be In a country as heterogeneous as the United States, local zoning control offers a way of preserving a comforting degree of homogeneity Since most people combine, in one proportion or another, a taste for neighborhood cohesiveness with a taste for the spice of variety, agreement on what constitutes a judicious balance will be difficult to reach In the meantime, the question of how much land is seriously available for the needs of social housing will be left without a general answer, its tentative ad hoc settlements will be worked out in widely separated locales like New York's Forest Hills and California's ocean front two-by-four pine studding is sufficiently rigid to frame a building two stones high—is said to be a crucial American contribution to architecture European practice—except in the northern parts of Scandinavia, where softwood forests exist on a scale commensurate with those originally found in America—has emphasized clay, stone and mortar construction in housing It would probably be economically advantageous if local styles could vary from year to year with the ebb and flow of market demand, but the habits of a locality defy this adaptability Because European materials are heavier, not self-regenerating, and require heat and chemical reactions to make them useful, as m the case of brick and mortar, the cost of construction there tends to be material-intensive, while in the US it has generally been labor-intensive The American pattern has been emphasized by the local organization of the building trades unions Yet it is a curious fact that much of the lower-skilled construction labor all around the world has been monopolized by nonindigenous people—the Algerians in France, the Turks in Scandinavia, the Arabs in Israel, and, typically, Irish and Italian immigrants m the United States The Italians on the Eastern seaboard have been desenbed as starting out on these shores carrying mortar m a hod, and becoming contractors as soon as they could afford to buy a wheelbarrow The connection between local labor, regional fashion or habit, and the choice of materials used m construction has been codified m the building and construction laws These standards are set primarily by local governments, although strenuous efforts have been made by state governments, professional associations and hud to supersede local ordinances with more nearly universal requirements The building codes do serve to protect the public from the danger of shoddy, fire-prone structures But they have undeniably been tainted by their local connection with contractors who believe that competition can be controlled or minimized by mandating the use of specific materials and subassemblies The unions, too, are notoriously interested m assuring their workers an accustomed minimum of man hours for work that, as a matter of law, cannot be eliminated or simplified While resistance to innovative materials and methods is anathema to all the paladins of virtue, there is reason to question whether the specification codes are as rigid as they are generally represented to be As for the union involvement, according to some estimates as much as 60 percent of all housing built in the United States is nonunion Furthermore, the unions have accepted a long list of new materials and techniques in the years since World War II Productivity has increased markedly and, at least until 1965, the index of housing construction costs in this country rose little or no faster than the index of family income Even in the more expensive parts of the nation the price of postwar housing was held down by the introduction of reinforced concrete in place of steel, the substitution of precast or prestressed concrete wall 3. MATERIALS AND TECHNOLOGY sections for brick, and the use of prefabricated gypsum board sections for partition walls instead of job-assembled wooden studs, lathing and three coats of field-installed plaster Some unions, of course, have been more receptive than others to labor-saving or material-cost-saving types of assembly but the trend toward revised work rules is unmistakeable True, it has been accompanied by another trend higher hourly wages and greater fringe benefits And the rigid division of trades continues?making small complex jobs, like housing rehabilitation, economically unfeasible under present building trades conditions The savings afforded by new materials and technological advances in the 1960s were wiped out not only by rising labor costs, but by a rising view of what should be included in a house The standard single-family tract house sold today at, say, $30,000 is four times as expensive as the one offered to families in the same stratum ot the income pyramid 30 years ago by Levitt and Sons The structural differences are probably not very great, yet the mechanical and electrical changes, the inventory of what must now be provided to make a kitchen acceptable—the type of range, refrigerator, dishwasher, etc —plus the automatically controlled heating system, and a host of plumbing conveniences have all added enormously to the final price Similarly, the movement to high-rise construction in the central cities, stimulated by the increased cost of land acquisition and the desire to minimize the relocation of sitting tenants, necessitates complex mechanical and electrical systems that push up rent levels Nor does this end the matter The basic raw materials of the traditional American house—lumber, sand, clay for bricks, asbestos for roofing shingle and transite piping, to name only a few—have become more expensive as sources convenient to construction sites have been exhausted and as the environmental interest has imposed conservation measures on the extractors Some of the manufacturing processes involved, like the calcining and pulverization of portland cement, produce smoke and dust in great volume, where the cost of controlling the polluting effluent exceeds the value of an existing plant, it may have to be closed down for environmental considerations, reducing supply Even if the supply is later augmented by the construction of a new plant, the cost of the requisite environmental controls will not be offset by the economies of modern technology, and the unit cost of the product will have to go up Other building materials—notably the copper vital to noncorrosive piping, and bauxite for making aluminum—are derived from overseas sources Their prices have risen significantly m recent years and undoubtedly will continue to do so This will increase pressures for more reviews of existing building and mechanical codes in the hope that changes in permissible materials may reduce American housing dependence on high-cost or overseas sources Codes and Systems There has already been much talk about the virtues of "performance codes" that stipulate, for instance, the number of hours of fire resistance a certain wall installation must be capable of, as an alternative to the traditional "specification codes" that require the wall to be built of bricks or concrete block of a given thickness laid up in mortar of a given composition Unfortunately, it is extremely hard to make a performance code work Who can tell whether a proposed type of fire wall will indeed resist for four hours...

...These questions are continually raised by professional engineers and architects who fear that changes in standards will undermine their own established ability to interpret the code, or otherwise adversely affect their livelihood Flexible copper tubing would appear to be a cheap, corrosion-free substitute for rigid brass piping that must be threaded and pieced together on the construction site Plastic tubing would appear to be an even cheaper substitute for copper tubing Yet many American cities have been prevented from approving these materials by opponents who base their rationale on the difficulty of stipulating in the building code exactly how such components are to be installed, and the lack of field experience to determine how satisfactory they may be In addition to looking for new low-cost materials, housing economists have long advocated a total "systems approach" to factory-built housing In what he called "Operation Breakthrough," former hud Secretary George Romney conducted a competition to qualify as "promising" a number of different prefabricated housing schemes Since the Breakthrough projects were to be erected in cities with detailed building codes, there could be no significant deviation from normal construction standards Unlike mobile-home manufacturers, the participating firms could not trim costs by reducing, say, the size of the wooden scantlings in the walls As Romney was soon to learn, there is no economy in the centralized mass production of housing, or anything else for that matter, unless it can be carried on at a very high volume, which requires a large ready market The more expensive the product, the more difficult it is to construct the market Just as the mass production of automobiles was scarcely feasible before a network of suitable roads had been built, so with mass prefabrication of housing until sufficient sites become available for it And that, of course, remains a local matter, twisting in the winds of local politics Even assuming that sufficient volume could be achieved, there may be no intrinsic savings in factory systems specifically designed to build housing The units may be too big to transport and production schedules may be too inflexible, since economic pressures would force plants to commit their capacity far in advance, severely limiting their adaptability to the sudden expansions and contractions characteristic of the American construction industry In sum, there is no technological breakthrough in sight that will stop the steady upward curve of construction prices Consequently, moderate-cost housing for the poor will become ever more difficult to achieve Though we should not abandon efforts to develop more efficient materials and assemblies, it seems likely that economies will be gained only by cutting back on amenities Given the built-in reaAccording to the U S Department of Labor, approximately 1 25 million new employes would have to enter the building trades for the nation to meet all the anticipated construction goals of the 1970s Of these, perhaps 500,000 would be needed for housing purposes, an addition of about 16 per cent to the workforce of 3 million Americans engaged m on-site housing construction last year With the overall unemployment rate currently exceeding 5 per cent, there would seem to be no danger of a manpower shortage Yet on-site construction represents only a part of the total labor requirement for housing Matenals must be prepared and transported, tools must be manufactured, and future trends in these areas remain obscure Environmental considerations may make the extracting and processing of building materials more labor-intensive and cause them to be shipped over greater distances If we begin equipping new houses with solar energy converters or heat transfer devices to help relieve the fuel shortage, the number of man-hours necessary per unit will increase, both on and off the site It is therefore distinctly possible that housing's labor needs will eventually grow to the point that they severely tax the available pool of workers At the same tune, there is no reason to believe that the expectation of steadier employment will encourage building tradesmen to moderate their demands for higher sons why all producers want to make a more, not a less elaborate house, a movement downward, wise as it might appear after long research, would be politically acceptable to the producers only if it carried a clear promise of a high volume of future work An effort to persuade the poor to settle for a significantly lower standard would have to be coupled with a restraining force to cut back on the quality of housing amenity still enjoyed by the very rich wages The combined effect of these two pressures may well be to push construction costs through the roof Beyond the basic shelter itself, the utility and social packages present further labor requirements Their extent obviously depends on whether the new housing is located in areas that already have a network of services, or on vacant land where everything must be developed from scratch But the possibility of using existing infrastructures depends in turn on the receptiveness of the affected neighborhoods to an influx of new residents Thus the willingness of urban residents to live in close proximity with different social, economic and racial groups—still a cause of sometimes bitter turmoil in modern America—will have a significant impact on the labor cost of new housing for the deprived Just as the same question limited the availability of the nation's land resources by foreclosing some suburban land from use by the under-housed, so our urban social schisms threaten to increase the cost of helping this group within city limits The problems of location also impinge upon an even more vital issue the possibility of expanding the construction work force to include nonwhites in the ranks of the best-paid, most highly skilled building trades until they are represented in reasonable proportion to their share of the total population This, at least, is how the problem might be formulated in the more progressive cities of the nation, elsewhere, discrimination against nonwhites is more primitive and blatant The breaking down of these racial barriers is so rudimentary a bit of common justice that one hardly needs to expatiate on the matter But it is equally important to remember that the unions came into existence and remain powerful because they prevent the price of human labor from sinking to the point at which it would have always remained if working people had not been permitted to bargain collectively And if it is difficult to overcome the combination of fear and prejudice that tends to maintain local union exclusivity even when construction is booming, the task becomes virtually impossible when employment is irregular, for then the cardinal principle of all labor organization—that seniority, not employer favoritism, confers previleges—becomes not an abstract principle but the difference between working and not working The whole question of economic discrimination is far too complex for this discussion of housing, but two points must be made The first is the obvious one that progress in racial integration of the work force can be aided by government investment programed to maintain a steady level of construction activity, making employment more dependable in an industry prone to cyclical ups and downs Second, attacks against union exclusivity become especially bitter when construction is undertaken in an area of high endemic unemployment among minority group members who feel victimized by discriminatory practices What is at issue in such cases is often not so much the ethnic composition of the union—it may even have a fair number of minority workers on the site—as the right of local residents to jobs on the project This movement proclaims that the neighborhood belongs properly to the people who live in it, and considers an organization preferring the alleged rights of outsiders "irrelevant" to the needs of those who are deprived m both income and housing 4. LABOR No one who recognizes that the principle of trade union organization around economic issues has done more than any other single social institution to improve the position of countless formerly deprived Americans can view the "geographic" challenge without a measure of alarm But it must also be recognized that here we are hearing, in a new accent, the very emphasis on localism that has made the construction unions at once highly decentralized and extremely powerful in the areas where they have won a practical closed shop Unless the level of unemployment drops, the issue will become more acute and contractors will find it ever more difficult to work out acceptable compromises between the unions and the local people who control the streets Already some individuals have allegedly threatened to incite serious mob interference if they were not hired as "peace makers " If the situation gets worse, contractors may well refuse jobs in troublesome urban areas Since the problem is not really amenable to solution on the national level, a modus vivendi in each locality will depend on painstaking negotiation between interested parties Whatever the result, the spirit of localism will probably reduce the availability of trained labor to some extent, raising again the cost of housing for the urban poor All too often in the course of discussing housing labor, one forgets the requirements of the social package In part, this embraces the relationships between those who live 111 multifamily housing and those who are responsible for its management Nearly every study of the quality of maintenance and the level of investment and reinvestment in urban multifamily housing stresses the importance of providing intelligent, competent, well-trained superintendents and maintenance workers to protect the stockpile from further deterioration In response to this manifest need, the Federal government has established a National Center for Housing Management Courses are now being given in this subject at a number of community colleges and similar institutions, just as courses in housing planning, architecture and economics are given at institutions of higher learning On the practical level, private foundations, often with government assistance, have set up model institutes and management firms to give professionalized training in everything from running a large cooperative to repairing small-apartment heating and plumbing systems In addition, almost every major city has organizations of young people who are determined to make a face-to-face impact on housing conditions Some of them are showing low-income tenants how to improve their housing conditions or manage buildings abandoned by their owners Though these efforts are plainly worth expanding, the majority of them lack sufficient funds The most important manpower need, however, is to develop people with a so far undiscovered skill in remotivating and retraining for successful community life those multi-problem families who have demonstrated an incapacity to coexist peacefully with their neighbors If, as some housing authorities believe, this group is beyond the reach of the behavioral sciences at the present time, a part of each major city will, as we noted earlier, inevitably remain a slum If, on the other hand, this significant fraction of the housing deprived can be brought to observe the minimal norms of conduct acceptable to the working poor, top priority should be given to this herculean task The early supporters of the housing reform movement sometimes seemed to promise the body politic that decent homes, sunlight, warmth in winter, and adequate ventilation in summer would solve the social ills of all who lived m the slums Though that faith seems naive today, its appearance on the social scene was not fortuitous One cannot justify investing in better housing for the poor if a small minority of them will destroy it for their neighbors Until this reality is widely understood, and a force of people is prepared to deal with it, no one can say that the human side of the housing resources picture equals the challenge 5. ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT All of us customarily refer to our distant ancestors as cave men because they lived in caves, we do not often reflect on the fact that they remained in caves until sufficient food could be provided to free some people from hunting long enough to build more congenial forms of habitation In the modern context, the national economy must be sufficiently well-developed to supply food, clothing and recreational facilities, as well as shelter, tor those employed in the construction and maintenance of housing or they will not remain so occupied for long Yet many citizens who impatiently demand that more resources be allocated to alleviate existing inequalities in American housing are unprepared to explain where the money should come from The suggestions usually offered include the space program (not so often heard any more), the destructive highway trust fund (infrequently heard now because the mterstate program is neanng its end), the military budget (very often heard), or higher taxes (seldom heard from those who are expected to pay them) Unfortunately, cutting down on the resources being used in any sector of the economy reduces the nation's total usable wealth unless they are immediately set to work somewhere else In the case of housing, governmental decisions to appropriate new resources do not become effective instantly In 1968-69, for example, Washington sought to stimulate employment and the gross national product by emphasizing housing production through monetary expansion and subsidies to private entrepreneurs The desired housing boom did not come until 1971-72, for first local political interests had to be accommodated and the normal restraints of capital markets circumvented Because of the time-lag involved, any substantial shift of resources from other areas to housing imperils economic activity m the present with relatively little assurance that it will be successfully stimulated by increased construction at a later date In other words, new outlays for the benefit of the housing-deprived might have the result of diminishing the monetary wealth available for financing low-income housing This paradox—that under certain economic conditions more resources may mean less wealth—derives from the function of money in the assertion of demand If funds for housing were taken from the military budget, say, employment m the supporting defense industries would drop, lowering market demand for all consumer goods, including housing The corresponding drop in tax revenues would then discourage local governments from accepting expensive obligations m a large-scale housing effort Of course, at a time when the total productive forces of the economy are operating at far less than full capacity, a different outcome might be hoped for In these circumstances, a diversion of resources to housing, stimulated by government rewards and subsidies, could take up the slack m the economy, as seemed to happen between 1968-69 and 1971-72 The trouble at the moment is that no one seems to be certain whether the U S economy has excess capacity or not Some of the more obvious and poignant indicators, like unemployment and unused manufacturing in relation to capacity, are definitely turning down Other factors, whose significance for housing is extremely important, point to overstrain high interest rates and rising basic costs and wages If a housing push for the pool, with all of the necessary changes in the utility and social packages, is piled on top of an already excessive demand for credit, the new construction will be not only extremely expensive but dangerous to the capital investment needed to meet other goals A constant stream of goods and services of all kinds is necessary in a modern economy, particularly when it seeks to maintain or raise living standards for a growing population It is easy to suggest that the United States is dedicated to maintaining too high a living standard for most of its people, and that the rest of the world would benefit from lower consumption standards here But in the short run the world suffers whenever America does not keep up its living standards, because it then buys less goods from foreign nations The long run, which might well justify those who claim that Americans should live less affluently, does not seem within the reach of a society whose affairs are governed by an electoral system exercised with the freedom of speech which Americans cherish It is easy to argue, too, that a system of government in the U S not wedded so firmly to the marketplace for the determination of human desires, or to the capital markets for the establishment of interest rates, might proceed differently It is hard to prove this by consulting the tacts The nation that has achieved the greatest recent gains m housing, as measured by units constructed per capita, is Malaysia, but conditions there are so different from America's that no meaningful comparison is possible In the Soviet Union capital investment in industrial development has taken priority over housing, and the level of crowding is still high by American standards Under the government-administered price system based on a government-owned industrial plant, rents are cheap, but consumer goods like shoes and automobiles are not, there is a connection between the two The Northern European countries most noted for their housing accomplishments have enjoyed, in the main, relatively stable population levels and export surpluses based on skilled labor partly remunerated by government welfare programs that in effect nationalize the production costs ot exportable goods Their essentially homogeneous populations are not afflicted with the racial strife and ethnic rivalries that complicate American housing policy Yet despite a long history ot cooperative ownership, these nations (especially Sweden) now seem to be encountering rising popular impatience with insistent government participation in the production of multifamily apartment buildings when there is a shortage of the one-family homes desired by a growing number of citizens At public meetings, after it has been shown that no panacea for our housing problems is to be found m imitating any foreign program, someone always asks why interest has to be paid on mortgages When the government needs battleships, this argument goes, it simply builds them, taxing people for the total cost instead of taking on a tremendous added expense in the form of accumulated interest charges Why not do the same for low-income housing'' The truth of the matter is that most of the national debt was incurred in order to build battleships and wage wars, it was politically impossible to raise taxes enough to cover these expenditures even when the wars were widely regarded as essential to the nation's survival Housing for the poor has never attained such unanimity, meeting its capital costs by taxation alone would be politically unacceptable It would also impose a heavy burden on the very families we are trying to help Moreover, interest is not an artificial construct of a particular form of economic organization but an expression of the opportunity cost of capital—the cost of using goods and services for the production of one kind of long-term wealth rather than another To put it another way, interest is a method of encouraging savings—a reward for a voluntary limitation of personal consumption that permits the marshaling of resources for capital projects such as housing While interest is not a perfect measure of social utility, it provides a means for choosing between alternative uses of resources The basic strategy of government housing programs has depended on minimizing the cost of capital Before evaluating the past performances and future prospects of these programs, we must therefore understand how the money market functions and what constraints operate to shape the amount of capital available for housing purposes...

...Who will decide whether the test conditions are realistic...

...What does the migration outward offer the city and its poor—will it enlarge or diminish their power to achieve better housing...