THE WAR HOUSING PROGRAM AND ITS FUTURE

The government has invested between $150,000,000 and $175,000,000 in its assumption of responsibility for the living conditions of industrial workers during the war. Of this about two-thirds has gone into the acquisition of land1 and the actual construction of housing and miscellaneous community accommodations of some permanency. The rest has been expended in supplementing local transportation, emergency conversion of existing housing facilities and the like, expedients more temporary in character. So far as practical activity is concerned, the efforts involved in this program occupied a period of only ten months, and the greater part of them were included in the six months from the middle of May to the middle of November, 1918.

The most obvious comment on these facts emphasizes the comparative insignificance of this outlay in the face of the billions spent by the United States on the war as a whole and the corresponding expenditure on housing by European nations, as witness the more than $700,000,000 invested in housing for workers by Great Britain even prior to 1918. Closer scrutiny prevents so casual a dismissal of the subject, for two main reasons. First, the whole story of the origin of the war housing problem and its treatment offers one of the best available cross-sections of national war effort in its relation to industrial problems; and, second, through government intervention, for the first time in our national history an effort has been made to deal with industrial community life in accordance with a carefully planned and liberal-minded policy. True, any general social purposes in the administration of the work were largely subordinated to the object in view-the prosecution of the war; but it is this very fact that gives the government's policy its real significance. The war has emphasized as never before the vital relation of decent living conditions to production, and whatever the immediate disposition of the projects undertaken this lesson can hardly fail of some effect.

The war housing problem was only one of the many lessons in practical economics thrust on a somewhat unsophisticated and flustered nation by the early months of the emergency, but in many ways it is the most typical of them all. It demanded a national policy, a program, and an administrative machine where none had existed; it was in every sense the assumption of an entirely new national responsibility. It demonstrated clearly through the long delay consumed before effective action was secured the sluggish and inelastic character of American governmental machinery. It was unforeseen, forcing itself on the consideration of the government, and it was so distinctly a product of the emergency that in all probability it would never have presented such an acute war problem, certainly not in the first year, had not the government's own policy greatly augmented its seriousness.

Before discussing the government's attitude toward the question and the policy it adopted, it will be well to glance briefly at the housing situation in the United States and see just how the problem

arose.

THE HOUSING SITUATION IN 1917

One of the members of a British mission, which visited this country late in 1917, when asked to give some information on housing problems, expressed great surprise that the United States, with its natural resources in building materials and its territorial extent both infinitely larger than those of Britain, should have a housing problem which could not be met adequately by the communities concerned. It was an unconscious reliance on the same general considerations, vaguely realized, which caused the nation's difficulties.

The facts were these: For several years experts have been regarding the industrial housing question in the United States with growing alarm. The construction of workmen's houses is an undertaking which is peculiarly liable to abuse if left entirely to speculative treatment because of the limited rents which can be charged working-class tenants, and it is decidedly significant that the United States is the only modern industrial nation which had not prior to the war taken some steps to give community aid to the solution of the problem. Many voluntary organizations

had been attempting to direct attention to the serious dangers of congestion, overcrowding, bad construction, and all their attendant evils even before 1914, but without securing any adequate attention to the need for treatment of the subject as a specialized problem.

Against such a background the outbreak of hostilities in 1917, with its tremendous demand for building materials and workmen for strictly war needs, such as the construction of cantonments, arsenals, munition plants, ships, and the like, made the building even of the most flimsy workmen's houses an extremely risky undertaking. The difficulty of obtaining materials and men was soon further augmented by federal restrictions. A certain number of more farseeing employers of the larger class were undertaking some house construction, but employers in general had their capital so completely occupied in plant expansion and transformation that this source offered no real solution. The United States Housing Corporation, the agency which later assumed the administration of the government's general housing policy, estimates that the annual expenditure for workingmen's houses was cut in 1917 to 10 per cent of the normal.

Against this startling decrease in supply of all houses, good or bad, must of course be set off a very distinct decrease in the aggregate demand through a falling off in immigration and especially through the large number of men from the industrial ranks that were called to the colors. Indeed, if quality is disregarded— and it is unquestionable that a great deal of existing housing was not of a character to promote efficient production-it is probable that the aggregate shortage in housing during the war has been distinctly less than the apparent shortage.

Strictly from the point of view of emergency war demands, the crux of the problem lay mainly in a dislocation of population due to an extremely abnormal distribution of the labor supply, which produced congestion in housing conditions in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic states, with a partly corresponding surplus in other sections of the country.'

'It is improbable that this surplus was wholly sufficient to have taken care of the congestion even under a better balanced scheme of distribution of war pro

The causes of this abnormal distribution were three: the concentration of allied contracts in the eastern states in the years before the United States entered the war, due chiefly to their proximity to seaports; the emphasis on these same centers in the distribution of American war orders because of their apparent advantages in plant expansion; and finally the location of new shipyards at points remote from existing housing facilities. For the first, of course, the government was in no sense responsible, but the second a more carefully planned allocation of war orders would have minimized, while it is probable that the third might have been somewhat alleviated by more careful attention to the needs of the labor supply.

Disregarding for the moment the responsibility, October, 1917, six months after the war began, found this condition existing. Wages in eastern munition plants and shipyards were high. Workman were drifting into towns like Bridgeport, Bethlehem, and Sparrows Point, attracted by the money, working for a few days, and then, unable to find living quarters, drifting away again. The turnover, with its consequent loss of efficiency, was enormous, averaging in many places from 200 to 300 per cent.1 It was not at all an uncommon thing to find output cut 30 to 50 per cent by lack of housing in the munitions community.

In the face of these inroads on the war production program, retrospect makes it seem somewhat strange that the government had not already discovered the cause and taken active steps to remedy the difficulty. The reasons are two: first, the national lack of appreciation of the complexity of the production problem, disregard of the labor factor, and above all the absence of adequate machinery for obtaining the facts in the industrial situation;

duction. Investigations by the Division of Surveys and Statistics of the Housing Corporation have, however, demonstrated conclusively the existence of a surplus of facilities in several mid-western towns, notably Portsmouth, Ohio; South Bend, Indiana; and Michigan City, Indiana. Informal surveys have established the same facts in other places.

The figures used are those of the Housing Corporation and expert witnesses before congressional committees. They are probably over-conservative. It must be remembered that lack of housing was not the only cause of turnover, but in most cases it was the strongest contributing factor.

second, the lack of single responsibility for the housing problem, at bottom only one phase of the absence of central control over production.

To understand these two basic weaknesses is really to understand the alpha and omega of the mistakes in the government's whole industrial policy during the first year of the war.

THE BUREAUS AND THE HOUSING PROBLEM

Throughout the first six months there were at least six important government bureaus' in the field for munitions of various kinds, each of them responsible for its own policy, each vying with the other in obtaining materials, and none of them apparently considering in any effective sense the basic industrial elements which must be properly handled to secure anything like continuity of production. The government, if the production bureaus can be discussed collectively, tended to see the problem only as one of distribution of contracts. The fulfilment of these contracts was left very largely to the hurly-burly of peace-time competitive methods in the face of an abnormal industrial situation. Generally speaking the individual manufacturer was thrown a contract and left to solve his own industrial problem, both as to materials and man power. Without a central planning scheme even the distribution of contracts went on in patchwork fashion, each contracting bureau

Ordnance, Quartermaster, Signal Corps (Air Service), Medical Corps, in the War Department; Bureau of Supplies and Accounts and Marine Corps, in the Navy Department; and the Emergency Fleet Corporation.

* Some of the testimony before congressional committees on the housing situation throws a side light on the early confusion in Washington in the purchasing bureaus. For instance, Philip Hiss, chairman of the Housing Section of the Committee on Labor of the Council of National Defense, testifying before the Senate Committee on Commerce on January 11, says: "Why didn't the government know about this thing we have been talking about for six months [i.e., housing conditions]? I will answer that in this way: I have no criticism to make of the government. One of the generals before us [in an investigation by the Housing Committee] was asked by me, ‘General, why didn't you know this?' 'Well,' he said, 'possibly I ought to have known it, but all of a sudden a hundred times the work I had was placed on my shoulders. I have had 96 clerks; I have asked for 5,000. I was given 192-96 more. I have 1,875 clerks now and am going fast toward 3,000. I was working twenty hours a day. We had to organize, and we had to attend to the thing that was right on the desk before us.'"