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Show cuvd tomorrow I -h- 111 FRANK PARKER I HOCKING increase There are about ten million more people living in the United States now than there were ten years ago. That is nearly enough additional ad-ditional people to fill a city as big as New York and Chicago put together. If you think of it that way it is easy to see why there is such a great shortage of housing accomodations. ac-comodations. Taking the average family unit as four persons, we should have built two and a half million new homes in the past ten years. New homes for ten million people peo-ple call also for new schools, hospitals, hos-pitals, churches, business buildings build-ings of all kinds, movie theatres and other places of recreation. It takes a lot more than merely dwellings to care for the needs of a growing population. Then, of course, more people call for more factories to make the things people peo-ple need to wear and to use, and making those things means more jobs and greater prosperity. Yet we somehow haven't got enough jobs, enough homes, or enough prosperity. Something seems to have gone wrong. COSTS proliibitive There isn't any doubt in my mind that we would be riding the top wave of prosperity now if the people of the United States had kept right on building new homes and the necessary community buildings to go with them, instead in-stead of shutting down on new building almost completed for seven or eight years. The reason for the slackening of new building was that the people peo-ple who controlled the prices of building material and of building labor have been unwilling to do their share toward restoring prosperity. pros-perity. When prices of almost every other commodity began to come down, prices of building material and supplies stayed up or even rose higher. When workers in almost al-most every other line were taking tak-ing pay cuts, these tightly ogran-ized ogran-ized building trade unions refused to work for less rnontey, even though they had to remain idle a good part of the year. Under such conditions as that it is not surprising that people who had planned to build and wanted to build held off because they simply could not buy new housing at the high prices which combinations combina-tions of material men and organized organ-ized labor insisted upon. TRUSTS graft A great many things have been undertaken in Washington in the past seven years which have seemed seem-ed to me ill-advised and impractical. imprac-tical. But one step which the Administration Ad-ministration has begun to take, seems to me to be so practical and necessary that I am surprised it was not taken long ago. That is the Government's effort to break down the combinations in restraint of trade which heve kept up the prices of building materials, mater-ials, and the combinations of la- bor organizations to keep up the cost of construction work. "The Building Trust" includes not only labor and material producers pro-ducers but also political rings which profit by making laws and ordinances to protect high-priced building labor and to give certain favored manufacturers of building build-ing supplies an advantage over their competitors. I know one case of a manufacturer manufac-turer of plumbing supplies who when he undertook to build himself him-self a home, found that he could not use his own bathtubs and kitchen sinks in his own house. Rival companies had conspired with the city building department and the plumhers' union to prevent pre-vent his particular materials from being used anywhere in the city. His company had refused to pay graft. UNIONS rules One result of the greedy attitude at-titude of organized labor in the building trades has been to bring unions into disrepute. Let me clear myself of any suspicion of anti-union prejuice by remarking that I have been a member of the International Typographical Union for nearly fifty years. But I have never been able to agree with the hold-up policies of many labor groups. I have had some experience in building and have had to deal with labor unions. I can't think of anything more silly than some of the union rules. I had to hire a staff of carpenters on one building just to bore holes through partitions par-titions for the water-pipes. It the plumbers had tried to bore their own holes I would have had a strike on my hands, and if I had let them do it I would have been fined by the Union. On another building job in New York I got the job finished on time only by okaying a contractor's contrac-tor's bill for $250 which he had to pay out to a union official to prevent a strike being called at the last minute. CAPITAL .... availability While the government is trying try-ing to check the abuses in labor and building material costs, it has already done a highly construe tive job of cutting the cost of the necessary capital for the small home owner. The first home I ever built cost me 7 per cent interest in-terest for the first mortgage loan and 30 per cent bonus for a three-year three-year second mortgage loan, and I had to put up a quarter of the total cost out of my own resources. Under the presentFederal Housing Hous-ing Administration a man with a job and $250 cash can build a $2 50 0 home and pay interest and principal in monthly payments over twenty years at a rate which figures only 4 and a half per cent interest on the building loan. What makes this plan especially especial-ly Interesting to me is that the Government does not put up any money at all. It simply guarantees to the lender who may be a bank, an insurance company or a priv- ate individual, that he will get lis money back wth nterest. |