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Show Housing Dreams Fail To Come True A great many people must feel a sense of frustrated sadness now as they remember those wartime advertisements ad-vertisements which pictured toii6 "dream home'' of the future a miracle of convenience, beauty and functional design, In which all you had to do was to touch a few buttons but-tons and silent machines would press your clothes, mix your drinks and do practically everything else. These advertisements were very often tied In with pleas to buy more war bonds so you'd' have the wherewithal to purchase the dream home once peace returned. Peace has been around quite a-while a-while now, but the dream house hasn't put in an appearance. The grim truth is that obtaining any kind of a house at all is the toughest tough-est problem faced by millions of Americans. Most commodity shortages short-ages are being rapidly made up but the housing shortage grows worse than ever. Business Week recently ran an nrtlcle on housing with a cynical and highly accurate, title: "Home Sweet Home At a Price." It touches on some of the most immediate im-mediate problems facing the home builder and home buyer. First of these problems, of course, is cost. Existing homes that were worth five or six thousand a few years ago now command ten or twelve. And when you enter the never-never land of new construction, anything can happen and usually does. Few contractors will now build on a firm contract they Insist on a fee or cost-plus basis of work. Bus iness Journals carry gruesome accounts ac-counts of homes which were designed de-signed to be built for ten thousand or under and wound up in the twenty thousand dollar bracket. Commercial builders, who used to develop subdivisions, have drawn In their horns and some of them have stepped out of the picture entirely entire-ly for the present. A number of building and loan companies, the backbone of whose business used to be homes, auto courts and apartments, apart-ments, have announced they will make no more loans for these purposes pur-poses until the situation stabilizes. The veteran home program, with its emphasis on under-110,000 houses, hous-es, Is so far In the doldrums as to be practcally lnvlsable. Many veterans, vet-erans, who put only a few dollars of their own money Into projected homes, have found payments beyond their means and have let them go. The reasons for high costs are obvious enough. Labor costs about twice as much as It used to, and complaints , are heard that labor productivity is low. Material costs run to as high as three times the pre-war level. Land values have followed fol-lowed the trend, and In many regions re-gions you must pay as much for a lot as you used to pay for an acre or so. But, logical as high costs may be, that doesn't solve the basic problem pro-blem which Is that homes cost a great deal more than the average family can afford to pay. As Business Bus-iness Week says, "Costs must com down sharply, many In the Industry are certain, If home building In 1947 Is to come anywhere near the level predicted by the Department of Commerce $6,000,000,000 In private pri-vate residential building and a million mil-lion private dwellings started." High hopes have been held by some for prefabricated houses. These represent an attempt to apply mass-production mass-production principles to the building build-ing problem. A number of concerns are producing prefabs. However, so far at least, they have certainly not proven a revolutionary i influence. They, too, cost more than prospect Ive buyers think they should and they must be erected on a piece of land, and plumbed and wired, all of which runs Into money. Again the sameness In design which Is an Inescapable In-escapable feature of prefabs, Is distasteful dis-tasteful to many people. The average American Is willing to drive a car Just like Jones next door but he wants his home to be different. Another complaint Is that newly built homes are Inferior as well as expensive. Instances are cited of green lumber, bad foundations, flimsy flim-sy hardware, Inefficient heating plants, etc. These are unfortunate results of efforts to shave costs. However, It la reported that the quality of materials In general has Improved of late. But price has gone up along with quality. - So I ar m existing homes are con cerned, they are still being listed at very high prices practically everywhere. ev-erywhere. But and this is a very important "but" indeed they are moving much more slowly than they did even a few months ago. Buyer resistance is the reason. The owners own-ers want big money the buyers want to pay less. It's comparable to the old analogy of the irresls-table irresls-table force and the immovable object. ob-ject. . What it all adds up to Is that housing Is a problem to which no one has found a solution. The dream home is farther away than ever, so far as the bulk of us Is concerned and it's Come down to a question of how to get four walls, a roof and a floor at a price we can afford. Many authorities are afraid the situation sit-uation will get worse before It geta better. |