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Show I Economic Highlights Happenings That Affect Di A great many people must feel a sense of frustrated sadness now as they remember those wartime advertisements which pictured the "dream home" of the future a miracle of convenience, beauty beau-ty and functional design, in which all you had to do was to touch a few buttons and silent machines would press your clothes, mix your drinks and do practically everything else. These advertisements were often tied in with pleas to buy more war bonds so you'd have the wherewithal to purchase the dream house once peace returned. return-ed. Peace has been around quite a while now, but the dream house hasn't put in an appearance. appear-ance. The grim truth is that obtaining any kind of a house at all is the toughest problem faced by millions of Americans. Most commodity shortages are being rapidly made up but the housing shortage grows worse than ever. Business Week recently ran an article on housing with the cynical, and highly accurate, title: "Home Sweet Home At a Price." It touches on some of facing the homebuilder and homcbuyer. First of those problems, prob-lems, 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 us-ually does. Few contractors will now build on a firm contract they insist on a fee or cost-plus basis of work. Business journals carry , gruesome, accounts of homes which were designed to be built for ten thousand or under un-der 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 for the present. A number of building and loan companies, the backbone of whose business used to be homes, auto courts and apartments, have announced they will not make more loans for these purposes pur-poses until the situation stabilizes. stab-ilizes. The veteran home program, with its emphasis on under-$10,-00Q houses, is so far in the doldrums dol-drums as to be practically invisible. invis-ible. Many veterans, 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 fo high costs are obvious enoueh. Labor posts about twice as much as it used to, arid complaints are heard that labor productivity is low. Material Ma-terial costs run to as high as three times the prewar level. Land values have followed the trend,- and in many regions you must pay as much for a lot as you used to for an acre or so. But, logical as high costs may be, that doesn't help solve the basic problem which is that homes cost a great deal more than the average family can possibly afford to pay. As Business Bus-iness Week says, "Costs must come down sharply, many in the industry are certain, if home building in 1947 is to come anywhere any-where near the level predicted by the Department of Commerce $6,000,000,000 in pivate residential resi-dential building and a million private dwellings started." High.hopes have been held by some Tor prefabricated houses These represent an attempt to apply mass-production principles to the building problem. A number num-ber of concerns are producing prefabs. However, so' far at least, they have certainly not proven a revolutionary influence. influ-ence. They, too, cost more than prospective buyers think they should and they must be erected erect-ed on a piece of land, and plumbed, plum-bed, heated and wired, all of which runs into money. Again the sameness in design which is an inescapable feature of prefabs, is distasteful to many people! The average American is willl ing 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- hardware inefficient heating , plants, etc' These are unfortunate results of efforts to shave costs. However it is reported that the quality of materials in general has improved im-proved of late. But price has gone up along with quality. So far as existing homes are concerned, they are still being listed at very high prices practically prac-tically everywhere. 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 resis-tance is the reason. The owners want big money the buyers nner Pails and Pay Checks want to pay less. It's comparable compar-able to the old analogy of the irrestible force and the immovable immov-able object. A . 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 au-thorities are afraid the situation will get worse before it gets better. bet-ter. -oOo- Best guess now is that federal income taxes will' be. cut about 10 per cent, with, pehaps, larger reductions in low brackets. Chance of a general 20 per cent across-the-board cut is nil. Important difference of opinion opin-ion within the Republican leadership lead-ership is over whether budget surpluses should be used for debt reduction or tax reduction. Senator Taft feels that tax reduction reduc-tion should come first. Senators Morse of Oregon and Knowland of California lead the group which believes debt reduction is the main necessity. |