HOUSING: Slum Clearance

Well aware of the filth, crime and disease spawned in New York City's sprawling slums, Manhattan's square-headed Robert Ferdinand Wagner proposed a bill two years ago seeking to eliminate such surroundings. The embryonic law died in the Senate Education and Labor Committee. Last year Senator Wagner's seasoned measure passed the Senate with little debate but Congress adjourned before the House could consider it.

Fortnight ago, Bob Wagner's veteran slum-clearing measure came to bat for the third time. Backed by such assorted powers as President Roosevelt, the conservative New York Times and the tory New York Herald Tribune, the bill looked like a sure thing. Sponsor Wagner crowed: "There is practical unanimity throughout the country in favor of the measure. . . . There was practically no opposition to the bill in the hearings before the committee."

His Housing Bill, 1937 edition, was modeled closely after a popular British slum-clearing act. It provided for $700,000,000 to be loaned by the Federal Government to a U. S. Housing Authority for pulling down noxious tenement houses and erecting low-rental dwellings in their stead. The Authority would then reimburse the Treasury by selling their own 60-year bonds (guaranteed by the U. S.) to the public. If income from the necessarily low rents fell short of paying off bonds & interest, the Government would chip in up to $20,000,000 a year—an outright subsidy, but a trifle compared to the cost of other Federal efforts to aid the underprivileged. Only tenants qualifying for the new houses would be the rock-bottom 15% of the lower third which President Roosevelt has labeled "ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed"—about 175,000 families earning some $50 a month and paying about $5 rent per room.

From the start Bob Wagner was worried about only one thing: how much damage would the Senate do to his bill before finally passing it? He had been on his feet less than an hour when sniping began. George of Georgia wanted to know what was in it for the farmers. Bob Wagner, instead of appealing to rural magnanimity, claimed that his bill benefited everybody. This palpable dodge angered the Southerner into damning the bill as "a fraud because it cannot be administered in rural areas." Snapped Senator Wagner: "I'll compare my character with that of the Senator from Georgia."

In spite of such wrangling Majority Leader Barkley predicted passage of the bill by the middle of the second day of debate. At the end of the fifth day Senators wearily voted, 64-to-16, for a Housing Bill gutted by conservative amendments. Anti-Administrationist Harry Byrd called attention to Resettlement Administration's Greenbelt in Maryland, which cost $16,000 per family unit, and Hightstown Project in New Jersey ($20,000 per unit). Then he demanded a construction limit of $4,000 per family unit and $1,000 per room. "A spokesman for the Administration," he cried, "said . . . that this was an experiment, and that all experiments were costly. . . . Why, may I ask, is the building of a house an experiment? People have built houses from the beginning of time."