THE NATION: No Place Called Home

In a single month more than 32,000 requests for living quarters—apartments, a room, anything—had poured into the Officers Service Committee in Manhattan. But quarters were found for only 2,750 families.

Last week applications were pouring in faster than ever and only a few dingy furnished rooms were available. Volunteer workers wondered if there was anything like it anywhere.

There was: war-jammed cities all over the nation felt the pinch of the greatest housing shortage in the nation's history. In Kansas City, the Veterans' Housing Center had 700 applications, could fill only 30. In Portland, Ore., a veteran turned city fireman lived with his wife and child in one room, shared a bathroom with seven other families. In Birmingham, veterans and their families lived in tourist camps, heated baby bottles on automobile radiators.

From coast to coast, desperate house-hunters crowded into newspaper offices to get early editions, raced for first crack at the few advertised vacancies. They found building superintendents who demanded $200 tips, landlords who forced them to buy broken-down furniture in order to get apartments. Despite a valiant rear-guard action by OPA, rents soared and ascended far beyond the means of the average returning veteran.

From Washington came the grim prediction of housing experts that the worst is yet to come. With demobilization rapidly increasing, the exodus of unemployed war workers from crowded industrial centers had not yet begun. The situation, said the NHA, will grow steadily worse until midwinter; the end of the ban on private building will have little effect before the end of 1946.*