HOUSING: The Year That the Building Stopped

President Ford's WIN buttons are likely to find few wearers among U.S. homebuilders and buyers. So far, their only role in the Administration's war against inflation has been to lose, and lose disastrously. Hammered by both out-of-control costs and the tight-money policies that the Administration counts on to curb them, the housing industry has staggered into its deepest slump since the 1930s. That collapse has deep social as well as economic implications; it is crimping the vaunted mobility of U.S. life by forcing millions of families to stay put in their present...