Earmarked for Defense

U.S. building materials, getting scarcer all the time, were earmarked for defense last week. Builders of small homes (costing up to $6,000 or renting up to $50 a month) in 275 areas where new housing is needed for defense workers were given priorities on materials. The priorities, all in the A series, will apply to 200,000 privately financed units and to 100,000 others financed by the Government.

This means that residential builders in other areas, or specialists in higher-priced housing, may be virtually out of business for the duration. Non-defense housing started before Sept. 1 will get a B priority rating, so that it need not go unfinished. The Office of Production Management also will grant priorities ratings for repairs, so that no existing house will become uninhabitable because of broken plumbing. But for new non-defense housing, contractors will have to rely on catch-as-catch-can methods to get their materials or on their own ingenuity in finding substitutes. Many contractors may be unwilling to try.

The order does not mean an end to the U.S. housing boom. The 300,000 defense units are to be built in the next six months --an average of 50,000 a month. Although residential building is at the highest level since 1928, it is still under 50,000 a month (F. W. Dodge Corp.'s August figure for 37 States: 34,708). Thus the housing industry can still expand, though in only one direction: cheap housing where it is needed most.

To the 33,346 U.S. builders and building contractors specializing in home construction, the new priorities system means dislocations aplenty. Tweedy little Sullivan W. Jones, a Manhattan builder who went to Washington last July looking for contracts and wound up as OPM's chief of housing priorities, estimates that 100,000 construction workers will lose their jobs. But, says Jones, without priorities 500,000 would have been thrown out of work.

Chief shortages are in copper (for wiring, plumbing), zinc (for galvanized tanks and pipes), iron & steel (for reinforcements, hardware, screens, heating equipment). In some districts, due chiefly to transport difficulties, there have been shortages of lumber, glass, cement. In Atlanta recently, a builder had to make a 40-mile trip to find nails. In Chicago, Contractor Charles Joern stopped taking new orders 30 days ago; John Lindop will give no guarantees of completion date, insists on an escape clause in all contracts. In San Francisco the Associated Homebuilders have contemplated a 75% curtailment.

Priorities, though obsolescent (see p. 79), were the only way OPM had to restore order to the building industry.

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