(2) Another erroneous statement, frequently heard, is that the present national British policy is one of variable rent subsidies instead of fixed annual grants. The assumption seems to be that the recently adopted Leeds rent policy is a national one and that its merits are generally conceded. The fact is, as stated previously, that subsidies to local authorities provided by all housing acts from 1919 to 1935, inclusive, take the form of fixed annual grants for a predetermined number of years. This will be made clear by table III attached. The Leeds experiment is purely local and has had, so far, no imitators. It has been widely criticized and has many opponents in Leeds itself. It involves very great administrative and human difficulties, even if the soundness of its basic aim is admitted. The receipt of definite annual grants from the National Government is the only thing that makes possible such an experiment as that of Leeds. Previous to the Leeds experiment, the only steps toward diffierential rents in England had been the modest preferential treatment given to families with a number of children at Welwyn and two or three other towns. These also had been purely local matters. (3) Erroneous statements have also been made in regard to the relative subsidy burden assumed by the national and local governments in Great Britain and other European countries, especially in connection with slum clearance. It has already been stated that the national government at the present time is paying three-fourths of the subsidy involved in slum-clearance schemes and two-thirds of that involved in housing to relieve overcrowding without slum clearance. The subsidy which the national government assumed immediately after the war, when the financial condition of local authorities was decidedly bad, but perhaps not worse than that of our own cities at the present time, approached 100 percent. The real lesson of British housing experience is that government-aid building on a large scale takes up the slack in the construction industry at a time when private enterprise is afraid to operate and aids, rather than hinders, its recovery. It also teaches us that slum clearance and the production of housing for really low income groups can only be carried on by public agencies with the aid of national as well as local subsidies. In connection with the timidity of private enterprise in the presence of high building costs, even when confronted by a large housing shortage, the record of our own construction industry after the war may profitably be recalled. There was no shadow of Government competition at that time. There was a strong effective demand from the beginning of 1919, yet building was way below prewar normal until 1922, and 1923 was the first year in which the shortage figures began to lessen. [From The Antislum Campaign, Sir E. D. Simon, 1933, appendix on differential renting] TABLE IV.-Statement showing number of houses completed in England and Wales each year REFERENCE TABLE II [From Town and Country Planning, September 1935, p. 123, Progress of Housing] Number of houses completed since the armistice [This statement does not include 14,715 houses provided to rehouse persons displaced under improvement and reconstruction schemes prior to the Housing Act, 1930] REFERENCE TABLE III Financial provisions (subsidies) of British post-war housing laws 2 Financial provisions of Wheatley Act and those remaining of Chamberlain Act terminated. This means that no additional projects could benefit from them. Yearly payments on projects already approved or built continue as before. The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Johnson, will you come forward? STATEMENT OF HOWARD JOHNSON, NEW JERSEY SOCIAL SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE The CHAIRMAN. Will you give your full name? Mr. JOHNSON. Howard Johnson. The CHAIRMAN. Where do you reside? Mr. JOHNSON. East Orange, N. J. The CHAIRMAN. What is your occupation or profession? Mr. JOHNSON. Social-service representative of the State Housing Authority of New Jersey. The CHAIRMAN. Your title of "doctor" is what degree? Mr. JOHNSON. Doctor of philosophy. The CHAIRMAN. What views do you care to present to the committee? Mr. JOHNSON. I wish to present our support of the Wagner bill. Mr. JOHNSON. I am speaking for Fred W. Ehrlich, chairman, and representing the State Housing Authority of New Jersey, in support of the Wagner bill, S. 4424. The State housing authority is a department of the State government, created by act of the legislature in December 1933, inspired by the Federal administration. During the past 2 years we have cooperated with the Public Works Administration in slum clearance and low-rent housing projects, for the continuation of which the Wagner bill makes provision. In order to determine housing conditions existing in New Jersey we made a real-property inventory covering approximately 91 percent of the urban population of the State. This includes the complete enumeration of 175 municipalities and a survey of the substandard areas in 44 additional towns. The territory included in the inventory varied from blighted areas to wealthy suburbs and from 6 cities of over 100,000 population to 73 communities of less than 5,000 persons. Consequently, this real-property inventory is an accurate gage of housing conditions in the nonfarm areas of the State. In it are enumerated the character and condition of 499,734 structures containing 873,852 dwelling units. We find that approximately 30,000 families in the State are housed in buildings that should be demolished. We have made a special study of dwelling units renting for less than $24 per month, which is the income group to be benefited by the Wagner bill. This study reveals the fact that approximately 52 percent of these accommodations are in very poor condition and that there is an alarming lack of sanitary facilities in these quarters. Also, a very high percentage of the families in these dwellings are very crowded. The need for new construction is another factor made evident by the real-property inventory. The potential need for new dwelling units at the present time amounts to approximately 60,000 family accommodations. We have made special studies of the relation of housing to the health, morals, and general welfare of the people of New Jersey. All our large cities are burdened with extensive blighted areas, where juvenile delinquency, tuberculosis cases, and crimes are many times higher than elsewhere in the city. Another analysis showed that municipal expenditures in the blighted area of a given city were nine times as high as the tax return from it. The deterioration of these areas has been measurably accelerated by the movement of the population to the suburbs in prosperous times and by the neglect of maintenance and repairs during the depression. There is no reasonable basis for expecting any improvement in these conditions. On the contrary, the trend is continuously downward. Indisputably the future welfare of our cities depends on the solution of the problem presented by their blighted areas. We believe that private capital will never be attracted to slum reclamation. We are convinced that Government subsidy and longterm credit at low interest will prove to be the impetus needed in providing low-rent housing. We favor the provision of the bill for decentralizing housing activities and the extension of local control in construction and management. In New Jersey we have anticipated this development, and the State housing authority, during the past 2 years, has organized a staff prepared to carry out the provisions of the Wagner bill. In conducting surveys and preparing 63 applications for housing projects to be submitted to the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration we have acquired the experience that should qualify us to function under the United States housing authority as proposed by this bill. Of the low-rent housing projects submitted, two have been approved and nine others in Newark, Jersey City, Elizabeth, Paterson, Trenton, and elsewhere are awaiting legislation providing additional funds. A large proportion of the State's unemployment problem is attributable to the decline in construction. From the peak in 1928 the number of residential structures erected dropped from 10,757 to 2,795 in 1933. The unemployment increase in this field is obvious. At the same time, stagnation in the material markets added further to the unemployed, as we note that construction dollar volume fell from $168,154,000 in 1928 to only $16,381,000 in 1933. The undisputed avenue to recovery is resumption of construction. In New Jersey we have two low-rent housing projects approved by the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration that have reached the construction stage-one in Camden, costing $3,500,000, and the other in Atlantic City, costing $1,700,000. We are encouraged with this modest start of a housing program but are apprehensive of progress if further Federal assistance is denied us through failure to approve the Wagner bill. Through public relations with the people of New Jersey, the State housing authority for 2 years has been breaking ground for a program such as the Wagner bill would permit and advance. Press releases numbering thousands have been printed in the 300 weekly and daily newspapers in the State of New Jersey. The authority 63408-3615 |