Defense Housing Programs
The 1940s began in a state of global crisis as the European and Asian Wars began rapidly expanding into what would eventually be known as World War II. The United States, although officially neutral, was busily taking defensive measures to ensure national security, while also attempting to assist friendly nations already in the midst of the fighting through measures such as the Lend-Lease program with Great Britain. The corresponding expansion of defense industries, especially those located along coastal areas, and the massive migration of workers into these booming regions, created a serious housing shortage that demanded immediate government intervention. On June 20, 1940, the Congress passed the National Defense Bill. Shortly thereafter, on June 28, the 1937 United States Housing Act was amended, instructing the USHA to waive income requirements for potential public housing residents, and to apply all remaining monies from low-income housing projects into efforts to house defense workers. Additionally, monies were made available for defense housing through the President's Emergency Defense Fund. In July 1940, President Roosevelt created the position of the Defense Housing Coordinator to oversee the new defense housing effort. Out of political necessity this position possessed only limited authority, and the Coordinator was instructed by the Presidential directive to fit the defense housing program into the decentralized public housing program already in existence since the 1930s. Real authority for the Defense Housing effort would remain vested in the FWA and its administrator, John Carmody (This administrative structure would last only until early 1942, when wartime limitations not only permitted but necessitated far greater centralization.)
The establishment of the defense housing program accelerated quickly after the passage of National Housing for Defense Act of 1940 (also known as the Lanham Act) by Congress on October 14, 1940, which provided $140,000,000 for defense housing construction. The Lanham Act specified that, "The housing is to be wherever feasible of a permanent nature, and after the emergency has passed these homes are to be disposed of, and in that way the Government is to recoup the initial investment... and they will be available for permanent homes." The cost per unit was set at, and not permitted to exceed, $3000. By its very nature, defense housing was primarily constructed for the middle-income employees of the defense industry. The Act also empowered the Federal Works Agency (FWA) to overrule local governmental resistance and regulations in order to expedite construction. Additionally, it ensured that the host communities of defense housing projects would receive payments from the federal government, in lieu of taxes "equivalent to full ad valorem tax, less the cost of any municipal services provided by the project". During the war years the Lanham Act was regularly amended by Congress in order to provide additional funds for housing and to adjust various aspects of the Act, especially its impact on local communities. By 1945, almost 9,000,000 individuals had been provided with housing. Total costs approached $7.5 billion ($5.2 billion private financing and $2.3 billion public financing), with the average unit costing $4,566.00.
The Federal Works Agency, as the principal governmental agency responsible for construction, maintenance and disposal of defense housing constructed prior to 1942, established three goals for its efforts:
1. To provide housing to defense workers as quickly as was possible.
2. To provide housing to defense workers as inexpensively as possible,"in accordance with the permanent or temporary character of the need and prospective uses of the facilities."
3. To provide to employees housing of a quality and standard that "benefits the defense personnel for whom the housing is constructed, and for the purpose of realizing the maximum permanent public benefit to be derived from the new housing."
The concept behind mutual home ownership was developed in the late 1930s and filed away by the FWA as were other middle income housing plans. But the emergency guidelines and policies outlined by the Lanham Act, the goals of the FWA, the availability of necessary resources, and the decentralized administrative structure for the development of public housing all contributed to an ideal environment for experimentation in public middle-income housing. The mutual housing concept was taken off the shelf, to be tried as an experimental community. An entirely new office was established by FWA in support of this effort. Headed by Colonel Lawrence Westbrook, this office was known as the Mutual Ownership Defense Housing Division.
Read more about this topic: Mutual Ownership Defense Housing Division
Famous quotes containing the words defense, housing and/or programs:
“Hence that general is skilful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skilful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.”
—Sun Tzu (6th–5th century B.C.)
“We have been weakened in our resistance to the professional anti-Communists because we know in our hearts that our so-called democracy has excluded millions of citizens from a normal life and the normal American privileges of health, housing and education.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)