The Daily Alaska Empire

Needed-A $25 Home.
(Seattle Journal of Commerce.)

Thomas R. Marshall, late Vice-President of the United States, once lifted his office from obscurity by voicing his famous remark to the effect that "what this country needs is a good five-cent cigar."

There are some who think we now have such cigars.

A writer in The Nation, named Mark Granite (it may be a nom de plume) comes forward now with the contention that what this country needs most today is a good $25 house.

The assertion is not as far out of line as it at first sounds. What is meant is that there is a serious need for modern, well-built houses of about five rooms each that can be purchased on payments not to exceed $25 a month-these payments to include interest and possibly taxes. That would mean a house that would not cost more than $2000 on a $500 lot.

There are any number of experts who will assert that it can't be done--that modern homes cannot be built for any such amount. They will continue to talk $5000, $6000 and $7000 "love nests" for young couples starting out in life-many with incomes of less than $100 a month. It should be evident that the home-buying power of millions of people has declined to a point where they cannot longer consider homes quoted at pre-depression prices. People do not live in slums, shacks and obsolete homes because they prefer them. Their income permits nothing better. We can build slum clearance projects until doomsday, but if we do not replace slums with living quarters that cost no more to occupy than the old hovels, we are merely engaging in ineffective gestures. When the head of a family is earning less than $100 a month, it is absurd to suggest home-buying contracts to him if the contracts require $50 or $60 a month to carry out. The difference between even $25 and $35 means that he buys or he does not buy.

The New Deal is spoken of as a war against poverty. Those who build and offer people homes that they can afford to live in and pay for are carrying on in a manner much more effective than those who are unable to get the idea through their heads that the rank and file of our people cannot afford homes costing an amount that would absorb their total income for a long period of years.

This country is seriously in need of a good $25 home, and the buyers of such homes are likely to be legion during the next few years, while the buyers of homes at pre-depression prices may hardly number more than a "corporal's guard" in most communities for some little time to come.