Slum Prevention

A familiar activity of U.S. housing administrations is slum clearance. Last week several of them got together for their first experiment in slum prevention. Said Fred W. Catlett of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board: "Home owners with expanding incomes and growing families are continually deserting old, established neighborhoods and moving farther and farther from the downtown business areas. The older inhabitants are replaced by those living on a lower economic scale. Rents decrease, values fall and houses are allowed to deteriorate because the income will not support proper expenditures for repair." In an attempt to counteract this, FHLBB, its subsidiary, Home Owners' Loan Corp., and the U.S. Housing Authority announced that they had chosen the old Waverly Village section of Baltimore as a testing ground. In prospect, if the program worked, is its extension all over the U.S.

Waverly Village became part of Baltimore in 1888. No slum, it is chiefly inhabited by middle-class families, has an average complement of stores, saloons, movie houses. Old York Road has some tumble-down clapboard houses, but Ellerslie Avenue's brick rows are more typical. The section chosen for the experiment comprises about 1,600 homes in 50 blocks, is bounded on one side by swank Guilford, on the other by Baltimore's Municipal Stadium. In cooperation with the Baltimore Housing Authority, HOLC will make a survey to find out "what is necessary to fortify and secure residential values . . . and provide a pattern which can be applied to communities throughout the country." Cost of the survey will be $25,000, of which WPA has been asked to put up $14,152 in wages.

The survey will involve appraisals of every house as to present value and cost of needed repairs. HOLC figures that financing such repairs would make its mortgages more secure, give mortgage companies more scope for investment, reward the city with sounder tax values, besides assisting the building industry, raising the local standard of living. Boasts HOLC's Maryland Director Herbert L. Grymes of his reconditioning division: "For every dollar we have spent in improvements, the properties have gained $2.44. . . ." Last week the U. S. Government also did the following for and to U. S. Business:

> Appointed a fact-finding board to investigate the long-drawn railroad wage dispute. With a nationwide strike called for October 1 over railroad management's proposed 15% wage cut, Franklin Roosevelt postponed the issue for 60 days by calling three men to Washington to hear both sides of the question. The three: 1) Chief Justice Walter Parker Stacy of North Carolina, 54, an aloof, greying, middle-of-the-road Democrat, erstwhile chairman of the Steel Labor Relations Board and the Textile Labor Relations Board, who was prominently mentioned for the Supreme Court berth that went to Hugo Black; 2) terse, sou-faced James McCauley Landis, 39, chairman of SEC until he retired year ago to slippered ease as dean of Harvard Law School; 3) high-domed, vigorous Prof. Harry A. Millis, 65, recently retired head of the economics department of the University of Chicago and onetime member of the National Labor Relations Board. With 30 days to deliberate, this trio promptly began taking testimony under the tinkling, glass chandeliers in the dingy caucus room of the old House Office Building.

> Forbade the Union Pacific, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy and the Chicago & North Western railroads to spend $150,000 to acquire jointly the capital stock of Union Transfer Co. which operates over some 2,500 miles in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska. The three roads had planned to spend $6,000,000 developing a coordinated railtruck service. But the ICC, reaffirming its decision in the Pennsylvania Truck Lines, Inc. case that truckline acquisitions by railroads are not in the public interest if they compete with the roads, said no. In addition, ICC pointed out, these three roads are competitors among themselves.

> Named a Wall Street broker to supervise details of organizing and regulating the over-the-counter security market. Last summer Congress passed the Maloney Act providing for registration of the estimated 7,000 o-t-c brokerage firms and their self-policing under SEC's eagle eye (TIME, June 27). Last week committees of the Investment Bankers Association and the Investment Bankers Conference appointed to formulate these policing organizations announced a joint meeting for this week; same day SEC Chairman William O. Douglas appointed Vice-President Henry H. Egly of Dillon, Read & Co. to head a new SEC division which will help create the o-t-c associations, draw up rules for registration, etc.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.