Met's Bets

Bogged down in California with two huge, costly, unfinished rental housing projects, Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. got a helpful suggestion from WPB: why not just forget about its $25 million investment until after the war? Met's answer to WPB was a qualified No.

Next to the U.S. Government, Metropolitan, owned by 30 million policyholders, is the world's biggest investor in rental housing. As housing experts, Met and the Government had much in common--until the war. Now the Government wants quick, cheap housing, near war plants. Metropolitan, with $1 billion already tied up in real-estate mortgages, is interested in durable materials, permanent tenants, long-term investments, perhaps even a few frills and luxuries, to meet postwar competition.

Daisies and History. The two California projects will not be abandoned. As a compromise, Park La Brea, in Los Angeles ($12.5 million), will be cut in half (1,300 units). Parkmerced, in San Francisco ($12.5 million), will be hacked one-third (from 2,600 to 1,700 units). The remainder of the finished concrete foundations will be left like the ruined city of

Persepolis to be grown over by milkweed and wild daisies until after the war (see cut).

Metropolitan's housing history:

>In 1922, Metropolitan, biggest insurance company in existence, pioneered in planned, landscaped apartments with a $7 1/2 million project in New York's Queens. Exempt from state taxes for ten years, the Queens apartments confirmed Met's belief that direct housing investment (without Government insurance) was an excellent bet.

> Last year Metropolitan completed its whopping $50 million Parkchester in The Bronx. Parkchester, "largest planned community in the history of American housing," covers 129 acres (only 35 1/2 acres are in buildings), boasts parks, playgrounds, 12,200 apartments in 51 elevator buildings. Its tenants, mostly families with $1,800 to $4,600-a-year incomes, pay $32 to $71 a month for two-to-five-room apartments.

> Parkfairfax ($9 million) at Alexandria, Va. (about 30 minutes by bus from Washington, D.C.) rose to completion without too much trouble, although WPB had clamped down on most building materials. Parkfairfax will open its first section next Sept. i. All of its 1,684 apartments ($61.25 to $90 a month) will be ready by October. (When the buildings were half-completed WPB suddenly refused to let Parkfairfax use reinforced concrete. Builders Starrett Brothers & Eken, Inc. shrugged, finally went out and bought lumber which seemed "a damn sight more critical than reinforcing rods.")

> Last spring Metropolitan announced that it had arranged to take over after the war 18 crowded city blocks of Manhattan's East Side. Every tenement, saloon, church, school, boardinghouse, and grocery store in the area is to be torn down. The City will give Met tax concessions on a $50 million postwar city-within-a-city called "Stuyvesant Town."

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