during and after the war, we are short about a million homes. In cities
such a shortage implies the challenge of congestion. It means that in
practically every American city of more than 200,000, from 20 to 30 per
cent, of the population is adversely affected, and that thousands of
families are forced into unsanitary and dangerous quarters. This
condition, in turn, means a large increase in rents, a throw-back in
human efficiency and that unrest which inevitably results from
inhibition of the primal instinct in us all for home ownership. It
makes for nomads and vagrants. In rural areas it means aggravation and
increase of farm tenantry on one hand, an increase of landlordism on
the other hand, and general disturbance to the prosperity and
contentment of rural life.

There is no incentive to thrift like the ownership of property. The man
who owns his own home has a happy sense of security. He will invest his
hard earned savings to improve the house he owns. He will develop it
and defend it. No man ever worked for, or fought for a boarding-house.

But the appalling anomaly of a nation as prosperous as ours thwarted
largely in its common yearning for better homes, is now giving way to
the gratifying revival of home construction. Accordingly the time is
ripe for this revival to afford an opportunity to our people to look to
more homes and better ones, to better, more economical and more uniform
building codes, and to universal establishment and application of
zoning rules that make for the development of better towns and cities.
We have the productive capacity wasted annually in the United States
sufficient to raise in large measure the housing conditions of our
entire people to the level that only fifty per cent, of them now enjoy.
We have wastes in the building industry itself which, if constructively
applied, would go a long way toward supplying better homes, so that