Remarks to the Planning Committee of the White House Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership.

I APPRECIATE very much the high sense of public service which has brought you here today. I would not have asked you to come if I had not felt deeply that there was a real need. For some years the business community, our municipalities, and great numbers of associations devoted to the promotion of public welfare, have interested themselves in the problems of more adequate housing and homeownership. I will say at once that we have a larger proportion of adequate housing than any country in the world, but we still lag far behind our national ideals of homes for all our people. Substantial advances have been made in some parts of the country; great experience has been gained. And it has been the wish of many of these groups that there should be a thorough national inquiry with view to a summation of this experience, the mobilization of existing movements, and the possible development from it of a new state of thought and action.

Adequate housing goes to the very roots of the well-being of the family, and the family is the social unit of the Nation. It is more than comfort that is involved, it has important aspects of health and morals and education and the provision of a fair chance for growing childhood. Nothing contributes more for greater happiness or for sounder social stability than the surroundings of their homes. It should be possible in our country for anybody of sound character and industrious habits to provide himself with adequate housing and preferably to buy his own home.

The finance of home-building, especially for second mortgages, is the most backward segment of our whole credit system. It is easier to borrow 85 percent on an automobile and repay it on the installment plan than to buy a home on that basis, and, generally, the house requires a higher interest rate. The whole process of purchase and finance involves a ceremony like a treaty between governments and yet the home is certainly as good collateral as an automobile; it depreciates more slowly, if at all, and its owner will make a harder fight to keep it. The home has tentacles of sentiment as well as bonds of practical necessity that bind the occupant to it. Part of the difficulty lies in inadequate financial organization and part of it you will find in obsolete laws.

There are other important phases of the problem beyond the financing of the individual homeowner. The problem of creating real and systematic home areas adjacent to industry and to our cities which can be safeguarded from commercial invasion and destruction needs exhaustive consideration. Such areas have been created both here and abroad with great success. The helter-skelter building of homes adjacent to our cities produces many inadequacies and wastes. Such a question at once raises large problems of city and industrial planning as well as problems of finance. The automobile has made such communities far more practical than ever before.

I am in hopes you can find the time and organization to go even farther afield than individual home-ownership into this whole question of housing. This will at once carry you into the apartment and rural fields as well. Besides these questions there are problems of architecture, aesthetic questions, and questions of interior convenience, as well as problems of construction--all of which have large importance, and enter into rural as well as urban homes.

I would suggest to you that there is also an important economic bearing of this whole matter beyond even the betterment of the family. With constant improvement of method and laborsaving devices we constantly set free a stream of workers from established industry which must be absorbed in new or expanding industries if we would have for them employment and the articles or services which comprise advancing standards of living. There is no doubt we shall make new inventions and new needs but the greatest present field for the absorption of our surplus national energy lies in better housing. There are some emergency questions arising from the present depression to which you can, I believe, assist in solution.

I shall not enter upon the many phases of the subject. They are well known to many of you. My general thought has been that we should first have a determination of the facts in every important direction, followed by a weighing and distillation of these facts and the formulation of collective judgment of the leaders of our country in this special knowledge. Not only the wide scope of the subject but its many intricate problems involved will all require time for investigation and study. I have not presumed that you could undertake to direct such a task as this and bring it to conclusion within a few weeks or even months, or that you could undertake it without large assistance and cooperation. We wish to set up something more than an ephemeral discussion. It is obviously not our purpose to set up the Federal Government in the building of homes. There are many questions of local government involved. It is my hope that out of this inquiry and the conferences that will follow it, we should make so well rounded a contribution to our national understanding as to give direction and coordination to thought and action throughout the country.