WORCESTER, MASS., May 16, 1955. Senator JOHN SPARKMAN, Chairman, Subcommittee on Housing, Senate Office Building, Washington, D. C.: Amendment to administration housing bill which would allow savings and loan banks to make loans to small builders and acquire land in connection with urban renewal projects will aid renewal work here respectfully urge your support. LUTHER C. SMALL, Executive Director, Worcester Housing Authority. MILWAUKEE, WIS., May 16, 1955. Senator JOHN SPARKMAN, Chairman, Subcommittee on Housing, United States Senate, Washington, D. C.: Understand proposal will be presented your committee to amend the housing bill with bill of Chairman Spence of the House Committee which would restore independence of home loan bank board. This board is in effect the reserve bank of the savings and loan industry it is self-sustaining and incurs no direct governmental expense. It has no direct functions with housing administrator. The Spence Bill, H. R. 5945, also provides for the retirement of the treasury stock in federal savings and loan insurance corporations approximately $66 million. As executive committeeman of the U. S. Savings and Loan League for 6 midwest States may I respectfully urge your earnest consideration and approval of this proposed amendment together with other proposed measures covering urban renewal projects and provision to buy securities approved by Home Loan Bank Board. CHARLES MCKEOWN, President, Consolidated Savings & Loan Association. WORCESTER, MASS., May 16, 1955. Senator SPARKMAN, Senate Office Building, Washington, D. C. DEAR SIR: As an area small builder of Worcester and Paxton, Mass., I am in favor of the bill pending allowing savings and loan associations to purchase, develop, and lend on raw land, which will enable many small builders to go along and build without endeavoring to carry the financial burden alone. Which in a large tract sometimes is impossible. Senate Office Building, Washington, D. C. Urge your support of amendment to administration housing bill permitting savings and loans to make loans and acquire land in connection with urban renewal projects. It will greatly aid in the revitalization of our New England cities. JOSEPH T. BENEDICT, President, New England Regional Council, National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials. Senator JOHN SPARKMAN, Chairman of Subcommittee on Housing; LOWELL, MASS., May 16, 1955. United States Senate, Washington, D. C. Strongly urge passage of the amendment to the administration housing bill permitting saving and loan groups to give loans to small builders and to acquire land for urban renewal projects. This is important to a workable renewal program. CHARLES M. ZETTEK, Planning Director for City Planning and Urban Renewal. Senator JOHN SPARKMAN, Chairman, Subcommittee on Housing, STOCKTON, CALIF., May 16, 1955. Senate Office Building, Washington, D. C. Strongly favor plan to incorporate provisions of Representative Spence's H. R. 5945 as an amendment to the administration housing bill. Have always favored independence of Home Loan Bank Board and believe it should now be accomplished since all of the stock in Federal Home Loan Bank System is owned by its member institutions. We also support the plan to allow Federal associations to acquire land and make loans to small builders up to 5 percent of withdrawable accounts and also to invest in securities approved by Home Loan Bank Board. We urge your support of this legislation. HAROLD A. NOBLE, President, San Joaquin Savings and FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS AND LOAN ASSOCIATION OF MIAMI, Hon. JOHN SPARKMAN, Senate Office Building, Washington, D. C. DEAR SENATOR SPARKMAN: We earnestly request your active support of proposed legislation which provides for independent status of the Home Loan Bank Board and the related activities which it supervises. You know, of course, how helpful the Federal Home Loan Bank System has been, and continues to be, in strengthening the economy of the Nation. The System is now owned entirely by its member institutions which bear all expenses of operation. No Federal funds are appropriated for this purpose, nor are any held in the System's capital structure. No community of interest or advuntage can be served by keeping it under the supervision of an administrator. We strongly feel that only as an independent agency, such as it once was, can it efficiently and successfully carry forward its two great objectives of encouraging thrift and home ownership. We are also very much in favor of limited authority for Federal associations to take a more active part in urban renewal projects, and for a broadening of investment powers of such associations to permit them to buy securities as approved by the Home Loan Bank Board. These matters will undoubtedly be discussed more fully in the hearing before your committee. We hope you feel favorably inclined toward our views and that you will do what you can toward adoption of these measures which we sincerely believe to be in the best interests of our national economy. Respectfully, R. V. WALKER, Executive Vice President. Senator SPARKMAN. Mr. Mills, we are glad to have you with us. Mr. Mills is from Gadsden, Ala. He has long been intimately connected with a good strong housing program. We are glad to have you with us. Mr. MILLS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I also have with me Mr. John D. Lange, who is the executive director of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials. Slum clearance and urban redevelopment STATEMENT OF WALTER B. MILLS, JR., PRESIDENT, ACCOMPANIED BY WILLIAM L. SLAYTON, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, AND JOHN D. LANGE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HOUSING AND REDEVELOPMENT OFFICIALS Mr. MILLS. The National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials is a nonprofit, professional association of citizens and local public officials interested in furthering good public administration in the fields of housing and urban redevelopment. The members of our organization are, by and large, those who are administering the public housing and urban renewal programs in cities throughout the United States. We have a real interest in the legislation, therefore, for we are anxious that it provide the best possible tools to enable us to assist in carrying out its objectives. When I got off the plane here late last night in Washington I was given a copy of the testimony or the evidence offered to your committee by the National Association of Real Estate Boards. I was surprised to see in that evidence or testimony that they took this association to task. Since it is completely unfounded I want to take this opportunity to discredit that part of that testimony and to point up to you that in a great many instances you have omissions of the real truth and facts that cannot be substantiated. They state: For example, when President Truman in 1952 requested 75,000 public housing units a year, no opposition was heard from the now articulate supporters of Government ownership of family shelter as to the insufficiency of this number. However, in 1954, when this administration requested 35,000 units per year, representatives of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials came before this committee requesting 5 million units. Mr. Chairman, I would like to cite the hearings before this august committee last year when the president of our association said, and I quote from your report: The President's Advisory Committee had before it published evidence that approximately half of all the families in redevelopment areas were in the income groups eligible for public housing. Since it is apparent that 10 million families will have to be relocated under an effective program of housing and rehousing, there is certainly indicated a need for housing of 5 million families of low income as a result of future redevelopment and rehabilitation. It would be optimistic to assume that half of those families can be located in existing or rehabilitated units. Thus, there is an enormous need for additional public housing for relocation alone. As I say, this was given to me at a very late hour and I haven't had an opportunity to go through it. I do know, sir, that just recently in Headlines, in the May 2 edition, they had an editorial on the front page in which they cited we were not serving the low-income families, and they used Washington, D. C. as an example. Of course, it's a known fact that about half a person in each thousand are receiving public assistance in Washington, whereas the national average is 6 or 7 persons per thousand, and there were only 31 families receiving public assistance in the housing units provided by the National Capital Housing Authority. Well, sir, it would be very easy to pick up the telephone and call the National Capital Housing Authority and find there are somewhere in excess of 400 families receiving public assistance, houses right here in the city of Washington. It is very unfortunate, sir, that they would also publish in that same editorial-I am sure this testimony bears that out-that the mayor of the fine city of Detroit, Mich., was unable to get any information from the housing authority. The mayor has refuted that statement, and Headlines has had to publish a retraction on it. I would like to submit for the record of this committee an address by Charles E. Slusser, which was made yesterday, May 17, at the Annual Conference of the Southwestern Regional Council of our asso ciation. I was present yesterday in Galveston when he made that talk. It's interesting to note, Mr. Chairman, that Mr. Slusser is a member of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, that he is a long-time member of this organization, and this organization proposes to speak for their membership. It's interesting to know in my town in Alabama they speak for the minority of their own membership. But I wanted to discredit those imperfections in this testimony before this committee. Senator LEHMAN. That speech was made in answer to some testimony that was given here yesterday or the day before by representatives of the real-estate board where they quoted completely inaccurate information. Mr. MILLS. And I would like to have this speech of the Commissioner submitted for the record. Senator SPARKMAN. Without objection it will be entered. (The material referred to follows:) ADDRESS BY CHARLES E. SLUSSER, COMMISSIONER PUBLIC HOUSING ADMINISTRATION AT THE ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE SOUTH WESTERN REGIONAL COUNCIL NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HOUSING AND REDEVELOPMENT OFFICIALS INTRODUCTION Robins appear. You can always tell when it is spring in Washington. The fishermen, including Larry Bloomberg, show up along the Potomac. And invitations from the various regional councils of NAHRO to speak at their meetingspractically all of them bunched in the month of May-roll in on the Public Housing Commissioner. To comply with your requests at times would require the occupant of this office to be twins or even triplets. Last week I was asked to be in both Augusta, Ga., and San Francisco, Calif., at the same time. Unfortunately, because I do not have a split personality, I had to decline the California invitation. This week, by being here, I am not able to address the New England council, and so it goes. You would find me in the mood to ask for mercy-and I must ask that I be forgiven for not being able to be in two different places at the same time-were it not for one thing. These meetings afford me the best opportunities to get out among you and to learn about your local problems, your difficulties, and your successes. I stress the word "local" and for good reasons. Last week in Augusta I said: "There has been a good deal of talk about this being a local program. If it is anything else, it will fail. It must remain that or public housing will not work. The safeguards that we attach to your operations are there only to protect the overall program from the censure that would be its portion, and has been its portion, when a few among the many of us have departed from the golden rule that should guide us at all times." That is the way I see it and the way I hope you see it, too. I want this program to grow and prosper, and to become more and more of a local operation. The more it becomes a community activity, the better our reputation, the better our service. Now admittedly, with the Federal Government backing us with millions of dollars, we cannot make annual contributions and merely ask that you let us know how much you will need the following year. Such is not the part of good sense and will not appeal to the United States Congress before whom I stand as your advocate. Until we pay off the public housing mortgage, we must be sure to let the Federal Government have full knowledge of our operations. Likewise, we must make sure that it knows that those operations are efficient and economical. When we do that, it means more public housing, not less. At the same time, wherever this can be made more of a local operation, I want to take that step. You will not have to encourage me to walk. You will find me out hiking in all kinds of weather. A case in point is my recommendation that the large signs which I have found in several instances identifying the projects as the work of the Federal Government be removed. I think such signs split the project off from the community. The more the project can blend into the community while retaining its essential beauty, the better. Obviously, a project, the work it is doing, will become more accepted when it is a local enterprise than when it is not. And now, having said that I want public housing to be a local enterprise, I must tell you that there are also occasions when the Public Housing Commissioner intends to exercise his prerogative to speak for all of you without sideline coaching or prompting. When this program is unjustly attacked, I intend to take the first public opportunity to answer. To clear up any doubts that might exist in any minds, my remarks are occasioned by an editorial put out by the Washington office of the National Association of Real Estate Boards in their May 2 publication, Headlines, and signed by their president, Henry G. Waltemade. Less than a year ago I spoke in Philadelphia at NAHRO's annual national convention. I discussed then the almost fanatical campaign directed against public housing by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, of which I am a member. I said I would not let distortion and fraud go unchallenged. Evi dently NAREB does not take me at my word, because this newest editorial shows neither regard for facts nor an intelligent understanding of the program. There are methods of supporting a cause or a system. You can lead with the truth or you can mislead with unsupportable propaganda. Valid, constructive criticism should never be rejected. But we have not had this from NAREB. Instead, behind a thin veneer of respectability, we have had the unlikeliest set of conclusions that were ever based on not wishful, but willful thinking. I am not unaware that these offensives begin at the time our Congress considers new housing legislation. So be it. Let us examine the previously mentioned May 2, 1955, editorial. First, they ask, "Does public housing take care of the needy?" Their answer as "Hardly ever. In Washington, D. C., the model of Federal experimentation, a study showed that only 47 of more than 4,000 families receiving welfare aid were permitted in public housing." The propaganda went on from there, but what are the facts? They need to be brought out. NAREB tells you that there are only 47 Washington, D. C., families receiving relief being benefitted by public housing. There are 399 such families in Washington's public housing. A dime local phone call to the National Capital Housing Authority would have established the facts. NAREB's Washington office could spare it. I give NAREB its poor choice. It has used either faked or negligent statistics. In either case, it owes an abject apology to the National Capital Housing Authority, in particular and the public housing movement in general, and I for one haven't the time to wait for it. There are more than faked statistics in this matter. Washington, D. C.'s, welfare load wasn't picked at random as an illustrative case. It was used in this instance because it is among the lowest in the country. Washington has only eight-tenths of a person out of a thousand on relief, while the national average is six and a half persons out of a thousand. Not satisfied to use an extreme case that completely distorts the national situation, the writer of this Washington, D. C., editorial had to give false figures, exaggerated by more than eight times. In this same editorial of May 2, 1955, NAREB charges that "the mayor of Detroit was refused information by the public housing authority in his city.” I have had the honor of knowing Mayor Cobo. In addition, I know something, as public housing commissioner, of the operation of public housing in that city and the State of Michigan, which requires all public housing authorities, or commissions as they are referred to there, to operate directly under the control of the city government. Given that as a fact, how could any public housing commission in Michigan refuse information to its mayor, let alone the Detroit Housing Commission refuse Mayor Cobo? Not content with the obvious falsity of this charge by NAREB, I have had my office contact that of Mayor Cobo, with regard to this statement. He authorized us to deny its veracity and to state that the Detroit Housing Commission has at no time denied him information, but quite the contrary, has always supplied it. On what figment of imagination NAREB has based this charge, I do not know. I do know, and Mayor Cobo knows, that it is false. Like many national organizations, NAREB meets annually, and for the most part, much good accrues to the realtor and the real estate industry from the interchange of ideas at these meetings. But unfortunately, through the years, |