Look at these graphs and you'll see that:

The need for more good houses is still enormous

millions 43 40

30

20 lO O

¹⁹⁴⁰    19SO    1953

The upper graph shows that at least 6 million families still have to live in substandard homes because there just plain are no better homes they could move to.

No one can build good new houses cheap enough for these 6 million families to buy. But our used house market will always be strong as long as we have all these millions pressing upward from bathless and often dilapidated units; and a strong market for used houses is as important to the sale of new houses as a strong used car market is to the sale of used cars.

The lower graph shows that the 15,534,000 new homes we started between 1931 and 1955 were 3,509,000 too few to provide a home for all the 18,943,000 net new nonfarm households formed in those years.

The only way we could house all these new families at all has been by carving millions of small units out of old homes.

In brief, good enough houses are still the greatest shortage of all

The American standard of housing is even further below the rest of the American standard of living than it was a generation ago. In a quarter century, while the rest of our standard of living has more than doubled, there is good reason to doubt that the average standard of housing has risen at all.

The 15,534,000 nonfarm homes we built from 1931 through 1955 average quite a bit better (even though most of them are small and most of them were built for below-middle-income families); but the nearly 30 million units now occupied in buildings erected before 1930 are 26 years older and must average quite a bit worse by now.

So it is nonsense to say the home building market is overbuilt. The simple and painful truth is rather that:

IVe are being outsold and undersold

And the simple and happy truth is that:    (see next page)