Mr. STRAUS. I think that we must rehouse slum dwellers in them. Mr. GIFFORD. Do they not have to pass a strict examination, that they are capable of paying the amount of rent asked for in the new dwelling?

Mr. STRAUs. You mean if the families were on relief? That is quite correct.

Mr. GIFFORD. If you demolished the building, you would put the people out of a home.

Mr. STRAUS. I do not know

Mr. GIFFORD. Can you take care of the same people in the new construction?

Mr. STRAUS. Congressman, I am glad to answer that question. We never put people out of anything that I would accept as a definition of an American home, and we do not intend to.

Mr. GIFFORD. I do not think that you are answering my question. Mr. STRAUS. It is the best answer that I can give you.

Mr. GIFFORD. Do you not have rules and regulations that the people who were occupying those homes have to give assurance that they will be able to pay the rent?

Mr. STRAUS. Right.

Mr. GIFFORD. And you depend upon relief to help them pay that rent?

Mr. STRAUS. We do not.

Mr. GIFFORD. Then how can you provide for all of the families that are dispossessed by the demolition of the building?

Mr. STRAUS. Congressman, that is a perfectly reasonable question. How are we going to take care of the people living on relief in the slums of America with a figure today of $500,000,000, about sufficient to rehouse 100,000 families? There are 3,000,000 families in this country, gentlemen, today living in such circumstances

Mr. GIFFORD. That is a general answer.

Mr. STRAUS. It is the best answer that I can give as one of the oldest students of housing in this country.

Mr. KOPPLEMANN. I think that the witness ought to be permitted to answer in his own way.

Mr. STRAUS. I do not know of any other answer, as a student of housing for a great many years. We will not do the rehousing that is necessary in America with $500,000,000. We will try to give a demonstration of what can be done to rehouse self-respecting American families with annual incomes of $600 to $1,000 a year and who are now compelled to live in loathsome slums and indecent homes. We are not solving the problem of relief in America, much less the problem of rehousing all of them.

Mr. GIFFORD. I understand that, and if I have to speak out loud, it is not because I am impatient, but when you demolish four dwelling units, it follows that those particular four families ought to be provided for in the new units, and you cannot do that now? Mr. STRAUS. No, sir.

Mr. REILLY. Certainly they can do it if they erect four new units. Mr. STRAUS. It means that if they are on relief we will not take them.

Mr. CRAWFORD. Isn't this true, that the act which this committee approved and passed provided that for each housing unit you built, there must be one demolished in the slums?

Mr. STRAUS. Yes, sir.

Mr. CRAWFORD. But it did not provide the situation around the other way-in other words, if there is a slum clearance here that dispossesses 100 families, you are not obligated to build 100 units, are you?

Mr. STRAUS. No. That is correct.

Mr. CRAWFORD. In other words, you put in your contract that for each new one you do build, they must demolish an old one? Mr. STRAUS. That is correct.

Mr. CRAWFORD. I think that there is an entirely different picture here, and, as you say, in your contracts you are providing that they must demolish one unit for every unit you build, but that is not intended at all to provide for the 100 families that might be dispossessed, where they live four or five families in one home, through the destruction of buildings in slum clearance.

Mr. STRAUS. It is not specifically provided in the act, although, in general, the difficulty is rather on the other foot. There is no difficulty in doing the building. Sometimes you have some argument as to the ability of the municipality to achieve the equivalent demolition, to take as many down. You see, living with this act, as we do, day after day, we see it so differently than we do in a discussion of this kind; we see these muncipalities, with the pitiful overcrowding in these slum districts, clamoring for places for people to go. They do not worry, like the Congressman over here, as to whether that one particular family is going to be in one particular unit. They see these human beings in crowded buildings, 30, 40, and 80 years old, without light, without air, not in compliance with existing statutes, but they are not closed up. Why? In New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, any city that you want to name, they are not closed up because there is no place for those people to go, and those are the conditions today in most of the cities in this country.

Mr. GIFFORD. My anxiety

Mr. STRAUS. I am sorry, but I cannot hear you, Congressman. Mr. GIFFORD. Well, never mind.

Mr. REILLY. Proceed, Mr. Straus.

Mr. STRAUS. So far as the points that I want to cover are concerned, I have covered most of them, but I have two more that I would like to emphasize.

One is in response to the question, or the criticism made the other day very courteously by some of you gentlemen, but, nevertheless, I could sense the atmosphere, as to why we have not gone faster, and I was sort of canvassing my mind on that over the week end.

Now, most of these local authorities are pretty new, are pretty inexperienced. They have been working with us, coming here, and we have been sending out people, going over the plans, going over the specifications, with a view to cutting down costs

Mr. PATMAN. What do you mean by cost?
Mr. STRAUs. The cost of construction.

Mr. PATMAN. Not the cost of administration?

Mr. STRAUS. Well, that plays, of course, directly into the cost of administration, because sometimes it is cheaper to put up a little better kind of construction, if you can do it within the terms of the act, so that you may keep down administration and maintenance, and that is exactly the thing that those people ask, that we must plan and counterplan for. We are constantly working to find out what the minimum that can be done is.

You gentlemen know that in this country our standards are much higher than abroad. One of the reasons why the housing programs abroad have done so much is because they ask much less. I have inspected a good many of those projects in Sweden, Holland, Germany, England, and one in Scotland, and they ask much less than we do. The rooms are smaller, and the service required is less. But we have been trying to adapt American ideas of what is a minimum in the matter of light, sunshine, hot running water, and we have done some pretty drastic things. We have set as the smallest living room that we will allow in one of these projects not 250 feet or 300 feet, but after an immense amount of argument, these have been set, and that is the limit in the first five projects-the minimum we will allow is 15 by 10, or 150 square feet, a very small room for a living room, but if you want to get within the cost, you have to do it. The average on the first four projects is 169 square feet.

Mr. McKEOUGH. For what sized family?

Mr. STRAUS. That is the minimum that we allow for any family. On the contrary, if the projects are for larger families, the tendency is to have them bigger, but we won't have them below those require

ments.

Mr. PATMAN. Define "family." A family may consist of one pre

son.

Mr. STRAUS. No, sir.

Mr. PATMAN. What is your definition of the word "family?"

Mr. STRAUS. I would like to go to Webster on that. I thought a family consists of at least two people. But you have an administrator who is wise in many things, but he would not attempt to substitute himself for a dictionary. I do not think one person is a family. Mr. PATMAN. One person can keep a homestead in some States. Mr. STRAUS. I do not know. We have not rehoused any family consisting of one person. Does the Congressman think we should have that in the statute?

Mr. PATMAN. I am not insisting on it. I am asking for information. Mr. STRAUS. I think the Congressman knows better than I do as to that.

On our main bedroom, we allowed them to get down to 120 square feet, and the average is 126 on the first few projects. On secondary bedrooms, we allowed them to get down to 96 square feet in our existing project, and we will allow them to go down to 90. On third bedrooms, we allow them to go down to 85 square feet. To emphasize how close we are cutting there, that is less than the New York City law would allow, but we believe it is sound, so that people who live in these projects financed with the national subsidy and the local subsidy should have the minimum of human decencies, but should not be rehoused in a manner with all of the conveniences and all of the extravagances of people who are rehoused without a subsidy.

I am a firm believer in that principle.

Mr. CRAWFORD. May I ask you a question there?

In other words, that 8-by-101⁄2 room will accommodate, with some decency, a double-sized bed, small table, dresser, and chifforobe? Mr. STRAUS. Yes.

Mr. MCKEOUGH. How do you get into a bedroom of that kind? With a shoehorn?

Mr. STRAUS. Wait a minute. You may ay think that that is funny. Some of our technical staff are working on just that kind of thing, and now they are erecting a compo-board model, so that the Administrator himself can be convinced on that. That sounds like a funny question, but it is not.

Mr. CRAWFORD. If you made those rooms any larger than that, and built on downtown property, where the slums are really located, and where the fellow is close to his work, you would certainly not be able to keep within the cost limits that we have set.

Mr. STRAUs. No.

Mr. CRAWFORD. In other words, you have built as small a room as cost will permit you to build?

Mr. STRAUs. That is correct.

Mr. CRAWFORD. And at the same time based on the actual experience of living.

I happen to be one of those that is not accustomed to a 20 by 40 bedroom myself, but, based on actual living conditions, I know that you can do pretty well in a bedroom 8 by 10%, or 8 by 12, or 10 by 12. Mr. STRAUS. That is correct.

Mr. CRAWFORD. You have demonstrated it, have you not? Mr. STRAUS. We are working on that theory, and I hope that I will come back next year and tell you that I have demonstrated it. Mr. CRAWFORD. I think that the size you have outlined here is amply large.

Mr. STRAUs. You do?

Mr. CRAWFORD. For these families; and I do not think that they are any too large.

Mr. STRAUS. All right.

Mr. FORD. You made some comment upon what they are doing in England. Am I correct when I say that Britain inaugurated her program about 20 years ago?

Mr. STRAUS. I can tell you exactly. The war was over in 1918, and that is when they began.

Mr. FORD. What is the town where Lady Godiva is supposed to have ridden?

Mr. STRAUS. She rode through Coventry. But I was not there. [Laughter.]

Mr. FORD. I looked at their housing project there in 1927, and looked it over carefully. Of course, if we built like they build, we could do it in this country for about $2,220 a unit; that would be our cost here, comparable to what they did there. They have about solved half of their slum problem, or maybe 40 percent, in that period, so that I am not expecting that we are going to solve our slum problem in 6 months or 6 years. If we do it in 20 or 30 years, that will be more like it.

Of course, over there they do not have the rigid municipal and State regulations on health that we have here. Their houses are comfortable, but they are not comparable in any way to what we build in this country, so that our program will cost relatively twice as much as theirs will.

Of course, I am in sympathy with the slum-clearance program, carried out over a reasonable number of years, but we cannot do it in 6 months or 6 years, or in 10 years, and I think that the provision of law that says that you must demolish for every unit that is built is wise. I always have thought that, not because of the angle that comes into the question from a real estate point of view, but because we want to get rid of a bad situation.

But the original bill did not call for any contribution by the local authorities, did it?

Mr. STRAUS. No, sir, it did not.

Mr. FORD. For that reason I would oppose it, and I am still inclined to oppose leaving off the original contribution. That is a frank statement of how I feel about it.

Mr. STRAUS. Of course, the present bill does not require a contribution like that. It requires merely that part of the funds shall be raised as a local loan, distinguished from the bulk of the funds, which are raised by Federal loan.

Mr. FORD. Nevertheless, it is a local contribution.

Mr. STRAUs. Excuse me. Even there I do not want to fence with words with you, but actually, as I tried to explain to the committee the first day, you could go to a group of bankers without any local intervention and get this 10 percent of the bonds underwritten and sold, if I were willing to give the bankers in regard to those bonds certain preferences, which I am not willing to give them, and therefore the alleged removal of an obligation on the localities, of enabling us to loan exactly 100 percent, is not really relieving the localities of anything substantial.

I like to look at the thing in this phase: I like to compel the localites to put up what they can in the way of local tax exemption, which I regard as best of all available methods today, not the ideal one, for local contribution, and to insist upon that to the utmost, but not to dwell too much on the importance of allowing us to loan only 90 percent in the belief that the raising of the other 10 percent places any burden on anybody, other than it is a little cumbersome and is to a certain extent slowing up the program.

Mr. KOPPLEMANN. Decidedly so.

Mr. FORD. I do not know that it will.

Mr. STRAUS. That is for you gentlemen. I just want to answer questions. I do not want to attempt to influence your judgment.

Mr. KOPPLEMANN. Mr. Straus, there is some question in the minds of some people, and for the purpose of the record I wish you would devote a minute or two to defining what kind of families are eligible for these low-cost tenancies, having in mind the people who are economically situated so that they cannot afford to rent the places that are available as furnished from private owners.

Mr. STRAUS. Congressman, I am very glad that you asked that, because it has been neglect on our part not to bring it up.

Under the terms of the act, occupants of these new buildings which are erected are limited to families whose incomes are not more than five times the amount of the rental, except in exceptional cases of large families, which are defined in the act, where the income may be six times the annual rental.

Now, that is a specific provision of the act, which limits it roughly to families having incomes between $600 and perhaps $1,000 a year. Maybe in some of the big cities you might go up to $1,200, but not over that.