Box 5, Folder 1, Document 41

Box 5, Folder 1, Document 41

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By Industy ae Plan

By WARREN WEAVER J R.
(Copyright 1949 by The New Yor Times)

WASHINGTON — The Nixon
administration is at work on a
new housing program that will
attempt to spur competition be-

‘tween giant corporations for the

right to build hundreds of thou-

_ sands of low-cost units all over
. the country.

The secretary of Housing and
Urban Development, George W.



6 Die in Crash
Of RAF Plane

FAIRFORD, England (UPI).
A Royal Air Force transport
plane crashed and burned Mon-
day during a training exercise,
and a spokesman for the Brit-
ish Defense Ministry said all
six men aboard were Killed.

The plane was a four-engine
U.S.-built C130 Hercules that had
been sold to the RAF.

The Defense Ministry spokes-
men said the plane crashed
about 200 yards short of the run-
way at the HAF’s Fairford Base,



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Romney, told reporters Monday
that the key to the new experi-
ment would be the encourage-
ment of mass preduction tech-
niques in an industry where
both the laws and the customs
have tended to produce build-
ings one at a time in the past.

By pooling the separate hous-
ing needs of the major states
and cities into a single mass
market, Romney indicated the
nation could miake profitable

-|use of the assembly line sys-

tem, originated in his former
industry, automobiles, in his
former city, Detroit.

Romney estimated that the
plan could produce from 250,000
to 350,000 low-cost housing units
a year, but he said that the first
of them would probably not be-
come available for about three
years. ;

“You don’t design an auto-
mobile in a few months, it takes
a couple of years,” the former
president of American Motors
said.

The housing secretary has
talked informally with governors
of a number of large states and

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‘struction contract.



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some leaders of the contruc-
tion trades unions. He said he
was encouraged by their favor-
able reaction.

Romney said that the proposal
would not involve any federal
spending beyond that already
planned for the mortgage in-
terest subsidy program voted by
Congress last year. Enough
money should be available even

if the Vietnam war continues,
he added.

He said his plan called first
for federal authorities to take
a kind of informal inventory of
housing needs, in each major
state and city.

“If we bring together suf-
ficient volume of demand,”
Romney said, “then we can go’
to the national corporations and
say: ‘What can you produce
for this market?’”

The corporations would be in-
vited to submit cost figures
competitively, as though they
were bidding on an actual con-
State and
city housing authorities could
then contract with the lowest
bidder for construction of their
share of the national inventory.