Local Building lndustry Should Supplv Delense Housing, Says Foundation Chairman

The "Laurel" design (List No. A85BSB) is offered this week by Southern California Homes Foundation as the first in a new series of modern California small-home plans developed by the building industry of the Golden State. This group of designs has its source in the planning services of retail lumbermen in several localities.

"The Laurel and the other designs in this new series are examples of the California building industry's great progress in production facilities and materials during the past decad€," C. W. Pinkerton, Chairman of Southern California Homes Foundation, points out. "Building is a local industry. Local retail lumbermen form a key unit of the industry in every community. The local design services they have created are but one feature of their whole modern organized service to the consumer. This in turn has been geared in with the services of real estate merchants, building contractors, the building trades and other units of the typical local construction group that is prepared to 'supply everything to build anything.'

"Many California centers now face the suddenly risen probability of increase in the population of industrial employees for the defense program. The vacancy rate is generally much lower than it was in 19L7, when a similar situation demanded a great amount of emergency housing. The building industry then was not prepared to meet that demand adequately. It is fully prepared now. It has prepared itself at risk and sacrifice duriag depression years to cooperate effectively with the Federal Housing Administration in making the small home easy to own for the average family and in providing more house for the dollar than ever before.

"In California communities, large and small, there is no emergency housing demand that the local building industry cannot meet. Its local leaders are eager to rise to the emergency, not only as a matter of public duty, but to maintain the American way of home ownership that they have developed and made effective and safe for every family of stable income.

"We must not be panicked into deserting this way and leaving the local supply of defense program housing to the chance that the mass slum-building and labor-camp construction of the 1917 emergency will be repeated in 1940. There were cases in 1917 of labor-camp beds being used in eight-hour shifts. Repetition of this can easily be avoided if the national program of defense housing is channeled through the ready and prepared local building industry units of the country."

Information and service on the Laurel may be had from local retail lumber dealers or from Southern California Homes Foundation, 441 Douglas Building, Los Angeles.