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12 Law & Contemp. Probs. 3 (1947)
The Extent of the Housing Shortage

handle is hein.journals/lcp12 and id is 7 raw text is: THE EXTENT OF THE HOUSING SHORTAGE P. M. HAUSER* AND A. J. JAPFEt War has always left in its wake grave problems of economic and social adjust- ment. World War H required an unprecedented mobilization of the nation's human and material resources to meet the total war effort of our enemies and has left un- precedented problems of economic and social reconversion. Among the most acute of these problems is that relating to housing. The acute housing problem which faces us today, however, is more than a heri- tage of the war alone. It is also, in part, a product of the great dislocation resulting from almost a decade of depression which preceded the war. The cumulative effect of these catastrophic forces is evident in the extent of the current housing shortage. . Measuring the extent of the housing shortage is not as simple a problem as may seem upon first consideration. It is a task beset by a number of difficulties of both an economic and social character. To begin with, an analysis of the supply of hous- ing relative to effective demand would produce quite different results than would an analysis in respect to social need. Moreover, in a transitional period, such as the present, complicated by rising prices, material shortages, temporary housing, produc- tion bottlenecks, and the changing aggregate and distribution of income payments, both the supply and the demand schedules for housing are particularly difficult to quantify. Any attempt to measure the social need for housing is handicapped by the lack of any widely accepted objective standards of either need for, or quality of, housing units. Another difficulty in dealing with this problem arises from the fact that most of the information available on a current basis is restricted to national data. Since the population is highly mobile while housing is immobile, and since both the war and the depression produced great population shifts, the national picture tends to obscure the problem as it actually exists in the specific local community. A.B., 1935, A.M., 1938, Ph.D., 1941, University of Chicago. Statistician, U. S. Bureau of the Census, Washington, D. C. Lecturer in Department of Economics, American University. Formerly Chief Statistician in the Research Branch, Information and Education Division, War Dept. Author of various research papers in demography, labor force, and related subjects. t Ph.B., 1929, M.A., 1933, Ph.D., 1938, University of Chicago; Assistant to the Secretary, and Assist- ant Director of the Census, Department of Commerce; past Vice-President and Fellow of the American Statistical Association; past Secretary and Member of the Board of Directors, Population Association of America; Member of the American Economic Association and the American Sociological Society; co-editor of GovERNMMNT SrATrsrMcs 1,oR BusiNEss UsE; author of monographs and contributor to social science journals. This papr is not written in the official capacity of the authors and is not to be interpreted as repre- senting official estimates of the Bureau of the Census or the Department of Commerce. The authors wish to express their thanks to Mr. Samuel J. Dennis, Chief, Construction Economics Unit, Construction Division, U. S. Dept. of Commerce, for his aid and advice in the preparation of this paper.

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