Page images
PDF
EPUB

I further refer you to pages 421, 422, 423 of the Report of the Senate Hearings, under S. 3603, and I trust you gentlemen will be able to report this bill in such form that it may be passed at this session.

I cannot see that the burden on the Government under this bill after it is set up will be any more than of the Federal Reserve bank.

STATEMENT OF DON A. LOFTUS, PRESIDENT HOMES
PERMANESQUE, CLEVELAND, OHIO

Mr. LOFTUS. I am here as an opponent of the bill, and I would like to be heard a few minutes, if it is possible.

The CHAIRMAN. All right. We shall be glad to hear you. Mr. LOFTUS. I am president of a national home building organization operating in 62 cities and have spent 25 years of my life building homes and financing them. I am solely interested in bringing about recovery through home building and modernizing. I am interested in the American home. I believe that the home owner of America is the one true American citizen. I believe that this bill is a bill for monopoly. It is a bill to bring about prefabricated houses, and to help to market prefabricated houses conceived by those who have them hidden away in Pittsburgh and Milwaukee. It is camouflage. We have more than a billion dollars available now for home building and modernizing, and there is no need for any bill of this kind, because that money is only waiting to know whether or not the financing of the American home is to be changed by the good institutions who helped to build 22,800,000 individual homes in America. I say to you that I have not been refused cheap money. I can borrow all the money I desire at 52 percent in most any section of the United States, without any bonuses or without any insurance penalties or anything else, and I say with a billion dollars available, if there is an assurance that their mortgages will not be further disturbed by the propaganda that is coming out of the bureaucrats in this city of Washington, and I condemn first the housing division, because from platform to platform I have listened to those in charge say that the individual American home is a failure, and I have challenged that statement.

I have listened to mass housing and slum-clearance proposals and seen these promotions of the so-called "social relief" organizations, promoted in a hundred cities by Mr. Cohen, Mr. Stein, Mr. Clayburg, and Mr. Wright. I have attended every national conference on housing during the past 4 years and I know what is going on, and we cannot further distress the American home, and the sooner the H.O.L.C. stops its propaganda, the sooner we will begin to see

recovery.

I am speaking of the situation in Cleveland, insofar as the H.O.L.C. is concerned. I have watched its operations, and it is a city that has been used as the guinea pig to try it out. We have had no relief for the individual foreclosed home. The relief has been for the sole purpose of paying off the R.F.C. loans to the closed banks, and we have three times the number of applications in that office

than can be handled in proportion to the amount allocated for that district, because of the paying off of the R.F.C. loans.

I am speaking first because I am a home owner, and every member of my family has been a home owner, and my home is not a failure. I say that if this bill goes through that my home will be a failure, and every other home built in America on materials that have been used for 1,500 years, and I say that the United States should not be an experimental agency for those who wish to have them exploit scientific houses. I say further that the American home can be protected by Congress, and Congress only, and if this Government is to survive as a democracy, for God's sake, kill this bill.

The CHAIRMAN. We thank you very much. The hearings on the present bill are closed.

(Thereupon, at 5:15 p.m., the hearing was concluded.)

X

« PreviousContinue »