Regional Council Checking Housing

Inventory of 22 Counties Started as Part of Drive for Congress Funds

By CHARLES G. BENNETT

The Metropolitan Regional Council is preparing to throw its influence behind demands on Congress for extensive housing funds at the next session.

Under the direction of its Committee on Housing and Redevelopment, the council began yesterday to take a housing inventory of the communities of the twenty-two-county area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut that it serves.

The inventory will bring up to date the housing data last collated in 1950. In an analysis of the 1950 tally for the metropolitan region just completed, the council reported that at that time 419,843 housing units, or 10.2 percent of the 4,128,487 housing units in the region, were sub-standard.

In preparing for the new inventory, council officials expressed concern yesterday because for the first time in ten years Congress adjourned without having passed an omnibus housing bill.

Leslie Slote, speaking for the council's secretariat, declared that Congressional adjournment last Aug. 24 "in effect immobilized the nation's urban renewal program."

"Only the Eighty-sixth Congress can bring the program back into action," Mr. Slote contended, "and the earliest it will probably be able to act will be next March or April."

Mayor Wagner is chairman of the regional council. Maxwell Lehman, deputy city administrator, heads the council's secretariat. Mayor Leo P. Carlin of Newark is chairman of the Committee on Housing and Redevelopment. Hugh R. Pomeroy, Westchester County Director of Planning, is its secretary.

Mayor Carlin's committee is mailing a questionnaire to the communities of the metropolitan region. It seeks information on the general condition of the total housing compared with 1950, new housing built between 1950 and 1958, construction cost ranges, rentals, numbers of families displaced and other such data.

According to the analysis of regional 1950 figures just completed, Orange County, N. Y., reported the largest percentage of sub-standard housing units of the twenty-two counties of the area. The percentage was 23.1, or 11,270 units out of 48,851.

County Percentages

New York County's percentage of sub-standard units—18.5—was one of the highest, with 110,979 out of 598,856. Other counties high in the percentage of sub-standard housing were Dutchess County, N. Y., 18.7 percent; Monmouth County, N. J., 17.6; Suffolk County, L. I., 15; Passaic County, N. J., 14.8; Morris County, N. J., 14.5; Middlesex County, N. J., 14.2; Rockland County, N. Y., 14, and Hudson County, N. J., 13.5.

In 1950 Nassau County, L. I., had the smallest percentage of sub-standard housing units, 3.8. This represented 7,526 out of 200,474. Other low percentages included Bergen County, N. J., 3.9; Queens and Bronx Counties, N. Y., each 4.7, and Westchester County, N. Y., 8.4.