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Western Lumber a Building Materials

Jqw Power Isn'l Getting lt

[-tOR AT least a year now, we have read and listened to expert, after government official, after businessman, alter sociologist, after politician describe the nation's shortage of housing, both present and future.

Their arguments seldom difier appreciably; we need reforms in property taxes, reforms in land planning and building codes, reforms in technology and financing, reforms in labor, materials and what not. No one disputes the major facts nor most oI the conclusions drawn from the mountains of statistics. The need is present and clearly visible.

What has happened to all this jaw power being applied to one of the nation's most serious problems? Nothing much as we see it. Oh sure, there have been studies, surveys, seminars, speeches and great quantities of collective handwringing. Some have even drawn new plans and built new test houses. Associations have plotted new areas of interest while corporations have realigned their forces and awarded new titles to new jobs in new corporate groupings.

The result still adds up to what amounts to noth' ing. Obviously the dimensions of the problem are staggeringly huge, obviously they are not going to be solved overnight. But equally obvious is the fact that no real progress is being made.

Everything that has been done so far is mere throat clearing, a re-hashing o{ past prototypes that only serves to further expose a stone of a situation that so far has only felt the flabby lever of talk.

We get the impression that everyone is waiting for a miracle and that until it arrives, they intend to fill the time with talk. Wishful thinkers mumble that if we can somehow get loose in Vietnam, then money will be magically freed to solve the housing problem. It is, admittedly, a lovely dream. But it is just that.

The drifting and dreaming period must end once and for all. The time for jaw power is also past. Real progress must be made towards building real houses, by the hundreds of thousands, and at a price real people can aftord to pay. The one small step forward to that reality must come soon if we are ever to see the giant leap forward that will follow.

Whoos loughing?

\Y/HENEVER the public takes notice of the YY wrangle over the size of the two-by'four, the Iumber industry gets a black eye.

Several years agq when the story first gained prominence, a national TV personality sneered that the next thing the public would be stuck with would be five beers in a six pack.

A recent editorial in the San Diego Union dryly observed that "next thing you know your yardsticks will be two feet long."

Those may be funny things to say, but we doubt the lumber industry's customers are laughing much.

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