Word: lustron
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...private housing program ever stirred up such a furor in Washington as Lustron Corp.'s plan to build 150 enameled steel houses a day-if the Government would put up the money. After some squabbling, RFC obliged. Last week, Arkansas' Senator J. William Fulbright, whose Banking & Currency Sub-committee was digging into RFC's affairs, popped an interesting question: Did people want to live in steel houses? "I have only seen one of them," said Fulbright, "but it sort of reminds you of a bathtub...
...quite a bathtub, replied RFC Director Harvey J. Gunderson. The first blue and yellow Lustron houses were "a little like hotdog stands." But the newer grey and green houses, he thought, were a great improvement...
More Mustard, Please. No matter what they looked like, one thing was clear. Lustron, as Gunderson's testimony revealed, was simply RFC under another name. When Lustron's persuasive President Carl G. Strandlund (who lives at Columbus, Ohio, in a frame house, with an adjoining Lustron guesthouse) proposed his program three years ago, RFC turned it down. Wilson Wyatt, then Federal Housing administrator, quit in protest. Presidential Assistant John Steelman stepped in and asked RFC to reconsider. RFC did so; it set Lustron on its feet with a $15.5 million loan (Strandlund & associates raised $840,000). Within...
...million last July. By February, they again needed more. By the time RFC had put in $7,000,000-for a grand total of $32.5 million-it had embarked on the biggest government peacetime venture in prefabricated housing. But that was not the end. Gunderson said he understood that Lustron needs another $3,000,000 immediately to "tide them, over" for the next few months. After that Lustron would need about $1,000,000 a month to keep going until it reaches its break-even point of 30 to 50 houses...
...Lustron has got no steel to build its houses. But the Department of Commerce's Office of Industry Cooperation has approved an allocation of 58,000 tons of steel to builders of prefab housing, the bulk of it to Lustron. Once before, OIC turned down allocations for steel prefabs, because they require six times as much steel as conventional houses. It reconsidered when RFC and other government agencies intervened. Strandlund and his associates are now sure the steel will come through. As one Lustron executive put it: "Our relations with the Government have always been very healthful...