The members elected their own board of directors, who, lacking experience themselves, followed the guidance of seven members of the American Veterans Committee, none of whom personally needed a house, but who had originally founded the co-op. Above all, there would be inexpensive housing for a few of the hundred thousand Philadelphians who needed it.īy August over three hundred veterans-most in their late twenties and early thirties-had paid an advance of two hundred and fifty dollars to cover the operating expenses of the organization and a down payment toward the purchase of land. After completion there would be other advantages to working together as a community through an elected council: fuel oil-bought in bulk-would cost six cents per gallon, instead of eight non-profit stores and a communal nursery would produce still further economies. By hiring their own contractors, the organization would be able to build whatever type of house its members agreed upon-and could afford. Since the project would be cooperative, the home owners would save on the middleman’s and builder’s usual profits. They learned that any honorably discharged veteran with an income of not less than fifty-five dollars a week could join. Thousands inquired during the first few weeks. Within a few hours of the story’s appearance, crowds had gathered at the offices of the AVHC-the American Veterans Housing Cooperative-in the basement of Philadelphia’s musty old Academy of Music building. They are not wealthy, but they are proud of their houses and of their remoteness from the untidy, dirty city. Here, in Fox Chase Manor, lives a community of suburbanites who commute daily on the Reading Railroad to central Philadelphia. To the east of the estate lies a neighborhood of small neat houses, each with a green lawn and a garage. The homes are huge, rambling Tudor-owned by manufacturers, businessmen, and industrial executives. Smooth black roads wind through avenues of cedars, blue spruce, and neatly trimmed lawns that come down to the very edge of the macadam. North and west of the Newbold estate is the area known as Rydal. The gilt was peeling from the ballroom, and the formal gardens had disappeared beneath a growth of weeds and saplings. Empty for over twenty years, it had suffered from fire, snow, and wind. On a high clearing stood, until recently, his home, in ruins, but recognizable as the seventy-five-room Georgian mansion (six central furnaces) it had been in another era. To the east of the highway lies Crosswicks Farms, a large irregular tract of some two hundred acres of rolling countryside-the long unsaleable estate of a millionaire stock-broker, the late Clement B. The story told here is, of course, only one story-but in its main outlines it is characteristic of several of the thirty or forty veterans’ cooperatives that have struggled or died a-borning since the war and it is a significant part of a larger problem-that of discriminatory trends in housing, which make the whole area one of the chief sources of present-day prejudice in the United States.Ī few miles north of Philadelphia on route 611 is the Township of Abington, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Hunt here presents a case history in veterans’ housing-the story of a plan for a cooperative project on the outskirts of Philadelphia which uncovered some of the ugly tensions that so often lie beneath the apparently placid surface of American suburbia.
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