Franklin D. Roosevelt

Message to Congress Requesting Housing and Community Facilities for Defense Centers.

February 24, 1941

To the Congress:

The national defense program has required a large expansion of existing military and naval establishments. The Government has constructed new cantonments, air depots, and naval bases. We . have financed and stimulated the construction of hundreds of new industrial plants to produce airplanes, guns, powder, ships, and tanks. This program has been spread throughout the country and has resulted in new concentrations of military forces and civilian workers.

Military and naval strategy has been the controlling factor in determining the location of many of these new defense establishments. As a result posts and plants have been necessarily located near communities without adequate public facilities and services for the large numbers of workers who arrived to construct them and who will be needed to operate the new establishments. There have been shortages of housing, insufficient sanitary and health facilities, overcrowding of transportation services, and inadequate recreational facilities. In fact, this shortage of essential public facilities has handicapped our rearmament effort in some areas.

The Government has already embarked on a defense housing program, but that is not enough. We must do more to obtain the most effect from new plants, new houses, and, most important, from new workers. There is need, in some areas, for improved streets and roads to carry the increased traffic, additional water supply and sewerage systems to service the new structures, and better health, safety, and welfare facilities to benefit the new workers and their families.

The provision of such community facilities has always been a local responsibility. It still is today; cities generally have been straining to meet the problem. Yet we must face the fact we cannot expect local governments to assume all the risk of financing the entire cost of providing new public facilities for the defense program.

After the defense program comes to an end, these new facilities may not be needed. This increase in operating and service costs may also be much greater than a coexistent rise in local public revenues from an increased business activity. Under these circumstances, equity requires that that element of risk attributable to the national defense effort should be shared by the Federal Government.

I am therefore transmitting for the consideration of the Congress a supplemental estimate of appropriation to be available for allocation to appropriate Government agencies, and to remain available until expended, in the amount of $150,000,000 for the purpose of providing community facilities in those communities where there exists or impends such an acute shortage of such facilities as to impede essential national defense activities, and where such facilities cannot otherwise be provided. This estimate is based upon studies and recommendations submitted by the Chairman of the National Resources Planning Board, the Coordinator of Defense Housing, the Administrator of the Federal Works Agency, the Coordinator of Health, Medical, Welfare and Related Activities Affecting the National Defense, and the Director of the Division of State and Local Cooperation of the Defense Commission.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Message to Congress Requesting Housing and Community Facilities for Defense Centers. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/210588

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