Hoover drove housing reform by declaring construction waste a solvable efficiency problem

Evidence

Despite the social importance of homeownership, Hoover concluded, the United States never would become “a nation of home owners” unless the nation’s builders began to produce houses more efficiently. For Hoover, indeed, the idea of efficiency was a kind of obsession. He had become a public hero by applying engineering principles to postwar problems, and he saw productive efficiency as the key to national prosperity. “The only road to further advance in the standard of living,” he wrote in his best-selling credo American Individualism, “is by greater invention, greater elimination of waste, greater production and better distribution of commodities and services.” As the first president of the Federation of American Engineering Societies in 1920, Hoover had organized a major investigation of waste in industry, and the study confirmed Hoover’s judgment that the backwardness and disorganization of the building industry forced millions of hard-working Americans to live in rented quarters: Waste accounted for 53 percent of the cost of construction. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 87

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Herbert Hoover made housing a national issue rooted in promoting homeownership — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 84