House & Farm

President Johnson last week sent two of his promised special messages to Congress. After the Johnson manner, the messages, on housing and agriculture, offered much for many, yet managed to reflect the President's own carefully drawn image of frugality.

P:HOUSING. "Now," he wrote, "is the time to direct the productive capacity of our home-building industry to the great needs of the neglected segments of our population." Many of Johnson's proposals are simply extensions of already existing practice: urban-renewal spending of $1.4 billion over the coming two years, an increase in the maximum mortgage insurable by the FHA (from $25,000 to $30,000), and extension of direct federal-housing loans for the aged.

Johnson did break some ground of his own. In a bow to the affluent society, he recommended that FHA operations be extended to insure mortgages on vacation homes. He asked for 25,000 additional public-housing units each year, to be added not through new construction but more quickly by Government purchase or lease of existing unoccupied structures. In his freshest innovation, the President offered a three-part program to combat the "space-consuming, unplanned and uneconomic" sprawl of suburbia. Johnson would 1) grant direct loans to help communities set aside land for future public facilities, 2) insure subdivision builder loans to install basic facilities such as sewer and water lines, and 3) insure private community developer loans to help finance land for schools and parks. All this is expected to boost spending some $150 million by fiscal 1965

P:AGRICULTURE. Johnson is plumping for yet more Administration "supply management." He offered no really new proposals, left the specifics to Congress. Clearly plowed under: the past Administration warnings that the farmer had erred in defeating mandatory, high-support controls in last May's wheat referendum and how would be left to his own devices. He did recommend voluntary controls and price supports for potatoes, one of the few freely marketable basic crops left in the national larder. And to the consternation of many, Johnson called for a return to part of the controversial and soundly defeated plan proposed by Agriculture Secretary Charles Brannan in 1949: direct Treasury payment to cotton and milk producers.

There was a notable lack of enthusiasm for Johnson's proposals. Curiously, complaints over the housing message, voiced by New Jersey's Congressman William Widnall, ranking G.O.P. member of the Special Housing Subcommittee, rang like those of a dissident liberal. Said Widnall: "The Administration seems more interested in insuring the vacation home of the redeveloper than in insuring any home for the person who needs it." As for the agriculture message, Farm Bureau President Charles Shuman totted it up and concluded: "It is a collection of all the discredited Government supply management proposals that already have been rejected by farmers and by the Congress."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.