The real-estate lobby's most energetic spokesman is a solemn-looking Midwesterner named Herbert U. Nelson. As the $25,000-a-year executive vice president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, he once undertook to set the populace straight on the postwar housing shortage: there was no shortage at all, he said, just an "overconsumption of space." He was also the first man alert enough to link that stalwart Ohio conservative, Bob Taft, with the Communistsbecause Taft sponsored a public housing bill.
Last week Nelson appeared as a witness in a House committee's inquiry into Washington...