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With all this the sociologists could find but small quarrel. If the rent was too high for slum dwellers, at least Mr. French had never promised to do any better. What did draw their thunder was the fact that the Federal Government had disbursed its $8,000,000 on such an unscientific project in the first place. Their point: high buildings can never solve the housing problem in Manhattan. Reason: If all buildings were twelve stories high they would be uneconomically half empty, while if only enough twelve-story buildings were built to house the population the city tax on the remaining vacant land would have to come out of higher taxes on the used land. In either case the poor would suffer. Prime principle of good housing is to make it impossible for too many people to dwell on the same acre.
*PWA, not Chairman Jones's RFC, supervises slum-clearance projects.