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Among some of the cases cited by the Times are the following:

Demands for more workers and lack of housing and high rent in Bridgeport, Conn., are resulting in men commuting to their jobs from as far away as New York.

Norfolk, Va. "We have two or three men in a room," says one landlady of a boarding house near the navy yard at Portsmouth. "Eight months ago a room and three meals a day cost $6 a week; today a bed in a room and three meals costs around $10. Even rentals on heatless houses in the Negro slums have jumped from $8 to $10," comments the Times survey.

In Alexandria, La., where 30,000 construction workers were crowded into a small town of only 25,000 population in order to rush through army construction, lack of proper housing caused what the United Press was forced to characterize as a "flu epidemic." The UP reported that 30,000 people were down with the flu which spread like wildfire among workers who were sleeping in garages, on warehouse and store floors, in cellars and in railroad stations.

[[image: Sketch of poster over large building says HOUSING PROJECTS HALTED! and poster over dingier buildings says SLUM Rents $60 - month $65.]]

City workers are not the only ones faced with housing problems. Out near Little Rock, Ark., the government is planning to build a camp for the training of draftees and 

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is demanding the use of 39,500 acres of some of the best cotton growing land around there. Building that camp will force 1,400 farm families to become refugees wandering through the country looking for homes and a way to earn a living.

Anxious to make money out of this latest housing shortage, real estate men and landlords are boosting rents as high as they dare. In Paterson, N.J., the Times survey says rents have already gone up 25%. In Detroit increases of from 14-40% are reported and in Birmingham rents are 10% higher than they were three months ago.

Low Incomes Hit Hardest

A report issued in January, 1941 by Isador Lubin, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the U. S. Dept. of Labor shows that low income families are hit hardest by rent increases. In a study of rents in 32 cities, Lubin reported that rents of under $30 a month have been steadily rising, rents from $30 to $50 have gone up some and rents of over $50, the group most able to stand rises, have decreased. The study covers the period from September, 1937, to September, 1940.

Rent increases, whether they are in industrial areas or around training camps or in places unaffected by plant expansion, vitally effect everyone faced with the problem of finding a decent place to live at a rental they can afford.

For when rents go up in places where industrial plants are expanding, rents in other places will not be far behind.

If a woman's husband is drafted into the army, she has the problem of trying to pay the rent out of her conscripted husband's $30 a month. If a man gets a job building barracks for the army camps and wants his family near him he is faced with rents far out of his reach..

Slowly the campaign to fight these rents increases and to demand adequate housing for both the men in the army 

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