Construction Activity—November 1946–January 1947 and Outlook for Year 1947

Progress of the Housing Program

MORE NEW permanent homes (58,000) were completed in December than in any other month in 1946. By the end of the year completions were nearing the half-million mark (about 454,000), and another third of a million new permanent dwellings (344,000) were under construction. Almost three-fourths of the units completed in 1946 were started in the same year.

TABLE 1.—Number of family dwelling units or equivalent living accommodations started and completed in nonfarm areas 1, by months, 1946, and outlook for 1947

1 Excludes military barracks.

Includes 8,027 permanent units started by New York Housing Authority, and 37,200 prefabricated units (National Housing Agency estimate).

3 Covers 64,500 privately financed converted units; 191,000 Federal (Mead-Lanham temporary housing programs) re-use units (147,300 family dwellings and 43,700 dormitory equivalents-Federal Public Housing estimates); 48,000 trailers (Bureau of the Census); and 29,200 family and dormitory equivalent units financed by various State and local public bodies and educational institutions (not included under the Federal Mead-Lanham temporary housing program).

A small proportion of new permanent units provided in the local emergency program now included under "other," will be shown for all months in both the started and completed columns for new permanent housing in future publications of this table.

Break-down not available for conventional and prefabricated units.

• Covers 45,300 conversion units, 101,900 re-use units, 48,000 trailers, and 12,900 local emergency units.

According to revised estimates, 40,400 permanent homes were started in December, all of which were privately financed. This is about 9,000 less than were begun in November.

A total of 670,900 new permanent dwellings (both publicly and privately financed) were started during the year 1946, and it is anticipated that 1947 starts will approximate 1 million. Completions in the coming year are expected to reach 950,000. About a fifth of the dwellings started in 1947 will be in multifamily structures (which are usually built to rent), compared with less than a tenth last year. The new permanent housing discussed here accounts for about twothirds of all the units begun and completed during the Veterans' Emergency Housing Program. In addition to the new permanent units, the VEHP includes conversion, trailer, dormitory, and temporary re-use accommodations.

Total Construction Activity

Construction activity continued to decline in January 1947, according to preliminary estimates. Total construction employment (1,728,000 workers) and expenditures for all work put in place (976 million dollars) were both 8 percent below December 1946 levels. All of the major categories of construction shared in the downtrend. It is believed that January will be the low point in construction activity in 1947. The 1,350,000 workers employed on the site of new construction in the first month of the year is expected to increase to over 21⁄2 million at the peak of the 1947 program next September. This exceeds last year's top on-site employment figure by threequarters of a million workers and approaches the high levels of the twenties.

Probably more than half the workers at the job site this coming September will be skilled (including foremen) and about 40 percent of the skilled workers will be carpenters. Last summer there were slightly more than 900,000 skilled workers employed on new construction, compared with the million and a quarter expected at the 1947 peak.

About 35 percent of the manpower required for this year's construction peak will be used on nonfarm housing, 30 percent on nonresidential building, and 35 percent on nonbuilding and farm construction. Employment on the site of residential building, which demands a larger proportion of skilled craftsmen than any other type of construction, is expected to rise from a low of about 485,000 in January 1947 to around 925,000 in September; nonresidential building site employment probably will range from 490,000 to 780,000.

TABLE 2.—Estimated construction employment 1 in the United States, by months, January 1946–January 1947

1 Estimates include wage earners, salaried employees, and special trades contractors actively engaged on new construction, additions and alterations, and on repair work of the
type usually covered by building permits, whether performed under contract or by force-account. (Force-account employees are workers hired directly by the owner and utilized as
a separate work force to perform construction work of the type usually chargeable to capital account.) These figures should not be confused with those included in the Bureau's
nonagricultural employment series, which covers only employees of construction contractors and Federal force-account workers, and excludes force-account workers of State and local
governments, public utilities, and private firms.
2 Revised.
• Preliminary.

19,000.

Includes the following force-account employees hired directly by the Federal Government: December 1945, 18,200; October 1946, 21,100; November 1946, 20,000; December 1946,
Includes airports, water supply and sewage disposal systems, electrification projects, community buildings, and miscellaneous public service enterprises.

Expenditures for new construction, which amounted to 847 million dollars in January, are also expected to reach peak (1.7 billion dollars) in September. For the entire year 1947, they will probably total close to 15% billion dollars-the greatest dollar volume for any 12month period in the country's history. This does not mean, however, that the physical volume of construction will also reach an unprecedented high in 1947, since it will take more dollars than in former years to pay for the necessary lumber, brick, wages, blueprints, etc. The marked decline in the purchasing power of the construction dollar is reflected in the fact that the same amount of work estimated to cost 15.4 billion dollars in 1947 could have been done in 1939 for approximately 9.3 billion dollars.

It is anticpiated that 1947 expenditures will be 15 percent above the dollar volume in 1942-the previous peak year, when the war construction program was at its height. However, if expenditures in both years were to be deflated to the 1939 level of construction prices, the 1947 program would be 10 percent below that carried out in 1942.

The 1947 expenditures for new construction will be more than 50 percent above the 1946 figure. Almost all categories of construction will share in the gain, but nonfarm home building will claim the greatest number of dollars in the coming year-6 billion dollars. Nonresidential building, at 5 billion dollars, will be a close second. Each of these categories totaled 3% billion dollars last year. Highway construction is expected to advance from 829 million dollars in 1946 to 1.5 billion dollars, and public utilities construction from 851 million to 1.3 billion dollars.

TABLE 3.-Distribution of estimated on-site employment on new construction, by type of construction, selected months, 1946-47

TABLE 4.-Estimated construction expenditures,1 by months, January 1946-January 1947

Estimated construction expenditures represent the monetary value of work put in place in continental United States during the period indicated. These figures should not be confused with the data on value of construction reported in the table on urban building construction (table 6).

Revised.