Background

In conjunction with Department of Defense efforts during the 1990s to review the overall history of the Cold War era, the Army contracted with the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to prepare a context study of Capehart and Wherry housing.

The CERL study produced the report For Want of a Home: A Historic Context for Wherry and Capehart Military Family Housing. This study is available from the U.S. Army Environmental Center, ATTN: SFIM-AEC- CDC, 5179 Hoadley Road, Aberdeen PG, MD 21010-5401, and is summarized below.

Historic Context

With the end of World War II, the late 1940s saw 15 million American service men and women returning home. This situation, coupled with a housing shortage that had grown steadily between 1926 and 1948, exacerbated an already existing housing shortage in the United States. In 1946, fully 9 percent of American families lived two or three couples to a single family home.

For the first time in the history of our nation, the buildup of nuclear weapons in the years immediately following World War II resulted in a need to maintain a large, peacetime fighting force. The increasing technological capabilities of the services, at the same time, required services to try to retain highly trained technological experts rather than having them return to civilian life.

In 1949, Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson said:

Rather than be separated from their families because of lack of Government quarters and scarcity of adequate rental housing at their places of assignment, many of the service personnel have accepted disgraceful living conditions in shacks, trailer camps and overcrowded buildings, many at extortionate rents. It cannot be expected that competent individuals will long endure such conditions.... There is nothing more vital or pressing in the interest of morale and the security of America than proper housing for our Armed Forces.

On March 5, 1949, Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska introduced a bill to provide for construction of family housing "on or around military installations." Developers were to obtain low-interest loans, insured by the Federal Housing Administration on lands leased from the Army. The military was to ensure that installations where housing was built under the Wherry plan would be designated as permanent bases. Developers, known as Wherry "sponsors," were to construct, own, and maintain the houses and give rent priority to military families. At the end of a 40-year period, each sponsor was to turn the project over to the Government.

The Wherry bill did not require specific designs, so sponsors took designs for the needed housing units from existing "off the shelf" plans that were being built in the civilian market at the time. Therefore, there are no specific Wherry style homes that were built for the military.

A number of problems existed with the Wherry houses, ranging from their small size to shoddy construction techniques used by contractors. But in the end, a total of 264 Wherry projects were built for three military departments, totalling 83,742 units.

While housing construction nationwide continued at a breakneck pace, by 1957 there was still a shortfall of housing in the military, with the Army estimating a deficit of 100,000 housing units.

On August 11, 1955, Congress passed the Capehart Housing Act. Similar to Wherry, Capehart required private developers to build housing units for the military, but unlike Wherry, once the houses were completed they came under military control, which left rent setting to the services.

Capehart houses were also built to larger specifications, reducing the complaints about the smaller Wherry homes. Privacy, preservation of the natural environment, and integration of the neighborhood into existing facilities were also key issues in Capehart housing, as well as a move toward more single-family and duplex-style housing.

Because of the disparity between the larger Capehart homes and the Wherry homes, many of the Wherry developments were at less than full occupancy and some projects had defaulted. By the end of the 1950s, Congress mandated the acquisition of Wherry housing at all installation that were to receive Capehart units. The primary objective of acquiring the Wherry houses was for the military to bring these homes up to the standards of other assigned housing in size and design of living spaces, so kitchen upgrades and additional bathrooms and utility rooms were authorized.

When the Capehart program came to an end in 1964, nearly 250,000 units of Wherry and Capehart had been built for the military at its installations. At the end of 1994, about 175,000 of these homes were still in existence. Even with their shortcomings, these programs were felt to be successful in meeting the critical housing shortages that existed after World War II.