Happy to have you here.

In World War II, when the United States needed to quickly ramp up production of wartime

material, you know, planes, tanks, guns, ammunition, uniforms, everything, the government

opened defense production facilities all over the country.

Factories.

They either retooled the existing ones or they built new ones.

And in some places where there were particularly large defense production facilities, either

a large number of retooled plants or a bunch of new ones that were built, one of the things

that emerged pretty quickly as a bottleneck for our country mobilizing for that war was

this conundrum of where all the workers would live who worked in these newly built and newly

retooled production plants.

In an already crowded city like Detroit, for example, the government realized in 1941

that they were going to have to quickly add hundreds of thousands of units of housing in

order to bring in hundreds of thousands of new workers to staff these defense production

facilities that were being retooled from civilian use in Detroit or in fact newly opened

to make war material in that city.

And that math is easy to see, right?

You need to build a whole bunch of new stuff.

You need a whole bunch of new or retooled or expanded facilities to build that stuff.

You need a lot of people to work in those facilities and so they need a place to live.

The math is simple, right?

On paper, that's all very rational.

...