A House Built With a Milestone

That amended housing law was enacted in 1938, and the Arlington house was the first structure financed and built under the revised housing act. It was viewed as such an important event in the housing industry that the National Retail Lumber Dealers Association's members made touring the house a priority item for builders visiting the nation's capital for the group's annual conference in May 1938. Many built similar houses elsewhere.

The expansion of the FHA program had its critics. Real estate agent Charles E. Lane, chairman of a New York housing committee, told a Fifth Avenue business audience that he disapproved because the expansion would encourage people to buy homes who were not in a "proper economic position" to do so, according to the New York Times. His concerns were echoed by others, who called a 10 percent down payment "too narrow a margin of safety for the mortgagee," according to another Times article in 1938. But by May 1938, a record $96 million in mortgages were initiated in a single month, including about 40 percent that involved 10 percent down payment loans.

Just this week, in a Senate hearing room, government officials and business leaders talked about how important the FHA program has been to the housing industry, and to homeowners, in America.

The FHA has helped millions of people "achieve the American dream of homeownership," said Regina M. Lowrie, president of Gateway Funding Diversified Mortgage Services in Horsham, Pa., speaking on behalf of the Mortgage Bankers Association. "It has worked," she said.

Lowrie and some federal officials are pushing for changes in the FHA program to make it more attractive to borrowers. Now buyers are asked to make a 3 percent down payment; supporters of the change want to scale back the down payment almost entirely. They also want the FHA to be able to insure more expensive homes. But some senators noted with skepticism that people earning as much as $130,000 would be covered -- and they questioned whether it is appropriate for the government to be insuring the homes of people who make more than twice the nation's median income.

So it seems relevant to look back at the little Arlington house. It's notable for how much smaller it is than what people think they need today. Even though over the years it has been expanded with a half bath, a sun room and an enlarged family room, it's still a two-bedroom rambler with almost no back yard.

Nancy West, who is selling the house on behalf of her aging mother, who moved there in 1978, can't prove that Eleanor Roosevelt visited. But the issue of small and affordable housing was much on the president's wife's mind at the time. In May 1938, she acted as a judge in a national small-home architectural competition sponsored by the Ladies Homes Journal magazine. She hoped to spawn construction of houses for what she called the "middle third" -- not the wealthiest or the poorest, but the middle-income people for whom housing was often too expensive.

Back then, the Arlington house was seen as a worthy residence for a man on the move. It was purchased by Frank Carnahan, secretary of the Lumber Dealers Association, as his personal home.

Later it was sold to a pair of schoolteachers and then to Nancy West's parents, Alan B. Prosise, a real estate appraiser and former World War II prisoner of war, and his wife, Dorothy, an artist and homemaker.

The house, which is listed for sale with Christian Manachi of AIREC Realty in Vienna, is priced at $625,000, too high to qualify for the FHA program. With a 10 percent down payment, buyers would need to earn at least $90,000 to qualify for the mortgage with today's five-year interest-only loans, and about $180,000 to qualify on traditional, more conservative lending terms with a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.