Excerpt from The Diary of a Housing Manager

For some time past nearly everyone interested in public or publicly assisted large-scale housing has been saying that its success or failure will depend largely upon how it is managed. Relatively little has been done, however, to define clearly the functions and responsibilities of managers, the qualities and experience they should possess, the special preparation, if any, they should undergo, or their relation to other parts of a moving housing program. In its first management training course NAHO has made a start on these problems but much remains to be done. Organizations of non-officials, I am sure, would also admit that they have more questions than answers on the really important phases of housing management.

As its title suggests, in this book Mr. Goldfeld has not tried to give a systematic answer to these questions. It is an abridged edition of the diary he kept during the earlier days of his work as manager of the Lavanburg Homes on the lower east side of New York with editorial comments by the diarist, himself, as he looked back upon the written record after several years of successful management experience. It was originally revised for the NAHO management training course in which Mr. Goldfeld was an instructor, but its character seemed to justify a wider audience.

Although the diary is a strongly personal document, both in the sense of emphasizing those phases of management in which Mr. Goldfeld is himself most keenly interested and in the sense of dealing with those problems that actually arose in this one development, I believe it is a genuine contribution to the literature of this profession in the making. It is specific and concrete. It shows how background in certain phases of the job has to be supplemented by common sense and native ability in others. It emphasizes the fact that the really crucial problems of housing management lie in the human relations between the tenants and the manager and among the tenants themselves. Although naturally it has relatively little to say about the problems of maintaining and operating the physical plant, it does make very clear that these problems cannot be divorced from those of tenant relations without causing an unending series of troubles.

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