"It was tough on everybody": low-income families and housing hardship in post-World War II Toronto

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2003 by Sean Purdy

   ... he had his first heart attack in December 21, 1947. In between
   a couple of times, he brought up blood from the mouth and in March
   49, I think it was March the 10, 1949 he came home from work and
   he had bled the whole day at work ... And it was a very, very
   difficult case and from 1956, he was out of work, on and off, from
   1954. And from April 56, he never worked again until the day he
   died July 21, 1958 ... I couldn't find a place to live with two
   children and him ... in the meantime, we heard about this Regent
   Park [public housing project], gonna build a new place. It was in
   the papers and that and he thought we should go down ... Well, by
   the time we got the letter we were accepted, it was about three
   days before he died. (1)

Such was Thelma Pilkey's painful recollection of her husband's illness and her families' housing hardship in 1950s Toronto. She had always worked, but with two children, her husband's irregular employment and arduous medical bills, it was difficult to make ends meet. Finding a decent, affordable place to live was particularly demanding: vacancy rates in Toronto were persistently low, landlords frequently shunned families with children, and rents were often excessive for low-income earners. Medical problems aggravated the difficulties. Thelma did not want to move the family into public housing but, given the precarious circumstances, she felt there were few options.

The Pilkey's distressing struggles did not reflect the typical experience of working families in Canada. From the 1940s to the 1990s, Canada became one of the most socially and economically developed societies with, arguably, the highest overall living standards in the world. (2) By and large, the majority of Canadian workers were able to achieve adequate housing without overwhelming difficulties in the post-war period. (3) However, this fulsome portrait presents an overly generalized view of the concrete situations of many working families. In turbulent economic times such as recessions, depressions and wars, even employed workers with moderate incomes were disadvantaged and confronted severe shortages of reasonable dwelling spaces. (4) Moreover, the last twenty-five years have witnessed a marked &dine in the social and economic well being of the Canadian working class which has affected chiefly the housing opportunities of women, single parents, the working poor and some recent immigrants. (5) In fact, there has always been a sizeable minority of low-income families who have historically experienced a permanent crisis of affordable, quality dwelling spaces.

This article explores the question of housing need in post-war Toronto by looking at the diverse reasons why families applied to the few public housing projects that were constructed after the war. It identifies a number of often overlapping causes for the housing dilemmas of low-income families, including outright inability to pay, landlord intransigence to families with children, evictions, illness, overcrowding, deprived housing conditions, racism and social factors within the family. It aims to make a contribution to a growing body of work that complicates accepted notions of post-war prosperity and the benefits of the welfare state for low-income earners in advanced capitalist countries. (6)

The first section is based on adaptations of various statistical indicators of housing hardship generated by researchers for Toronto's public housing administration as well as analyses by social agencies, contemporary observers and recent scholarly research. It briefly looks at pre-World War II developments and then chronicles housing need from the 1940s to the 1990s. Various methods and databases were used in these studies and rarely did they originally attempt to chart processes over time. Nevertheless, we can make a reasonable assumption that this information offers us sound indications, if not exact measures, of the housing difficulties faced by low-income families.

The concept of housing need, is, of course, a subjective term. It conveys an opinion about housing that someone ought to have. (7) In housing studies, conceptual definition is important: in the flush of the reform impulse and heightened class struggle in the 1940s, when public housing advocates were contemplating the policies and procedures of the new Regent Park North (RPN) housing project in Toronto, for example, the proportion of income paid for rent (rent to income ratio) that was considered "fair" was 20 percent. (8) This was also considered a "just" figure among public housing residents in struggles against rental policies in the late 1960s and 1970s. (9) Yet the government body that finances and oversees housing in Canada, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), touted a 25 percent figure at the time, which would be used until the 1980s. (10) During a period of state fiscal restraint and the gradual undermining of the welfare state in the 1980s-90s, CMHC adopted a 30 percent figure, quite possibly to increase public housing tenants' rent and therefore reduce government subsidies and/or to make it appear that there was less housing need. (11) CMHC now uses a sophisticated Core Housing Need Model, measuring adequacy (physical state of repair), suitability (appropriateness for family size and type) and affordability (30 percent rent/income ratio). (12) In addition, various other measures--rental unit vacancy rates, home ownership affordability and availability, and the number of public housing applications--are also commonly used to assess housing need. As John Sewell notes, none of these measures is wholly precise. For example, the rent to income ratio is based on gross income and clearly has a differential effect on rich and poor families, thus underestimating real housing need. (13) However, this paper accepts the definitions of affordability, availability and quality proffered by the government bodies, social agencies and scholars cited, as broad indications of what was considered housing need at the time.