"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

Families frequently complained that landlords disliked families with children and refused to rent dwellings to them. (96) One early RPN tenant recalled landlords in the 1940s-50s, saying, " ... we can't take you," when prospective tenants told them they had children. (97) Larry Furlan, a self-employed bailiff with three kids, shared a four-room duplex with another family when the landlord asked him to leave because "children not wanted." (98) Steve Rohan, a shipper and receiver, applied to RP because his wife was pregnant with their third child; they feared that no landlord would rent to them. Nancy Boudreau, a twenty-one year old mother of two whose husband worked as a clerk, stated in her 1961 application to RP that the reason she was applying was that "landlords will not take children." (99) One family, citing landlord obstinacy with children, wrote the Mayor for help, signing their letter, "We remain a despaired Family of Seven." (100) In 1965, Marian Hartley, a single mother with six children, wrote a heartfelt letter to RPN manager, Robert Bradley, affirming, "I have been looking for a place but it is so hard with 6 children, soon as you tell anybody you have 6 children you might as well stay on the sidewalk than to go ask for a place." (101)

Unsanitary, rundown living quarters were also a widespread concern. Theresa and Richard Lampston wrote the HAT (Housing Authority of Toronto) pleading with them to provide healthy accommodations for their two children. The inspection report in their apartment noted an open sewer trap on the kitchen floor, few windows and an unfavorable location next to a boiler room. (102) Marie Corbeil, who lived with her husband and four children in a badly maintained East Toronto house, wrote the housing authorities articulately describing her family's gloomy housing state:

   The house is very hard to heat and we are cold all the time. There
   are no heat vents in either kitchen and we have both to turn on gas
   stoves to heat the kitchen making both our heat (which is at 80-85
   degrees all the time) and our gas bill too high and then we are still
   not warm. The children have running noses since we moved in and my
   3-month old girl caught a bad cough and kept bringing up her milk.
   The bills are piling up and we are having a hard time to keep up ...
   We have been looking for another place but no one is interested in
   our four children. (103)

In some cases, families were physically separated due to miserable housing circumstances and desired public housing to assist reunification. Jim Johnson, an operator at the Dominion Electric plant, was living in one-room in a larger house while his wife and three children lived elsewhere. (104) Emma Talbot, a teenage girl, lived away from home while her parents and two brothers lived with three other families in a 9-room house, (105) In 1955, Belinda Koslosky, daughter of a clerk at Massey Ferguson, lived with her grandparents while her parents shared an apartment in very crowded conditions." (106) In 1960, James McPhee, a local factory operator, wrote the HAT saying that his parents were arriving from the Maritimes and that, "They are both in poor health. I would like very much to have a place for them to live as I will be looking after them." (107) Lisa Saunders left Jamaica at sixteen-years old in 1989 to join her family. When she arrived in Toronto, there was no family. "It had just blown up," she remembered, (108) Her only option was government housing.