"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

The second section of the article elucidates the informative if partial statistical record of housing need by considering various qualitative sources such as oral testimony, tenant correspondence and other documentary voices of low-income families. (14) My interests in exploring this subject emanated from a larger study of RP in Toronto, Canada's first and largest rent-geared-to-income housing projects The archival records, which contain numerous letters from prospective tenants and rare resident case files, and the interviews I conducted with former tenants of RP, speak directly to the question of housing need. I use the evidence of both families that secured places in RP as well as prospective tenants who expressed a need for state assistance. By no means does this exhaust the low-income housing experience in Toronto, but it provides readily accessible qualitative evidence to explore the question of housing hardship in the post-war era. The article thus highlights individual accounts of housing hardship, allowing us to put a much-needed human face on those left out of the much-vaunted, post-war "age of prosperity."

The Low-Income Housing Crisis By Numbers, 1900-2000

Squalid housing conditions in the rapidly industrializing cities of Canada were a growing public concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Middle-class reformers, businessmen, and some government officials were particularly worried about the morally and socially erosive effects brought about by the "slum" housing of workers, many of them immigrants. (16) The bulk of reform propaganda articulated a middle-class version of what was considered "proper" housing with a tenuous link to the actual housing environments of working-class families. Yet there is little doubt that many workers lived in overcrowded and unsanitary dwellings.

Problems of affordability were also paramount. John Bacher has carefully documented the bruising effects of unrestrained industrial growth on working-class housing conditions in the period. He notes that "an increasing proportion of the work-force [was] faced with the choice of accepting shelter that was overcrowded, poorly serviced, or below minimal building code and sanitary standards, or sacrificing other necessities of life." (17) From 1900 to 1913, rents in Toronto increased by 100 percent while wages only grew by 32 percent. The rent to income ratio of skilled workers such as carpenters increased from 19.4 percent in 1905 to 23.3 percent in 1913. For fully-employed laborers, rent soared from 22.8 percent of wages in 1900 to 35 percent in 1913.Is An investigation in 1914 by Toronto's public health department found 9,000 houses overcrowded. (19)

Housing shortages vaulted onto the national stage during the First World War. The adverse conditions of wartime--scarcity of resources, price inflation, and an unwillingness to invest in housing--led to a marked decrease in residential building. (20) Coupled with unemployment and real wage loss, the lack of available dwellings would precipitate a severe housing crisis in the immediate post-war period. It came as little surprise that the National Industrial Conference (1919) and the Royal Commission on Industrial Relations (1919) would both highlight poor dwelling conditions as one of the chief causes of the working-class upheaval of the immediate post-war period. (21) Fewer than 7,000 houses were built under government auspices in the period and had little real impact on the national crisis. (22)