"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

In the 1960s, more and more applications for public housing appear to have been motivated by the desire to escape from abusive men. Robert Bradley, RPN manager, claimed that applications from "broken families," 98 percent of them women and the majority fleeing abuse, increased over 100 percent in 1965. (53) It was for women in situations like this, that in 1967 the THA established an emergency hostel for women and children who were being evicted or fleeing abuse. In addition to providing some security for families for a short period (average stay was 13 days), they helped find spots in both the private rental market and public housing. In its first year, they assisted over 400 women and 1,300 children. Approximately 30 percent were housed for "domestic problems." (54)

The strategies employed by low-income families to achieve what Robert Murdie and Carlos Teixeira term a "comfortable neighbourhood and appropriate housing" (55) varied considerably among ethnic groups in post-war Toronto. Toronto was the single largest destination of immigrants to Canada in the post-1945 period. Yet until the 1970s, the vast majority of public housing applicants and residents in English Canada were of Anglo-Canadian origin. (56) Only in the 1970s and 1980s did larger numbers of Caribbean and Asian families opt for state-assisted housing in Toronto. (57) The single largest immigrant populations to Toronto before the 1970s, the Italians and Portuguese, adopted a very different approach to securing housing. Investing substantial cultural and economic importance to home ownership and close-knit, ethnic neighborhoods, first in the area due west of the city center and later in several distinct ethnic suburban enclaves, Italian and Portuguese families relied on extensive community and family ties as well as considerable economic sacrifice to become homeowners. More often than not, this meant reliance on private, community sources of finance, renting out a part of the owned house to pay the mortgage, living in boarding houses in the first years after arriving in the city, purposely doubling or tripling up with other families to save money and devoting a disproportionate amount of income to home purchases. (58) In contrast to the prominent ideology of the male breadwinner in post-war Canada, Franca Iacovetta also shows that women's paid labor, which was more common among Italian than native-born women, "was part of a well-articulated working-class family strategy for success, one most often measured in terms of home ownership." (59) Alvin Finkle reports that these multifaceted approaches to economic stability were common in Southern European and some Jewish immigrant families in cities across the country. (60)

Nevertheless, by the mid 1960s, as Kevin Brushett has thoroughly documented, the housing crisis had come "full circle" (61) for many underprivileged families. Shortages for low-income Torontonians were once again rampant, rents were spiraling and evictions were increasing. City officials warned migrants, especially the growing numbers of families from the Maritime provinces seeking work in industrial Toronto, to stay home. (62) Excepting Southern European immigrants, the dream of home ownership increasingly became just that for large numbers. Homeowners in Toronto decreased from 71 percent of occupied dwellings in 1951 to 56 percent in 1981. (63) Shelter costs also became increasingly burdensome for poor families. In 1962, the Toronto Star noted there were still "Thousands Caught in High-Rent Trap." (64) In 1965, a City of Toronto housing policy committee report argued that fully 20 percent of the city's families "were unable with their own resources, to provide decent, safe and sanitary housing." (65) A 1966 study of 411 applications to RPN found 62 percent paying more than 30 percent of their income towards rent. (66)