"It was tough on Everybody": Low-Income Families and Housing Hardship in Post-World War II Toronto

Abstract

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 and 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. 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 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. My interests in exploring this subject emanated from a larger study of Regent Park (RP) in Toronto, Canada's first and largest rent-geared-to-income housing project. 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 both of families that secured places in RP and of 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.