Facing an unprecedented housing shortage during the Second World War, the Canadian government took an extraordinary step: it intruded directly into the housing market. Prompted by the immediate need to provide housing for the thousands of workers entering cities to work in wartime industries, the government faced down opposition and used the War Measures Act to create the Crown agency Wartime Housing Limited in 1941.
Led by Hamilton construction magnate Joseph Pigott, one of the government’s dollar-a-year men and a long-time supporter of social housing, “Wartime Housing acted like a developer, buying land and contracting the construction of houses,” says Richard Harris, professor emeritus at McMaster University .
The government’s creation of WHL was a dramatic departure; its long-standing position, supported by Deputy Finance Minister W. C. Clark, was that housing should be left to private industry. The push for change came from C.D. Howe, the minister of munitions and supply, because of the desperate need to supply Canada’s war industries with workers and workers with housing.
Howe overcame opposition from Clark, but the compromise was that WHL’s mandate was limited to providing temporary housing for workers in munitions and other war industries.
Working closely with municipalities, WHL, in its first year, contracted 13,000 homes in 57 communities across the country. In many cases, municipalities provided vacant lots to WHL for a nominal sum and supplied services in return for an annual payment per house. Because they were supposed to be temporary, the houses were built without basements.
Wartime Housing Limited project in Hamilton. (Hamilton Spectator/Courtesy of the Hamilton Public Library)
Despite WHL’s early success, it did not ease the housing crisis. The Globe and Mail reported in July 1942 that servicemen’s families in Hamilton were living in trailers, tents, and garages. “Tents are less common but at least two families are known to have resorted to canvas homes.”
The housing situation was so severe in July 1942, according to the Globe, that it was affecting military morale: “A rising tide of bitterness is being noted among servicemen because of the conditions under which their families are forced to live because they are not included in the Wartime Housing program.”
During a meeting of Toronto city council’s Special Housing Committee in September 1942, member Alfred Ward said, “It seems to me that the old peacetime motive of private profit will have to be sacrificed as far as emergency housing is concerned.”
By 1944, WHL‘s mandate was expanded to building housing for families and returning veterans.
Local architects and builders hired by WHL carried out projects according to pre-approved designs. The government gave WHL priority over private builders on materials that were in short supply. Once a project was completed, WHL rented the units and acted as landlord.
Agenda segment, January 17, 2023: Should government build rental housing?
WHL’s accomplishment was huge, says Harris. “To put it in context, Wartime Housing Limited, between 1942 and 1948, built about 46,000 housing units — three times as many as were built under Canada’s public housing program from 1949 through 1964.”
Each of the houses was about 700 or 800 square feet with two or three bedrooms, says David L. A. Gordon, professor at Queen’s University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning. “Families with six kids would live in these little tiny houses with a triple bunk bed and a dresser and one closet in each room and one bathroom.”
In the years after the war, government efforts to build homes for veterans shifted from building public rental units to building homes for sale under the newly created CMHC, which inherited all of WHL’s assets. The wartime houses that were supposed to have been temporary became permanent, says Gordon, adding that the houses were lifted using steel bars to add basements and then sold to veterans.
Any unfinished WHL projects were completed by CMHC, which then built new subdivisions of houses meant for sale.
The houses were priced for young families with moderate incomes and sold to veterans for between $5,000 and $6,000. CMHC introduced mortgage guarantees for veterans, making possible 25-year mortgages and monthly payments not much different from rent, says Gordon. The shift reflected “the general consensus at the time that living in a single detached home and owning your own home and driving a car rather than taking the bus was the best way to live.”
Wartime Housing - Houses in Jig Time
Former housing advocate and CMHC executive Humphrey Carver, writing in 1975, said that wartime and veterans' schemes should have been redirected to the needs of low-income families, but that "the prospect of the federal government becoming landlord to even more than 40,000 families horrified a Liberal government that was dedicated to private enterprise.”
“It was Canada’s greatest success,” says Carolyn Whitzman, an adjunct professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Geomatics at the University of Ottawa, pointing to the combination of government land acquisition, co-ordination with other levels of government, and pre-approved designs.
But, she adds, it was also, in some ways, Canada’s biggest failure. At the peak of the crisis, “Wartime Housing acquired land and built about 30,000 homes in the form of public rental housing in just about three years,” she says. “But under CMHC, government land ownership wasn’t retained, and those wartime houses became part of an investment-oriented market — they didn’t think about what would happen several generations later.”
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