Homes built in Peterborough, Ont., by Wartime Housing Limited in 1943. [J.B. Scott/LAC/PA-14533]

[Conrad Poirier/BAnQ Vieux-Montreal/Wikimedia]

The shortfall was caused in part, too, by the lack of employment during the Great Depression and the scarcity of skilled labour—because of the hundreds of thousands enlisted for military service—and supplies between 1942 and 1945.

“A third factor was the deterioration of the existing stock,” wrote B.C. historian Jill Wade in the academic journal Urban History Review. “By 1945, many occupied dwellings in the larger Canadian cities were substandard in that they needed exterior repairs and/or lacked or shared flush toilet and bathing facilities.”

In 1942, the vacancy rate was less than one per cent. The result was overcrowding and “doubling up,” where two or more households shared the same living space. By 1944, a federal study known as the Curtis report, written mostly by Clifford A. Curtis, an economics professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., said the need for housing accumulated between 1939 and 1945 was about half-a-million units, with low- and medium-income tenants experiencing the greatest need.

The federal government under Prime Minister Mackenzie King knew it had to do something to address the crisis. But, there was a question of conflicting philosophies. On one hand, there was a problem that needed an immediate state-sponsored solution. Meanwhile, the Department of Finance felt that housing, especially rental units, could better be managed by the private sector.

The solution? The government would create a federal agency tasked with providing as many homes as possible. These would be temporary buildings, built quickly and were expected to be replaced shortly after the war’s end. Using the War Measurers Act and the Department of Munitions and Supply Act, Wartime Housing Limited (WHL), a Crown corporation, was established on Feb. 28, 1941. The company reported to C.D. Howe, minister of munitions and supply.

It was tasked with building homes in subdivisions, preferable near war-industry sites. These houses were to be cheap, quickly built and suitable for a couple or small family to live in. The dwellings would be rented with the corporation acting as landlord.

Howe appointed Joseph M. Pigott, who oversaw administration of the family-run Pigott Construction Company, to run the new agency. Pigott was one of many wealthy industrialists Howe recruited to Ottawa in wartime to share their expertise and work for a dollar a year. Pigott, along with his brother Roy, had turned the company started by their father from a small Hamilton-based outfit into a million-dollar business. It had become known for building the first skyscraper in Hamilton, the 18-storey Pigott Building. The company would grow even more successful after the war, overseeing construction of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the Bank of Canada building in Ottawa, among other high-profile projects.

One of WHL’s first steps was to look for vacant property that could be turned into new neighbourhoods. In Ottawa, for instance, a vacant lumberyard in the city’s west end once owned by timber tycoon John R. Booth was acquired and soon became the bustling neighbourhood of Carlington North.

A worker shows the tongue-and-groove joint of a cedar plank used in construction of prefabricated wartime homes. [Harry Rowed/NFB/LAC/3197233]

“This neighbourhood dates more from the second wave of housing caused as the veterans themselves began coming home and looking for new jobs in the civilian world,” said Greg MacPherson of the city’s heritage department.

Similar developments were built in the suburbs of numerous cities across the country.

WHL’s strategy was to create a catalogue of house designs for builders to select how they would create suitable neighbourhoods. Generally, the homes were bungalows and one-and-half-storey buildings. They had steeply pitched roofs, small sash windows and metal chimney stacks. Each had a living room, a kitchen and dining area, bedrooms, a bathroom and a woodshed. They were built quickly without basements since they were meant as temporary housing.

Appropriately, street names in these subdivisions tended have a military flare, with monikers such as Marshal, Admiral or Veteran. At the time, no one dreamed these homes would make neighbourhoods with their own character, be improved on by owners once the government began selling them off and still be standing 80 years later in communities across Canada.

Of course, the dwellings had a certain conformity of appearance. The government called them “Victory” homes or “Homes for Heroes,” but the public tended to refer to them as “strawberry box homes” given their resemblance to the boxes the fruit was sold in at the time.

Originally, these units were intended for industrial workers who were moving into cities, and they were built near wartime plants. But the homes were also attractive to veterans returning with wounds and the large influx of war brides and their children. A second phase of construction started once soldiers began coming back to Canada, notably after the victory in Europe in 1945.

While WHL only existed between 1941 and 1947, it built almost 26,000 dwellings for workers, veterans and their families.

Bureaucrats insisted that the units weren’t low-income rentals. In the 1940s, poorer families were paying about $12 a month for housing. Pigott had no intention of subsidizing WHL tenants, who were paying between $22 and $30 a month for its homes.

Still, Finance Minister James L. Ilsley believed a peacetime government’s direct involvement in housing was socialistic and dangerous. As early as 1942, he had written to Pigott warning him that the WHL precedent was setting a “grave danger” for similar postwar programs.

Nonetheless, the initiative flourished. It had a head office in Toronto, 51 branch offices and superintending sites in 73
municipalities by 1945. It spent $50 million on new homes between 1941 and ’45.

Originally, these units were intended for industrial workers who were moving into cities. But the homes were also attractive to returning veterans.

At least one parliamentary inquiry was called to examine the efficiency and merits of the program. Pigott appeared and confidently claimed that WHL was “well-established” and “smoothly operating.” Parliamentarians ultimately agreed.

Wartime Housing’s house type H.5 in Cartierville, Que., in December 1943.[LAC/4517119]

The conflict of philosophies, however, remained until it was eventually settled in 1947 with the creation of the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), today known as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. CMHC took over responsibility for all government housing programs. It moved quickly to sell much of the WHL inventory. By 1952, the new corporation had sold 29,452 units for $110.5 million.

But many of the WHL neighbourhoods survive today. A sizeable portion of the wartime homes built in Ottawa’s Carlington North neighbourhood still stand in more or less their original form. In 2022, the city recognized it as a “cultural heritage character area,” a distinction short of being a heritage district that would be protected under the Ontario Heritage Act.

“A study was done of the designs of the houses and looked at the streetscape itself,” said city heritage planner MacPherson. The distinction gives recognition, but doesn’t impose restrictions on future change.

With Canada facing a new housing crisis—renters are facing increases double that of inflation, homelessness is rising and more than 60 per cent of homeowners with a mortgage are having trouble meeting their financial commitments—the government is now looking at the success of WHL as a possible blueprint for a 21st-century solution.

The legacy of WHL hasn’t died. Instead of disappearing with the crisis in the late 1940s, the neighbourhoods have passed into private hands and largely been maintained or improved. Residents mostly wanted to make their modest homes comfortable as they painted, built additions, planted gardens and developed local community programs.

Each has engendered a character of its own, a character its residents are proud of and don’t want to see disappear.

Landscapers and construction workers complete a wartime home in Vancouver in May 1944. [Harry Rowed/NFB/LAC/3197842]