Canada's "Wartime Housing Limited" was the precursor to our present-day CMHC. An understanding of the former's history and achievements can gleaned from Jill Wade's Wartime Housing Limited, 1941—1947: Canadian Housing Policy at the Crossroads (June 1986). Her complete essay can be viewed/download here.
She frames her investigation with this introduction...
"Beginning in 1941, a federal crown corporation called Wartime Housing Limited (WHL) built almost 26,000 rental housing units for war workers and veterans. It was a successful yet temporary phenomenon. Six years later, Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CHMC) absorbed and dismantled the wartime company. Eventually, CMHC made possible the tenants' purchase of the WHL units.
In 1944, while WHL efficiently performed its construction and management operations, a report issued by the housing and community planning subcommittee of the Advisory Committee on Reconstruction described the enormous contemporary need for low and moderate income shelter in Canada. The report recommended a nation-wide, comprehensive, and planned program emphasizing low-rental housing. Instead, the federal government initiated a post-war housing program that promoted private enterprise and home ownership and neglected long-range planning and low income housing.
Thus, an interesting question follows. Why did the federal government not reconstitute WHL as a permanent low-rental housing agency to meet the huge low income accommodation need following World War II?..."
Jill Wade was born in 1942 and raised in St. Boniface, Manitoba. She taught British Columbia history in the university program at the Open Learning Agency in Burnaby and published Houses For All: The Struggle for Social Housing in Vancouver, 1919-1950 (UBC Press, 1994). (source)
