Houses for All: The Struggle for Social Housing in Vancouver, 1919-50

Houses for All is the story of the struggle for socialhousing in Vancouver between 1919 and 1950. It argues that, howevertemporary or limited their achievements, local activists pplayed asignificant role in the introduction, implementation, or continuationof many early national housing programs. Ottawa's housinginitiatives were not always unilateral actions in the development ofthe welfare state. The drive for social housing in Vancouvercomplemented the tradition of housing activism that already existed inthe United Kingdom and, to a lesser degree, in the United States. Jill Wade analyzes the housing problem that developed in Vancouverin the first half of this century: the chronic shortage of decentliving conditions for those of low income, and the occasional seriouscrisis in owned and rented dwellings for others of middle income.Beginning in 1919 with the Better Housing Scheme and concluding in theearly 1950s with the construction of Little Mountain, the first publichousing project in Vancouver, the book also chronicles the responses ofgovernments and activists alike to the city's residentialconditions. It highlights the spirited, yet frustrated, campaign forlow-rental housing in the late 1930s and the more successful, sometimesmilitant, drive for relief during the housing emergency of the 1940s.Fascinating and informative, Houses for All repairs thecurious rupture in the collective historical memory that has leftVancouverites of the 1990s unaware of previous housing crises and pastactivism and achievements.