Carolyn Whitzman’s Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis was published in October.
If anyone is qualified to solve the mystery of how Canada’s housing disaster began, and what can be done about it, it’s Carolyn Whitzman, BA 86.
The Ottawa-based Whitzman, who has been writing, opining and educating others about the challenges of affordable housing for decades, recently published the prescriptive policy primer Home Truths: Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis (UBC Press).
In Home Truths, Whitzman, who was recently appointed senior housing researcher and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, looks at how Canada has “essentially neglected non-market housing — public, cooperative and community housing — which is directly correlated to growing homelessness and the affordability problem.”
The problem began in the 1940s, Whitzman writes, when the government of Prime Minister Mackenzie King supplied housing to Canadian workers involved in the war effort and to returning veterans. Victory Houses — tens of thousands of simply designed homes known as “strawberry boxes” — supplied affordable homes to single-earner households between 1944 and 1960.
“Those houses could have been preserved as affordable starter homes by keeping the land leases in government hands and restricting the prices of resales, but the federal government wasn’t interested in being in that business,” Whitzman says. “That was missed opportunity number one.”
The second catalyst for today’s housing crisis, Whitzman adds, was providing a principal residence exemption to the capital-gains tax. “This promoted housing as an investment rather than housing as a place to live,” she says, noting how this perpetuated a cycle of ‘house flipping’ that further put housing out of reach for many Canadians.
On the housing approaches she has seen work effectively, Whitzman credits the province of Quebec. She says, “It never got the exclusionary single-family dwelling zoning happening all across Canada. If you look at, say, Vancouver, more than 80 per cent of the residential land there was zoned for single-family units, while Quebec was embracing the plex culture, as in duplexes and fourplexes, and small apartment buildings.”
She is also optimistic about another province’s take on effective housing policy. She is impressed with how British Columbia’s government is boosting affordable non-market and Indigenous housing on government land and reforming the building code to improve accessibility.
From open houses to closing the book on a Toronto murder
Growing up in Montreal, Whitzman’s interest in housing began with her mother, who worked as a real-estate agent. “I used to spend a lot of time going to open houses and thinking about why certain homes were priced the way they were,” she recalls.
Attending Concordia to major in geography (now human environment) “was the best decision I ever made,” Whitzman says. “I especially loved that third-year field trip to Ireland with [professor emeritus] Robert Aiken, because I was always fascinated by historical geography.”
Another key memory from her days as a Concordia student? It’s where she met her now husband, David Hunt, who was the editor of The Link student newspaper at the time.
Being a self-described “policy wonk” inspired Whitzman to embark on a “second career” as she calls it. She moved to Australia to become a professor of urban planning at the University of Melbourne.
Along the way, she wrote mainly academic books, such as Suburb, Slum, Urban Village: Transformations in a Toronto’s Parkdale Neighbourhood 1875-2002, and Building Inclusive Cities: Women’s Safety and the Right to the City. But when she was working on her PhD in housing policy in 2001 at McMaster University, she found a Toronto story that inspired her to delve into true-crime writing.
Clara Ford, a 33-year-old working-class Black woman and single mother, was accused of murder in the October 1894 death of Frank Westwood, a wealthy white man whose family lived in a luxurious home in Parkdale. During the trial, Ford took the stand in her own defence and was acquitted after sharing that she had first confessed under duress after being kept by police for hours without access to counsel.
Released in 2023, Clara at the Door with a Revolver, was the culmination of Whitzman’s 20-year obsession with Clara’s story. The title won the 2024 Heritage Toronto Book Award, and has been optioned by a theatrical production company in the United Kingdom.
“This was by far the most fun I had writing because it gave me the chance to write something outside of my professional work.”
While there is no third book in three years on the horizon, Whitzman looks forward to continuing her housing advocacy, which includes a recent research paper for the Institute for Research on Public Policy in Montreal.
“We can enable low-cost housing,” she says. “The tools are there. We just need the political will at all three levels of government.”