How Toronto’s army barracks became shelters almost 80 years ago
By Karen Black, TVO Today, December 10, 2024
During the Second World War and for a decade after, Canada faced an unprecedented housing crisis. People had flocked to cities to work at munitions plants, causing a severe housing shortage, and the return of Canada’s 620,000 veterans only exacerbated the situation.
The crisis was especially acute in Toronto, a magnet for post-war immigration. In response, the federal government moved more than 1,000 homeless families into army barracks. “Not many people are aware that former army barracks housed more than 5,000 people well into the early 1950s,” says Kevin Brushett, an associate professor at Royal Military College of Canada. “In the eyes of most Canadians, homeless people and emergency shelters are recent problems.”
By 1944, one of the most pressing issues was the number of families facing eviction. With more people flocking to the city, landlords often kicked out existing tenants so that they could rent to those who could pay more or had fewer children. The situation was so dire that the federal government ignored the protests of “real estate men” and placed strict regulations on landlords, forbidding them from evicting tenants.
Despite the new controls, the number of homeless families continued to grow. In August 1945, the federal government decided the crisis had become so severe that it would have to take further action — and moved to repurpose recently vacated army barracks into emergency shelters.
Little Norway, built at the foot of Bathurst Street, near the waterfront, to house Norwegian airmen sent to Canada to train, became the first emergency shelter, housing 100 families with about 300 children.
Stanley Barracks, the 31-building military complex located on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, had been slated for demolition after the war. But because of the housing crisis, the federal government turned it over to the city to use for emergency housing. The first building to be occupied — the former officers’ quarters and the only remnant of the 1841 “New Fort” still standing, now forming part of Hotel X — became a temporary home for 18 families, says Aldona Sendzikas, an associate professor at Western university and the author of Stanley Barracks, Toronto’s MilitaryLegacy. As of 1947, 332 adults and 440 children were living in the barracks.
“By 1949, there were 144 apartments, and those apartments were fully occupied,” says Sendzikas. “There were night watchmen who made rounds every night, and their reports have references to zoot suiters coming in and causing trouble and tenants being noisy or unruly.”
Three other war-time barracks — Victory Aircraft in Malton; Small Arms Limited, near Long Branch; and General Engineering Co. Ltd, a top-secret munitions plant in Scarborough — were also converted into emergency shelters. “The conversions to emergency housing were very much done on the cheap,” says Brushett. “Part of the thinking was that, if the housing wasn’t too commodious, that would convince people to leave. They did not want to create the precedents for a larger public-housing program.”
In the summer of 1947, the Toronto Star described life at Stanley Barracks for the Fegan family. Jake, his wife, and their 14 children lived in a two-room apartment about 18 by 25 feet overall, the Toronto Star said. They shared a community washroom with toilets sinks and showers, though none of the showers was working. “There are leaky pipes and pools of water on the floor and the tenants have to carry water from the washrooms to their rooms for daily needs.”
One of the biggest issues was a lack of play space and unsafe conditions for children.
At the Long Branch shelter, seven-year-old Ross Drury drowned while playing near an abandoned water-filled cement foundation. “The dead lad, one of a family of nine, lived in the barracks with his family,” the Toronto Star reported. The tragedy happened a day before Ross and one of his sisters were to have been adopted. Ross’s father said he was giving the children up because “we are so crowded here and this is no place for children.”
In May 1949, city council hired private realtor Harold Locke to manage the shelter program. But conditions continued to worsen.
One of the most stinging rebukes of the emergency shelters came in a report to city council in October 1954 from the Association of Women Electors. “There is no justification for wasting further money on outworn army barracks that have become hovels conducive to every from of mental and moral degradation,” it stated.
Public outrage led the city to take back control and to step up efforts to find housing, with the goal of closing the shelters. But for many families, there was nowhere to go — and it was not until 1958, when the crisis had eased slightly, that the last shelter was closed.
Brushett says the story of Toronto’s post-war emergency-shelter program shows that “when put in an emergency, governments can act fairly quickly.” But, he adds, it also highlights the fact that, for generations, Canadian governments have been “allergic” to public-housing programs, preferring to rely on the private market — and “today, Toronto reaps the seeds of that.”
