Smoothing the National Landscape: Life-World

The professional appraisals of the Flats reflected the social Darwinist understanding of “natural” neighbourhood change. These descriptions were part a desire to the move the Flats “forward” – and to forget the working landscape of the past.

The neighbourhood descriptions contained within individual property assessments charted the “natural decline “of the central city, assessed the desirability of the neighbourhood, and expressed a pointed desire for the Flats to “progress forward.” Yet, this socio-technical process would overlook the working landscape of the past, the French-Canadian and Irish background of the majority of the working-class residents, a growing Italian community, and a smaller Lebanese community as it experienced significant postwar migration that had altered the Irish, British and French-Canadian of the area. In fact, contrary to reports marking the Flats as a transient area, many residents had lived on the Flats for several decades. In 1951 over 77 per cent of all the dwellings had been occupied by the same residents for more than five years.

While real estate specialists, town planners, federal politicians, and civic boosters hankered for the redevelopment of the Flats, the expropriation and demolition would also sever community and family ties.

For example, the widower Mrs. Cora Albert, who had lived on the Flats for 36 years expressed her displeasure: “I’m not too happy to move because this is my home and my family is all happily settled here”. Her two daughters and a son rented the three other units of the four-unit row house, and had recently undertaken several renovations.

In fact, despite the narrative of decline, many individual land-owners had improved the overall condition of the building stock. Yet such rehabilitations in the view of appraisers, only ‘retarded the deterioration of the area as a whole’ and were only slowing down the ‘natural’ decline of the area.

Many appraisers blamed the ‘integration of the Italian Ethnic group,’ for the ‘unnatural’ upswing in housing prices in the area. In the racialized view of experts, these ongoing familial lending practices and multi-generational homes were deemed by the experts to be out of step with the postwar norms of institutional lending and the nuclear family ideal.