Since its inception fifty years ago, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has played a dominant role in the development of Canadian housing. Although the policy mechanisms and directions have expanded over the years, the primary role of CMHC has remained consistent since 1946; to promote home ownership by reducing the risk inherent in mortgage loans, to financial institutions. This policy predates CMHQ in 1935 the Dominion Housing Act (DHA) initiated joint lending on mortgages between lenders and the federal government The joint-lending arrangement continued with the National Housing Act in 1938 and responsibility for its administration was inherited by CMHC A basic shift in policy occurred in 1954 when joint lending was replaced with the current programme of mortgage insurance.
Although state-assisted mortgage policy is often cited to have been central to the building of the post-war suburb in Canada, empirical analysis is lacking. This paper analyses the socio-spatial impact of the DHA through use of original mortgage files. DHA-sponsored mortgage lending featured pronounced class and geographical biases. Although a suburban orientation was present from the beginning, the middle classes were generally unable to participate.
Along international borders, spillover of resource management issues is a growing challenge. Development of cross-border regions (CBRs) is seen as an emerging means of addressing these issues. A set of theoretical models, geo-economic mobilization and a resource-focused territorial program of place-making have been proposed as a lens for understanding why such change could occur. From this theory, we identify three C's as critical initial or necessary conditions to start the process: common territorial identity, convergence of knowledge and values, willingness for cooperation. We then utilize results of a Delphi study in the Fraser Lowland, a sub-district of the American-Canadian Cascadia borderland, to test if these three are present and actively working together. Our analysis based on both cumulative logit and mixed-effect modeling confirms the active existence of the three C's demonstrating the value of these theoretical models. However, the Delphi also shows that not all in this region are convinced of cross-border convergence and case studies provide mixed signals of successful cross-border resource management, indicating that sufficient conditions are yet to be fully met. Thus, our results confirm the value of these models as a lens to view events, but leave many questions to be researched.
An enduring theme in Canadian federal housing policy is promotion of home ownership through state‐supported institutional mortgage finance. This article studies National Housing Act (NHA) mortgage lending that occurred in Vancouver in 1951, at the outset of the post‐war era. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) archival mortgage files, which constitute the data source for this article, have rarely been used in academic scholarship and never previously for study of NHA lending patterns. The objective of this study is twofold: (1) to provide a detailed description of such lending in Vancouver for 1951, identify trends in the data, and make comparisons with the 1951 Census; and (2) evaluate a widespread view in the literature that the NHA promoted post‐war suburbanization. The article also demonstrates the potential utility of this unique data source for the study of Canadian urban geography.
In the literature, Canadian federal housing policy is most often considered to be a post‐Second World War phenomenon and to have been effectively initiated, at least in an institutional sense, with the establishment of Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (chmc) in 1945 (Bettison, 1975; Hatch. 1975; Rose, 1980). It is generally accepted that the state was led to intervene in the private housing market as a result of an unprecedented demand from returning servicemen. This demand was heightened by increasing levels of disposable income and exacerbated by reduced levels of housing production during the war. In this scenario. the state is seen to have been responding to a specific market crisis; the response resulted in the creation of various agencies, most notably cmhc, and in National Housing Act amendments, virtually all of which took place in the post‐war era.
The ‘market‐crisis’ perspective to the study of federal housing policy tends to overlook the initiation of state monetary and credit system management during the 1930s and its implications for the form of state intervention in housing during the 1940s and beyond. I wish to make a case here for pushing back the study boundaries to at least the early 1930s in conjunction with a brief examination of the Central Mortgage Bank (cmb). The argument is that the essential ‘actors’ in the determination of housing policy at the federal level (i.e. the Department of Finance, the institutional lenders [particularly the insurance companies], and the provinces) came to be delineated in the 1930s around the issue of debt management in the wake of widespread mortgage default, especially in the rural districts of the prairie provinces. The cmb, although never becoming active, is seen here as the first substantial collaboration between the state and finance capital in the area of residential mortgage lending practices. It represents an additional facet of state monetary and credit system management that proceeded apace with the formation of the Bank of Canada in 1935.
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