Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto's American Tragedy, 1900-1950.

Richard Harris' Unplanned Suburbs is a superb study of working-class suburbanization in Toronto during the first half of the twentieth century. Harris not only documents the process and patterns of Toronto's early twentieth-century working-class suburbs, but carefully places Toronto in the larger context of the North American experience. Richly documented and imaginatively argued, Unplanned Suburbs makes an excellent contribution to the history of suburbanization.

Harris' major contribution lies in his argument regarding the extent of owner-built housing in Toronto's working-class suburbs. According to his calculations, during the early twentieth century approximately 22% of Toronto's new housing, ranging up to 86% in some of the outer suburbs, involved workers building their own homes. This conclusion contradicts many of the earlier assumptions by historians that houses were either built by speculative builders or filtered down to workers from an upwardly mobile middle class, and should prompt a rethinking of how the city-building process actually functioned in North American cities during the early years of the twentieth century.

In order to establish the extent of owner building, Harris relies mostly on the creative use of assessment records. The incidence of homes built below a minimum monetary threshold, or dramatically differing in value from their neighbors, are just two of the more inventive clues Harris uses to determine the extent of owner-built housing. Recognizing the risks associated with this type of deductive reasoning, Harris is careful not only to explain fully his process and the conservative nature of his conclusions, but to support them with additional documentation whenever possible, including interviews, family reminiscences, contemporary newspaper accounts, photographs and personal investigation of neighborhood housing stock. The result is a very convincing analysis that clearly substantiates his thesis that Toronto's workers took it upon themselves to construct their own houses in order to attain the widely held dream of a home in the suburbs, however modest that home might have been.

Harris also does a nice job documenting the extent to which workers were willing to sacrifice time, comfort and convenience to obtain homes of their own. In some cases, locating on the urban fringe allowed workers to substitute proximity to workplaces for lower housing costs. Primary wage earners often walked substantial distances to work in order to take advantage of lower land costs in areas on the urban fringe poorly served by transit. Even when transit was available, many workers continued to walk in order to save the extra expense of commuting.

Time was not the only luxury Toronto's workers were willing to sacrifice to achieve homeownership. To the dismay of many middle-class reformers of the day, working-class families were also willing to sacrifice privacy, by taking in lodgers, and efficiency, that "all-embracing term used to denote domestic comforts, municipal services, and ready accessibility to centers of employment." (p. 16) Harris documents the extent of lodging among Toronto's workers, noting periods of rise and decline, and provides both analytical and anecdotal evidence of the hardships imposed by the lack of modern sanitary conveniences. In addition, Harris notes that many workers followed industries relocating to the suburbs. The proximity of factories and their belching smokestacks did little to tarnish the allure of suburban living for certain members of Toronto's working classes. The bucolic ideal of a home in the suburbs far removed from the dirty grime of the city was a middle-class ideal; home ownership in and of itself seemed enough to satisfy many of Toronto's workers. By examining these issues in careful detail, Harris helps establish firmly that workers' perspectives on the benefits of homeownership were, not surprisingly, different from those of the middle class.

The key to the success of owner-built suburbs, and, according to Harris, their tragic flaw as well, was the lack of public planning for infrastructure development. The absence of municipal sewer and water connections, as well as paved streets, substantially lowered the cost of building on the urban fringe. In fact, owner-built housing flourished in those areas where housing restrictions and controls were weakest. The dense settlement pattern resulting from the small size of the lots these workers could afford exacerbated the problems associated with the lack of municipal services. Although workers were prepared to forgo many of the conveniences middle-class reformers thought essential, in the end it was not to be. As overall metropolitan sanitary standards rose, workers found themselves ill prepared to pay the higher taxes that the eventual installation of municipal services required. The spiraling costs associated with the provision of services to these unplanned suburbs drove many of the poorest members of the working class out of their homes. In a curious twist on a common assumption, in this case suburban housing did not filter down from middle-class to working-class families, but instead filtered up to those families most able to afford the increasing costs of municipal services. Ultimately, the solution to the problems posed by the unplanned suburb was to raise minimum building standards, thereby excluding the owner builder from participating in the attainment of at least a modest version of the suburban ideal; this, to Harris, represents the greatest tragedy of the unplanned suburb.

The insights Harris gains by piecing together the suburban experience of Toronto's workers offers an important corrective to an analysis largely informed by studies of exclusive middle-class suburbs. Documenting the strategies and tactics workers used to achieve and maintain their own homes allows us to better understand the true nature of city building. By comparing Toronto's experience with that of other cities in the United States and Canada, Harris is able to set his conclusions firmly in the larger North American context. Richly illustrated with maps, photographs, tables and graphs, Unplanned Suburbs is a marvelous example of what can be achieved in a case study of a single city. Harris not only convincingly locates workers in the suburbs, but cites the owner builder as an important force in the process of North American city building.

Steven J. Hoffman Southeast Missouri State University