Nobody's Home

Book excerpt: The scourge of the monster house affects communities all across Canada, so while the Toronto neighbourhood of York Mills is not unique in this respect, it has suffered more than most, owing to the generous size of its residential lots in what has now become the centre of the city. York Mills was still a rural community until after the Second World War, when a post-war population boom created a housing boom that gobbled up the local woods and farmland. By 1960 most of this land had been sacrificed for housing, and by the mid-1970s it was all gone. Then a strange thing began to happen. Developers, who had the money to outbid legitimate home buyers, started tearing down perfectly liveable post-war homes to build monster houses. Today, over fifty years later, this destructive practice continues. The environmental costs have been devastating, as affordable houses are demolished—their remains dumped in landfills—and mature trees are cut down to facilitate the new construction: construction that demands copious amounts of wood, cement, and other new building materials. The social cost has been equally damaging, as affordable homes are destroyed and replaced by multi-million-dollar houses that are out of reach of families who once called these neighbourhoods home. The three hundred colour photos in this book recall but a fraction of the homes we have lost in this one community alone. The text tells their stories, stories that take us back to a time when houses were places to live, not get-rich-quick schemes.