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HUMPHREY CARVER
Humphrey Carver, who devised the rent - geared - to - income system that became the basis for public housing rents across Canada, died this past October at the age of 92. The Oxford - educated architect devoted his working life to the cause of public housing as an educator, activist, writer and a chairman with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. Humphrey Carver was the most influential housing planner in post - war Canada. Involved in policy development at Central Mortgage and Housing Corp. from the beginning, and author of the influential 1948 book "Houses for Canadians" which sets out the blueprint suburban development followed without much further reflection through the next two decades, Carver played a key role in the key government institution that created and supported the corporate suburbs and the high - rise apartments that supplied most of the living accommodation for the country's quickly - growing urban population. Among his books was "Compassionate Landscape", published in 1975, in which he gave an inside look at the CMHC, where he felt like "an environmentalist lost in a crowd of mortgage lenders." He was the planner most responsible for Toronto's Regent Park, Canada's oldest and largest public housing development. In "Compassionate Landscape" Mr. Carver points to it with some pride, although the execution was skimped and its history has not been a happy one.
Mr. Carver was among the group that formed the Co - operative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner of the NDP, in the 1930s. He also wrote for the "Canadian Forum". Before the Second World War he was on the staff of the University of Toronto as a lecturer at the school of architecture and after World War II as a research associate with the university's school of social work. In 1948, he moved to Ottawa to become chairman of the CMHC's research committee. In 1955, he was appointed chairman of its advisory group. In "Compassionate Landscape" he wrote that there were no community activists there in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. In 1978, "City Magazine" published an excerpt from his contribution to the book "Suburbia: Costs, Consequences and Alternatives", published by the Urban Studies Program, York University, which also includes articles by Frank Lewinberg, Anne...