Back When: The Past, Present and Future of Canada's Housing Agency

Less than a year after the end of the Second World War, Canada created what later became the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Over the next four decades, the national institution saw its job as making sure that all Canadians were properly housed. At first, CMHC helped put roofs over the heads of returning Canadian forces in the country's biggest-ever boom in setting up family life. Two decades later, it invented social housing and co-ops in Canada. It demonstrated how housing could be designed to weave entire communities together, in places like Vancouver's South False Creek neighborhood.