Flattered But Not Imitated: Co-operative Self-Help and the Nova Scotia Housing Commission, 1936-1973
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IN 1938 THE NOVA SCOTIA HOUSING COMMISSION initiated the first in a series of small housing projects that offered a distinctive solution to the problem of housing low-income families. Combining co-operation, self-help and state financing, this solution was codified as a plan which was taken up by groups in various settings.1 Between 1940 and 1973 the Commission was responsible for the construction of 5,475 affordable homes. Tompkinsville, the original project located at Reserve Mines, received widespread attention throughout Canada and the United States and the commissioners claimed that it was noteworthy as the first enterprise of its kind upon the Continent.2 Many observers held it up as an inexpensive model that should be applied elsewhere. For example, in 1940 writer claimed that it was one of the finest co-operative housing schemes to be found on this continent . . . which might well serve as a model for slum-clearance projects everywhere.3 In retrospect such flattery appears shallow. After 1945 the demand for inexpensive owner-occupied homes was enormous, but the scheme was rarely copied, and after a few years, it was largely forgotten outside the Atlantic Region. By 1956 the author of an international survey of co-op housing could describe the Nova Scotia plan as successful, but relatively unknown.4 Except for occasional enthusiastic references from partisan cooperators, the same has remained true to the present.5
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".