Postwar subdivisions with known build dates
In older Nepean you can usually tell roughly when a house was built from the subdivision it sits in. Carleton Heights was built for veterans under the Veterans’ Land Act, with most homes not built until around 1950, as small houses on large lots. Bel-Air Park’s homes were all built between 1956 and 1958 by Campeau, and Bel-Air Heights followed in 1959 and 1960. Copeland Park’s first house went up in 1956. Parkwood Hills was planned by architect John Russell in 1959 and built out between 1959 and 1972, largely by Minto, with many singles of around 1,200 square feet. City View’s homes were built mostly from the 1930s to the 1960s. Plywood became the standard subfloor after the war, so most of these houses typically have plywood sheets nailed to dimensional joists; City View’s older houses and the earliest Carleton Heights homes can still have boards laid diagonally across the joists. Little of it has been replaced: in the Carleton Heights census tract, 80.6 per cent of homes predate 1981 and only 2.6 per cent were built after 2000 (Statistics Canada, 2021 Census Profile). Barrhaven, part of the City of Nepean until 2001, is a different case: it was established in the 1960s and most of its growth came later.
