Retrofitting buildings in cities is crucial for municipalities to reduce carbon emissions, but resources primarily target market housing, often neglecting affordable housing.
The Urban Land Institute, a global network of urban developers dedicated to responsible land use and sustainable communities, has released a plan to scale up affordable housing retrofits to help Vancouver to meet its net-zero targets.
“We eventually came up with the typical roadmap that people would go through when they go through an exercise of retrofitting affordable housing, and just really identify what those roadblocks were, when they were happening, why, and how we could help,” said Vincent Delfaud, Chair of the BC’s ULI Global Net Zero Imperative in B.C.
To search for answers, the institute’s B.C. branch embarked on a study to identify challenges. They chose Alexander House, an 81-unit seniors' residence in Vancouver, as a case study, said Delfaud, who also works for developer Bosa Properties.
An expert advisory panel that includes engineers, affordable housing organizations, contractors, and BC Hydro dug in to do the research, which was funded by the Urban Land Institute’s Global Net Zero Imperative, an initiative to promote decarbonization in the building environment. They found the affordable seniors’ housing was in rough shape and deteriorating fast.
“Most of those housing units that we see in the market here in the Greater Vancouver area are aging at a dramatic pace, and the living conditions are getting pretty dire for the tenants that occupy the units,” Delfaud said.
Buildings in Vancouver account for 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, and “affordable housing has a share of that,” Delfaud said. Since mitigating emissions from affordable housing is not a priority for Vancouver, the risk is completely ignoring the potential issue, which could result in those buildings performing worse over time, he added.
Canada needs to retrofit about 600,000 homes every year starting in 2024, according to a study the institute issued last year. The City of Vancouver website reports there are 500,000 buildings in Metro Vancouver, including multifamily residential, schools, offices, shops and industrial buildings, and those account for four million tonnes of carbon emissions each year — a quarter of Metro Vancouver’s total emissions. Delfaud said only a “very small” number of buildings have already been retrofitted, and that’s the biggest issue the city is facing in reaching the national carbon-cutting goals.
The worst residential emitters are wood frame buildings, Delfaud said. “So it's very easy to demolish a wood frame building. It doesn't really cost a lot of carbon and energy to do that.”
Alexander House is a concrete building, the type most deserving of the city’s retrofitting efforts, he said.
Demolishing concrete buildings requires more effort in terms of energy and produced fossil fuels. “So there's a balance of emissions that's really tilting the other way once you start looking at concrete buildings,” Delfaud said.
Despite advancements in new building technologies and energy models, Delfaus said high costs, a lack of retrofitting skills and unreliable data regarding buildings can halt or slow the entire retrofitting operations.
“You have to really understand where you're going, how to get there, to be able to run that successfully and go through all of those roadblocks in a proper fashion. Otherwise, you will hit them, and the exercise is then moot.”
Some of the recommendations from the institute’s report include streamlining the entire retrofit process through a clear roadmap, simplifying access to funding and application requirements, and outlining emission reduction strategies by the city.
But it’s the quality of life of the people who will occupy the buildings that should be the top priority for any retrofitting project, an element that for Delfaud “should be actually almost the heart of it all and it's often completely left aside.”
“The way people live in the building is impacting energy consumption, is impacting the quality of life, is impacting how people go about their lives. In my opinion, decarbonizing is not just making better climate impact,” he said. “There's a climate emergency, but there's also a societal emergency to lift people up and really get them to a better place in life, and decarbonizing is an opportunity to do that.”
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