community housing can play a leadership role

A year ago I would have assumed that it would be difficult to incorporate measures in low-cost community housing that would improve the sustainability performance of the buildings. For one thing, budgets are very tight. For another, community housing projects are led by government departments that tend to put carbon impacts low on their agendas. They have bigger issues to worry about, what with huge housing backlogs and tenants who can barely pay the rent and buy groceries every month.

Today, the challenges are the same, but the response is starting to change. I've blogged previously about the Cape Town Kuyasa housing project that incorporates solar water heating, insulated ceilings and energy-efficient lighting (and was a CDM project under the Kyoto Protocol).

Now in Toronto, the Community Housing Corporation (CHC) even has a green plan manager who is cutting the greenhouse gas emissions produced by their projects, and cutting their own costs along the way.

On a tour [of one of the CHC buildings], the manager points out all the green fixtures: low-flow toilets and shower heads in all 215 apartments; energy-efficient fridges, stoves and washers; compact fluorescent light bulbs in every socket; new and well-sealed balcony doors; and, in the basement, four spanking new efficient boilers. The exhaust is recaptured on the roof and used to preheat the air circulating into the hallways.

And this is not only in new buildings:

So far, the housing corporation has spent around $90 million on energy retrofits and thus cut its annual greenhouse gas emissions by 19,000 tonnes – the equivalent of taking about 10,000 cars off the road every year.

What makes this achievement even more remarkable is that this ecological saving is coming off an already small footprint. These tenants are "not living in 3,000-square-foot houses in the suburbs and driving their SUVs 50 miles to work and back every day," they are the city's poor. But there are lots of them, occuping 2,000 buildings run by the CHC, and only a few buildings have received this sustainability makeover, so the potential carbon reduction for the city is significant. And it's not being done for ethical reasons, but purely as a cost saving measure. Other developers should be taking note.