Deep retrofit Towers and surrounding communities for a low carbon future: Our sizeable legacy of post-war residential towers collectively produce several megatonnes of greenhouse gases each year and are among the most carbon-intensive housing types in Canada’s urban centres. However, these towers are uniquely positioned to emerge as models for low-energy retrofit. Deep retrofits can reduce their impact by as much as 80%, while also modernizing this housing typology for the next generation. Engaging in deep retrofits provides a platform…

In August, the Tower Renewal Partnership (TRP) conducted new analysis on incenting nation-wide comprehensive tower retrofits. In particular, tax incentives were modelled and evaluated to understand how they could be used to achieve public policy goals around affordability and renewal. As the federal election approached, this analysis, coupled with existing TRP research formed a suite of federal policy recommendations to further advance and implement wide-scale tower renewal. The advantage of working with tax incentives to address policy priorities like GHG…

Canada has a remarkable legacy of postwar tower housing that defines many of our urban centres. There are nearly 2,000 postwar apartment towers located throughout Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe Region alone, representing nearly half of the region’s affordable rental stock. Supported by government policy and incentives, hundreds of thousands of units of apartment block housing were built in the postwar years throughout the country. This housing was mostly privately developed, intended to house the middle- and working-class populations. Today, this housing accounts…