Canada needs 3.5M additional homes to achieve any level of affordability | CMHC
Peter McCartney: Millions of new homes could make or break response to climate crisis
Peter McCartney
The Vancouver Sun
Opinion: Regulators need to be willing to set strict green building codes that come into effect now, not after these millions of new homes already exist
Construction cranes tower above condos under construction near southeast False Creek in Vancouver. Photo by DARRYL DYCK /THE CANADIAN PRESS
Canada’s foremost authority on housing has thrown down a gauntlet that will shape this country for decades to come. How it plays out could also have an enormous impact on the planet.
There are just over 16 million homes in Canada. By 2030, building at current rates, we’ll reach 18.59 million. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, to achieve any level of affordability we’ll need an additional 3.5 million by then. That’s a total of six million new homes.
Whether these homes come in the form of sprawling subdivisions or compact communities will determine if Canada succeeds in meeting its climate goals and safeguarding the natural world.
If all this new construction paves over wetlands, forests and fields to build endless cul-de-sacs that force everyone to drive a car, it will lock people into a polluting lifestyle.
A better path involves a total rethink of our communities to include more new neighbours, more green space and more public transit so all this new housing can actually help fight climate change. A recent U.S. study found that doubling the population density of an urban area cuts carbon pollution from household travel almost in half.
Transportation is second only to the fossil fuel industry in terms of Canada’s carbon pollution. Buildings, mostly due to gas furnaces and boilers, come up a distant third. While electric vehicles are better for the climate, they still take up valuable resources, space and money. Our best solution to reducing transportation emissions is to make it possible for most Canadians to take public transit, walk, roll or bike to work, instead.
Frequent transit service requires significant ridership. Meanwhile, we have millions of new homes to build. Putting them in existing neighbourhoods would enable both current and future residents to ride the bus instead of driving. Unfortunately, even in bustling cities like Vancouver and Toronto, the vast majority of the land is still reserved for single-family homes.
In these places, the solutions seem obvious if not inevitable. Build towers on top of subway lines and upzone the rest of the city for mid-rise apartments. That would create a whole lot more homes close to where there’s already pretty effective transit.
But what about communities built since the advent of the cul-de-sac? How does a place like Calgary or Kitchener or Abbotsford make taking the bus a viable option?
Picture a typical neighbourhood built around a modern strip mall. There’s usually a grocery store, a pharmacy, a bank, a dentist’s office, and often a chain restaurant or a local pub. In larger centres, you’ll also find a movie theatre, a few big box retailers and some fast food restaurants. But look on a map, and most of what you’ll see is parking. Much of the prime real estate in our cities is currently used to store people’s vehicles.
If you want to encourage transit use and build more homes, replace these spacious parking lots with apartments. They don’t necessarily need to be highrise towers, although some certainly should be, but even six storeys on top of ground-level retail shops would add thousands of new neighbours, customers and transit-riders to an area. Allow the surrounding single-family homes to slowly convert to multiplexes or townhomes, and you’ve got yourself a vibrant community and enough people within walking distance to justify a new major rapid transit station.
Regulators also need to be willing to set strict green building codes that come into effect now, not after these millions of new homes already exist. This means banning gas connections, requiring less polluting materials, designing for passive heat and cooling, and ensuring far better insulation. Having these measures come online in the 2030s, once we’ve already built millions of new polluting buildings, would be a catastrophic failure of climate policy.
Given the urgency of the many crises we’re facing, we cannot afford to tackle them one at a time. Our solutions to the housing crisis must also help us respond to the climate crisis. If we just keep building polluting homes and neighbourhoods, they will only wind up underwater or up in flames eventually.
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