British Columbia’s shift toward climate-resilient, affordable housing is transforming lives, lowering emissions, and protecting vulnerable communities.

The day Margaret Wanyoike moved her family to an affordable apartment in New Westminster, British Columbia, her son asked her a question about their new home.

“He said to me, ‘Mom, is this the way that rich people breathe when they are in the house?’ ” Wanyoike remembers.

Wanyoike, her son, and her daughter moved into their three-bedroom apartment in September 2024. It’s one of 96 apartments in an affordable rental building, operated by the Lu’ma Native Housing Society and the Swahili Vision International Association. Half the homes in the building are rented to members of the Indigenous community, and the other half to Black community members.

Wanyoike, who works as a volunteer with the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition, pays $775 for the bright, second-floor apartment facing New Westminster Secondary School, where her son, Darrell, is in Grade 10. 

Sitting at her kitchen table in front of a glass bowl of white damask roses as spring rain beats against the windows, Wanyoike describes her home as “heaven” — a stark contrast from the family’s previous living space, where she was paying $2,600 per month in rent and had poor ventilation, unreliable appliances and few windows.

“In the other building, I had mice, I had bedbugs, I had mold,” she says.

Like many older buildings in B.C., Wanyoike’s former home also lacked air conditioning, making her family vulnerable during the summer, which is growing increasingly hot and smoky in the Lower Mainland due to climate change. She says wildfire smoke in the summer of 2021 triggered an asthma attack in her daughter, forcing a trip to the local hospital’s emergency room.

Wanyoike vividly remembers the record-setting heat dome that same year, calling it “the worst days of my life.” The Wanyoikes relied on fans to try to keep their home cool in the intense heat, which the BC Coroners Service says directly contributed to the deaths of more than 600 people.

Many people who died were seniors living in older, multi-unit housing in urban areas — housing ill-equipped for extreme temperatures, where renters must contend with life-threatening heat, health hazards from wildfire smoke, or uncomfortable cold when a bone-chilling Arctic outflow settles in during the winter.

Affordable housing can help address climate challenges, such as wildfire smoke.

B.C., like other provinces, is facing a growing housing crisis. New provincial laws aim to make it easier to build more housing quickly, a difficult task at a time when prices for everything from labour to land are increasing. While crisis responses can often prioritize cost reduction or expedited timelines over environmental standards, advocates believe that housing affordability and climate action should be mutually aligned.

As B.C. attempts to address the housing crisis, it states that investing in non-market, climate-resilient social housing is part of the solution. Wanyoike’s current home was built to meet high standards set out in B.C.’s “energy step code,” designed to make buildings more energy efficient. The voluntary code sets guidelines for ensuring buildings are well-insulated and airtight — features that also help protect residents from the effects of extreme temperatures and poor air quality. 

To ensure the homes in Wanyoike’s building were affordable, the B.C. government provided support through its Community Housing Fund, which offers financing to community organizations building rental homes. Seventy per cent of a building’s units must be affordable to qualify, with rent geared to tenants’ incomes or deeply subsidized. The remaining homes can be rented at market rates, helping to subsidize other units. 

Jill Atkey, CEO of the BC Non-Profit Housing Association, says non-profit housing developers and operators are eager to find ways to build affordable housing that also addresses climate challenges. Government incentives, like B.C.’s Community Housing Fund and step code, also help drive climate-resilient construction, she adds.

“It’s helping [the] government meet two of their key priorities,” she says — tackling the housing crisis and reducing carbon emissions. In 2022, about 12 per cent of B.C.’s total emissions came from residential and commercial buildings.

Recent changes to British Columbia Building Codes require all new residential buildings to include living space designed to reach temperatures no higher than 26 °C. Buildings must also be at least 20 percent more energy efficient than the code previously required. 

Rowan Burdge, provincial director of the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition, says the people least able to compete in overheated housing markets are also the most vulnerable to the dangers of extreme weather events driven by climate change.

“[They] have such little protection from environmental catastrophe, it’s pretty shocking to think about,” Burdge says in an interview. “If there’s a wildfire or a flood or an atmospheric river or whatever happens next, many of the people in poverty in B.C. would not have the tools to be able to protect themselves adequately — and that is quite scary.”

Housing affordability affects people across the socioeconomic spectrum, but places the most significant burden on those with the lowest incomes. The province’s income assistance program, which is available to people who are not able to work or do not earn enough to cover their basic needs, provides a maximum of $790 to cover shelter for a family of three like the Wanyoikes.

By comparison, in 2024, the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New Westminster was $1,935, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Across the Metro Vancouver area, which includes New Westminster, median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $2,300. And for anyone looking to rent in the area for the first time, or moving from a current rental, even a one-bedroom apartment frequently costs much more.

Market-driven housing is not a viable option for many of B.C.’s poorest residents, who often can’t afford even the smallest, oldest, and most poorly maintained homes available for rent. That’s where social housing — built and operated with funding provided by governments and built or run by non-profit organizations and government agencies — comes in. Rents are often adjusted based on a tenant’s income.

“The beauty of social housing is that it’s non-market housing, so it’s not being made for profit,” Burge says. 

Retrofitting older buildings without displacing vulnerable tenants

Kitsilano is a picturesque neighbourhood in one of Canada’s most beautiful cities. Home to the famous Kitsilano Beach on the west side of Vancouver, it features tree-lined streets and lush gardens surrounding single-family homes. While home and rent prices are more affordable than further west in the posh Point Grey neighbourhood, Kitsilano is a desirable place to live, and high rental prices reflect that.

One block away from the charming commercial district along Fourth Avenue, the Moreland Kennedy Building is a boxy concrete edifice, with its residents steps away from breathtaking views of English Bay, downtown Vancouver, and the North Shore Mountains.

Built in 1974, the six-storey apartment building, which provides 31 studio and one-bedroom rental homes for seniors, could have easily been demolished to make way for more modern housing, potentially displacing its vulnerable residents. Instead, it’s being retrofitted by Brightside Community Homes Foundation, a non-profit housing organization based in Vancouver. The retrofit has been carefully planned to allow residents to stay in their homes while the work is done.

“We take a building that’s older and has a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, move it to pretty close to net-zero, and introduce cooling — that’s amazing,” Brightside CEO William Azaroff says.

In addition to building and operating non-profit housing across Vancouver, Brightside has set itself “a very ambitious goal” to make its operations net-zero by 2035, Azaroff says.

“We’d rather be ambitious and perhaps need a couple more years than to take longer and look back and say, ‘I wonder if we could have done that sooner.’ ” 

Brightside is behind four residential developments that will yield 328 affordable homes across Vancouver. The foundation also manages 27 buildings in the city. Eight are managed under agreements with BC Housing, a Crown corporation responsible for developing and managing subsidized housing.

Retrofitting upgrades the structural and mechanical systems of aging dwellings to extend the building’s life, rather than tearing it down. For some buildings, retrofits can enhance energy efficiency and reduce emissions, providing a cost-effective and climate-friendly approach to maintaining the housing stock. A design initiative led by the Pembina Institute estimates the best retrofits can reduce a building’s energy use by up to 90 per cent and slash carbon emissions from building operations, such as heating and cooling systems, lighting, and appliances.

In some cases, Moreland Kennedy is one — retrofits can be done while residents remain in their homes. This avoids displacing people who may struggle to pay higher rents in a new home and helps maintain housing affordability.

“The longer that building stays in place, the more likely that those lower rents are available to those people that reside in that building,” Roberto Pecora, director of building decarbonization with the Zero Emissions Innovation Centre, a charitable organization focused on helping communities drop their emissions to zero, tells The Narwhal.

“If you were to tear it down, even if you were to build a much higher-density housing complex in that space, generally it’s a tide that lifts all the rents.”

Money should not ‘dictate’ access to clean air: Brightside CEO 

Moreland Kennedy ticks many boxes that a building needs to be a candidate for retrofitting: its mechanical systems are reaching the end of their lifespans, and its carbon emissions are high due to poorly insulated windows and other issues.

The building’s windows will be replaced to improve energy efficiency, while a heat pump system will replace the current gas boiler. The building was constructed with internal garbage chutes, a bonus feature that makes adding a cooling system — something Moreland Kennedy currently lacks — easier and cheaper. 

Azaroff points out that including cooling and filtration systems is crucial in both retrofits and new builds, particularly at a time when climate change has transformed summers into a wildfire season.

“All homes should have these things because why would you build a home today that doesn’t have some kind of cooling and some kind of filtration?” he asks. “This is not going to get any better anytime soon, and I don’t think money should be the dictating factor of having access to clean air and not dying of heat exhaustion.”

The Moreland Kennedy retrofit pencils out financially because Brightside expects to recoup its costs over 25 to 30 years, which is much longer than the typical three- to seven-year timeline for retrofit projects. Cost is a significant factor in determining what’s possible in the non-profit housing sphere, where tenants can’t bear the brunt of paying for retrofits through rent increases. But even people with lower incomes should be able to live in a comfortable home, Azaroff believes.

“I don’t think money should be the main determinant of who gets to live in a decent place.”

Building affordable housing does not mean higher costs.

While retrofits can help preserve affordable housing, the ongoing housing crisis can’t be solved without building new homes. Cracking B.C.’s affordability crisis by 2030 would require building 610,000 more new homes, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. That’s hundreds of thousands more homes than the agency expects will be built in the province, based on recent trends.

For affordable housing, the gap between what exists and what is needed is staggering. The Canadian Human Rights Commission estimates that the country needs approximately three million affordable homes for its poorest residents. That gap could grow to 4.3 million homes by 2031.

New homes cost more than existing ones, so it may seem counterintuitive that new residential buildings with top-of-the-line energy efficiency and climate resiliency standards can help address the housing gap for low-income individuals.

But Pecora, with the Zero Emission Innovation Centre, says building housing suited to today’s changing climate does not have to mean higher costs.

“It is possible, and that’s extremely important because a lot of people say it’s more expensive, it takes more time, but it’s not the case,” Pecora says. “There’s a growing number of developers who can do this for cost parity.”

A BC Housing analysis of 38 buildings found no clear correlation between increased cost and high-performance construction. The study included three buildings that met Passive House requirements, an international standard that requires low emissions, high energy efficiency, airtightness, and temperature stability. Despite the additional requirements, the study found passive house buildings had average construction costs; one even came in with lower-than-average costs.

“High-performance buildings can be built at or below the cost of lower-performance buildings when higher performance is considered by an experienced design team from the start of a project,” the study’s authors concluded.

Pecora says B.C.’s non-profit housing sector is “typically ahead of the game” when it comes to climate resilience and mitigation in new developments.” 

Brightside’s Timbre and Harmony development is a prime example. Living on an arterial road is usually a noisy experience, with the sound of traffic a constant presence in street-facing homes. But the Timbre and Harmony development was built to B.C.’s passive house standard. In addition to ensuring residents have cool, clean air in their homes during the summer, it all but eliminates the sound of vehicles travelling along Vancouver’s busy 12th Avenue.

The site, located at the intersection of 12th Avenue and Clark Drive, was formerly home to two social housing buildings that housed 57 homes geared toward seniors. Now, with the help of federal funding, the two buildings offer 157 affordable rental homes, with Timbre’s units reserved for people 55 and older.

The project received support from the Green Municipal Fund, a federal program that supports energy-efficient and emissions-reducing housing developments and retrofit projects. 

Brightside projects have also benefited from B.C.’s Community Housing Fund, which Azaroff describes as “one of the best funding programs in the country as far as building affordable housing.” The fund is set to distribute $3.3 billion to build 12,000 homes by 2032.

New home a source of hope and reminder of B.C.’s dire housing crisis 

Despite all the upsides of affordable, climate-resilient housing, B.C. and Canada have nowhere near enough of it.

For Wanyoike, her current home is both a source of hope and a reminder of how dire B.C.’s housing crisis is. 

“I’m okay, but through the work that I’m doing about advocacy for affordable housing, when I see other people still in the same condition that I was, sometimes I feel so sad,” she says.

Wanyoike helped other people seeking affordable housing apply to live in her building. She says there were 600 applications for just 48 units.

On its website, Lu’ma Native Housing Society, which co-manages the building where Wanyoike lives, says it has a waitlist of more than 3,500 for 1,760 subsidized homes in its portfolio. In 2024, 21,502 households were on the BC Housing Registry — a waitlist for social housing — up 14 per cent from 2023.

“I feel like the government should do more about building more housing, and not only housing, but affordable housing,” Wanyoike says.

She’s adamant that affordable housing needs to be developed with input from the people who will be living in it — people Wanyoike says are too often excluded from planning processes. With the voices of immigrants, members of diaspora communities, people with disabilities, Indigenous people, and others contributing to the conversation about social housing, Wanyoike believes the resulting homes will better serve their residents and the community.

“Bring the seniors on board, bring the people of color on board, bring the youth on board, everybody should be there,” she says. “I believe in change, but there is no change unless you bring everybody in on that decision-making.”

https://thenarwhal.ca/bc-affordable-energy-efficient-homes/