British Columbia residents will be the first to tell you that the housing market is not sustainable. In 2024, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the Metro Vancouver area was $2,300, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
As British Columbia is addressing new provincial laws while tackling a housing crisis, housing advocates are pushing for climate-resilient social housing to be a bigger part of the solution.
Margaret Wanyoike, a British Columbia resident and volunteer for the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition, was selected to move into an affordable rental building in New Westminster with her two children in September 2024. The building is operated by the Lu’ma Native Housing Society and the Swahili Vision International Association, and its residents are a mix of Indigenous and Black community members.
The apartment building has 96 units, and Wanyoike pays $775 a month for a three-bedroom apartment. Her previous unit was $2,600 and falling apart.
Jill Atkey, CEO of the BC Non Profit Housing Association, says that nonprofit developers are working with operators to find ways to tackle the housing crisis and create weather-resilient housing simultaneously. Incentives like the Community Housing Fund and the BC Energy Step Code will help forward new structures that are net-zero-energy-ready buildings.
“It’s helping [the] government meet two of their key priorities,” she said — tackling the housing crisis and reducing carbon pollution. In 2022, about 12 per cent of British Columbia’s pollution came from residential and commercial buildings,” Atkey said to The Narwhal.
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British Columbia does not receive the same amount of snow that Winnipeg does, yet Metro Vancouver can still experience atmospheric rivers, heat waves, and wildfire smoke.
Kitsilano, an upscale beach neighborhood in Vancouver, is also getting investments from the Brightside Community Homes Foundation. The foundation is retrofitting an older six-story building without displacing the residents.
“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,” the CEO of Brightside, William Azaroff, said.
Brightside is also getting assistance from British Columbia’s Community Housing Fund. Azaroff called it “one of the best funding programs in the country as far as building affordable housing.”
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The Pembina Institute, a clean energy think tank in Vancouver, said that the best retrofits will ultimately reduce the buildings’ energy use by up to 90% and curb carbon pollution drastically. As for the retrofitting job in Kitsilano, the building will get new windows, heat pumps, and cooling.
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Azaroff stated that Brightside’s goal is to achieve net-zero operations by 2035.
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