Toronto’s glass condos burning thermal holes in the sky
Now Toronto
By: Adria Vasil
17 May 2017
During a week of torrential rain that put Toronto Islands on evacuation
alert, the city’s Parks and Environment Committee was mulling over
ambitious new blueprints for meeting Toronto’s 2050 climate targets.
If all goes according to city staff’s new TransformTO plan, which the
committee approved May 4, we’ll all be living near accessible
fossil-fuel-free transit, tossing our waste into tiny garbage bins and
getting 75 per cent of our energy from renewable sources, and all our
homes, condos and apartments will be retrofitted to become lean, clean
greenhouse-gas--saving machines. The city-led TransformTO road map,
which goes to council May 24, calls for all new builds to put out near
net-zero emissions by 2030.
But in a city where half our greenhouse gas emissions now come from
leaky buildings, the glass condo boom may be setting us up for failure.
Since most of the floor space that will exist in 2030 has already been
built, retrofitting our existing building stock is critical to meeting
our climate change goals. Hence why the blueprint calls for 100 per
cent of existing buildings to be “retrofitted to the highest emission
reduction technically feasible”– roughly 40 per cent below where they
are today.
It’s a lofty goal, especially when one in three Toronto households call
high-rises home, according to the latest data from StatsCan. The city’s
1,200 postwar towers (which house about half a million people) are
clearly in need of some retrofit love.
many glass towers and other
hastily built condos are falling apart faster than the old concrete
giants
But there’s another glaring reality: many glass towers and other
hastily built condos are falling apart faster than the old concrete
giants – springing leaks, facing high repair bills and prompting
lawsuits.
They’re also greenhouse-gas-emitting giant thermal holes. Anyone living
in a glass box knows that all those windows have them cranking the
thermostat in the winter to keep warm and blasting the AC in
summer to keep from getting heat stroke.
It’s one thing for owners to pad brick-and-mortar houses with extra
insulation and to clad old concrete tower exteriors with foam
insulation boards, à la Toronto’s Tower Renewal Project. But how the
hell do we deal with all the floor-to-ceiling-glass -condo towers
already crowding the skyline?
“I don’t really have a solid answer for that,” says Jim Baxter,
director of the city’s Environment and Energy Division and one of the
authors of the TransformTO report. “The new condos are basically
floor-to-ceiling windows, and windows are large thermal holes. So you
have entire sides of buildings that are open to the outside.”
Upgrading things like furnaces and lights and adding insulated blinds
and smart thermostats that detect when occupants are home all chip away
at carbon footprints, but energy is still pouring out of those thermal
holes – a problem that will only get worse as insulating argon gas
between the panels leaks out.
U of T civil engineering professor Marianne Touchie notes that
high-density high-rises are an asset for getting public services to
people efficiently, but their enormous energy use also makes them an
environmental burden.
Touchie, whose research focuses on retrofitting buildings to make them
healthier and more sustainable, says high-rises really should be built
with “passive survivability” in mind. In other words, they should be
designed so they can maintain critical life-support conditions in the
event of power outage or loss of water, especially in the face of
increasingly extreme weather to come.
Even the newest condos can leave residents high and dry, without water,
cooling or heating when they need it most. It’s an issue, says Touchie,
that we have to consider since tens of thousands of families have moved
into these units over the last 15 years.
Imagine all the people in those condos without power for three days in
August. They would be uninhabitable.
“Imagine all the people in those condos without power for three days in
August. They would be uninhabitable. As we increase the design standard
for buildings, we’re going to have to address it.”
So how do building codes continue to allow for shoddy glass towers that perform so poorly in Toronto’s volatile climate?
The city talks up its green building standard (GBS), brought in under
former mayor David Miller in 2010 and mandating some 25 per cent more
efficiency than what’s required under Ontario’s building code. Those
standards were beefed up again in 2014, but developers are still
allowed to build floor-to-ceiling glass walls if they do things like
outfit units with high-efficiency heating/ventilation systems.
So are we stranding residents with enormous energy bills in leaky hot
boxes that perhaps shouldn’t have been built in the first place?
“Unfortunately, we may be,” says Councillor Mike Layton. Toronto is
further ahead than other municipalities in Ontario since it’s the only
jurisdiction with the power to raise its own building code standards.
“We have made up a little bit of ground and used our powers that the
City Of Toronto Act gave us,” says Layton. “But a bold jump isn’t being
made.”
Although homeowners can upgrade their homes through the city’s
low-interest Home Energy Loan Retrofit program, these loans are not
available to owners of condo units. High-rise landlords, property
managers and condo boards can access retrofit funding through the
Atmospheric Fund’s TowerWise program. And the city is, thankfully,
prioritizing funding to retrofit social housing towers desperately in
need of repairs.
Toronto & York Region Labour Council president John Cartwright, an
early green building advocate, blames the takeover of poorly built
glass towers on a Harris government that purged NDP-era green building
criteria from building codes in the 90s.
“We have one net-zero building in the GTA, and it’s in Stouffville,”
says Cartwright. “In France, every region [can point] to a
net-zero-carbon school, community centre, seniors housing. [They] have
an entire net-zero community up and running.”
While the TransformTO blueprint is undeniably ambitious, it’s hard to
disagree with Julia Langer, CEO of the Atmospheric Fund, that waiting
until 2030 to get to net-zero is wasting precious time.
“That’s too late – we could do it now,” says Langer, and not just to
get in line with climate goals, but to kick-start the creation of green
jobs.
As for new builds, Langer says, “you can’t meet high-efficiency,
performance and comfort requirements without addressing the
wall-to-window ratio.” If we’re truly going to transform T.O., building
code updates will have to do just that.
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