Tower Renewal — Enabling Complete Communities

Project overview

Tower renewal is an initiative that ensures this type of housing stock continues to be viable as core rental housing.

We conducted a study to understand the factors and conditions that lead to tower renewal and housing infill development. It examines how conditions can be achieved where existing “Tower in the Park” sites are leveraged to achieve new mixed and affordable housing.

These building types benefit their existing communities and broader national housing, environmental and social goals. Tower renewal results in 3 primary goals or outcomes:

• Deep energy retrofits to sustain, enhance, and transform our postwar tower housing stock into comfortable and high-quality low-carbon housing.
• Mixed-use neighbourhood design that leverages existing neighbourhood assets and aligns with broader city building goals of growth and transit planning.
• Social and economic investment toward community resilience, demonstrating a community led approach toward more healthy and complete communities.

Implications for the housing industry

This study suggests that there are favourable conditions in which new affordable housing can be integrated into older tower neighbourhoods.

Not-for-profit developers may be best positioned to deliver affordable housing through mixed-income developments.

Recommendations

• Grow the not-for-profit development industry.
• Leverage sites already owned to avoid land costs.
• Pre-zone sites where ‘social impact development’ is desirable with ‘conditional’ zoning.
• Encourage municipal partnerships with not-for-profit developers to create coordinated investments.
• Calibrate National Housing Strategy tools for maximum district impact.

This report is part of the Research Insight series.

Read the full report: Advancing Building Retrofits

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About CMHC Research Insights

Research insights are summaries of our research reports. These insights:

• identify a housing research issue, gap or need
• provide an overview of the research project undertaken to address it
• Present major findings of the research

Examples of research insights topics:

• adaptability and accessibility
• affordable housing
• housing market and finance