To date, Canada’s response to the housing crisis has been focused on volume: build more, build faster, and use modern methods to cut cost and delivery times. Unfortunately, the ideal unit-mix has often been skewed in favour of the most
profitable one-bedroom units.
The impact is significant; in May, CMHC reported that over 4,300 completed new condominiums across Metro Vancouver remained vacant, a 76% increase over the previous year. The federal and provincial governments are now seeking to acquire more than 2,200 vacant units and convert them into affordable housing. This situation exposes the inherent shortcomings of treating housing primarily as an investment commodity rather than as a community asset.
As architect Beatriz Ramo argues in her article, “The Housing Crisis is also a Design Crisis” on page 22, “Dwellings have turned into three-dimensional Excel sheets, containers of calculations. And yet a dwelling does not primarily host numbers, but first of all: people.” A residential building may meet carbon targets and earn green certifications yet still fail to respond to the needs of the people who inhabit it.
Adaptability extends useful life, reduces alterations and embodied
carbon, and can create additional homes without more land or materials. As Ramo puts it, “We may already possess the square metres required to accommodate everyone, but not the right number of homes—or the right housing layouts.”
Ramo’s firm, STAR strategies + architecture, implemented this broader interpretation of sustainability at START-Ivry in Greater Paris: 288 dwellings across five buildings of 13 to 19 storeys, combining social, intermediate and market housing and capable of evolving into as many as 350 homes.
The project demonstrates that adaptability is not limited to small or experimental buildings, but can be integrated into a large-scale, economically viable residential development. START-Ivry reframes sustainability as social resilience: adaptability becomes circularity at the scale of the apartment. Applicable at a variety of scales, these strategies challenge Canada’s volume-based response.
Had housing production over recent decades responded more closely to the real diversity and evolution of households—and incorporated even some of these strategies—Vancouver might not now be facing thousands of empty homes in the middle of a housing crisis. As Ramo states, “The most sustainable square metre is the one that never needs to be rebuilt.”
Jim Taggart FRAIC
Editor