Should this sort of scene survive in Greenest City? By “this,” I mean the year-round heated outdoor patio in Vancouver, at 50 degrees north latitude, where outdoor sitting used to be a 5-month gig. Will the Green Police shut them down, or is “green” merely a metaphor for a particular kind of lifestyle?
These sour, no-fun thoughts were prompted by a chance meeting on the street with a neighbour who is renovating a century-old Grandview house and getting the full blast of new “Green” building-code requirements thrown at her. She has a thousand-square-foot house on a half lot – I’ll bet her heating and electricity bills are under $1,000 a year total – and yet the city is demanding she upgrade her walls to R-20, which she can’t do with the house’s vintage 2×4 framing.
Given that 4% of a house’s heat loss, typically, is through its walls (and 3% through single-glazed windows), her efforts will cost her a fortune, possibly doom the house, and save a piddling amount of energy year-over-year compared with the constant consumption of natural gas in cafés such as this one.
The city wants “Green,” which means in part to re-use and adapt rather than demolish, but has adopted a building code and enforces it in a way to make renovation onerous if not impossible. Is “the greenest building the one that’s already built” in Greenest City?
The issue was explored recently in “Reno vs. Demo: When is it easier to just start over?” by Bethany Lindsay in the Sun. The article was a depressing, realistic view of the myriad hoops the city makes renovators go through – whether it’s for ‘heritage’ or just upgrading.
Geoff Glave was one of the homeowners interviewed for the Sun story.
“There’s a lot of wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth over demolition of what I would consider perfectly fine houses in Vancouver,” Glave said. “I think if the city wanted to encourage renovation, they certainly could by making it a more cost-effective option than tearing the whole house down and sending everything to the landfill and starting from scratch.”
Beyond the green issue, there’s the affordability one. Glave and his partner paid the city $6570 in fees in order to be put through this process:
In Vancouver, the costs really start to add up as a renovation project becomes more extensive. Once construction costs exceed $5,000, the builder will need to meet certain new energy-efficiency requirements. Over $50,000, and walls may need to be deepened to allow for thicker insulation, while the building will require sealing around spots like windows and doors to prevent heat leakage.
When the project reaches about $95,000, city engineers will usually order a new sewer connection at a cost of $16,000 as part of an ongoing, long-term plan to separate rainwater from sewage. If the renovation hits 50 per cent of the replacement value of the home, a sprinkler system will have to be installed.
And any new addition to a home will have to meet all modern building codes, which include triple-glazed windows and accessibility requirements like wider doors and levers instead of doorknobs.
In the Vancouver climate, those windows would have to last 50 years in order to justify the energy required to manufacture them, and the seals typically fail in 15-20 years.
Mike Collister, the city’s manager for building inspections, justified the requirements:
From a sustainability point of view, they said that the city would prefer to see people maintaining as much of their homes as possible, rather than sending piles of demolition waste to the landfill. Preserving historically significant homes is also a priority.
But they insisted that while renovations are more expensive in Vancouver than in the rest of the region, there are good reasons for the costly updates required by the building code.
‘We’re not doing things just for fun. We’re doing things because they’re safety improvements, they’re environmental improvements. They’re things we need to do anyway,” said Doug Smith, Vancouver’s acting director of sustainability. “What typically happens is we’ll do it and then within 10 years, other municipalities will catch up and do it as well.”
Making homes more energy efficient goes a long way toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, he maintained, while retrofitting homes to be more accessible is essential as baby boomers hit their retirement years.
When does safety become nannyism? When do the energy inputs into a renovation far exceed any potential savings of greenhouse-gas emissions? And, vis-à-vis the café on The Drive, when is the system fair?
I’ve studied this issue in-depth for 30 years, first as a CMHC Scholar at MIT and later as an architect doing every kind of green building from off-the-grid to full-on heritage restoration and I’ve come to this conclusion: nobody wants “green” if it conflicts with either their ideology or their budget.
Oh man, this is a nightmare in reality. You haven’t even touched some of ridiculous ways the city prevents sensible renovations in favour in ridiculously expensive and wasteful rebuilds. It hardly comes as a surprise that John Graham, a “scholar” and “architect”, poo-poos these complaints. Hey John, have you ever worked in construction where an individual wants to slightly enlarge their deck but finds out that it will cost them tens of thousands to do so because of inane red tape? Or another person doing a minor laundry room update will have to move all the venting in their house through the roof because of the new cruelty (rules)?
I’ve been a big fan of Vision and Gregor for many reasons, but on “green” housing issues they are really screwing the pooch. It’s a disaster on the ground, utterly ridiculous and idealistic. Worst of all, it’s wildly wasteful.
Thank you for shedding some light on the hypocrisy surrounding this issue. Contractors and home-owners need relief.
Actually, Jordan, more experience on the ground than you can imagine. I only got halfway through my comment when I got interrupted with other things and I posted it prematurely. Here’s the rest of what I wanted to say: “However, there’s no distance we won’t go for green when it aligns with our ideology and there’s no money at stake, and this is what Vancouver’s green building initiative is all about, ideology over rationality. By imposing blanket standards of “greeness” on renovations, the city has created a huge impediment for people to upgrade the performance of their houses, which condemns many more houses to lower energy efficiency and shorter lives.”
Good to hear! My apologies for having prematurely judged your perspective.
I don’t think John poo-poo’d them so much as said people won’t do them/want them if they’re not a requirement.
… at least having rules as a general requirement levels the playing field – everyone has to play. There are definitely some common sense minor alterations which should be more easily permitted, but the ‘its just one little X’ argument doesn’t necessarily hold up universally either … ‘its just one little structural beam, whats the problem if we get rid of it?’
Some rules certainly have a good basis in reality, even if it seems like they don’t.
Vancouver doesn’t go so far as to require seismic retrofit of existing buildings unless they undergo renovation, for instance, like other cities do, so there could certainly be even more extensive/expensive requirements that aren’t being imposed. There are also plenty of ‘green’ features which aren’t being required, that other places do, that again, would place even more costs (green roofs, solar or solar-thermal installation, etc… we just require a hookup for a potential service).
That side-venting exhaust, for instance, I’ve seen plenty of examples which are, to put it bluntly, deathtraps waiting to happen, and really should be completely replaced … there is definitely the reality that to prevent the worst (to dumbproof) things you also end up preventing the arguably acceptable.
“Given that 4% of a house’s heat loss, typically, is through its walls (and 3% through single-glazed windows), ”
These numbers seem low. If these numbers are correct, then where does the other 93% of heat disaappear to? I did a quick search and found that 20 – 40% heat loss is through walls and 10 – 20% is through doors and windows:
http://www.resurgence.org/education/heac.html
Anyone have good numbers for typical heat loss? And how upgrades to windows and insulation improve heat loss?
I do like improved building standards, but also agree that the rules need to be reasonable, especially for renovations.
Carl Elefante, the American architect specializing in green retrofits of old houses, used those figures in a lecture in Vancouver a few years ago. He used 40% as the typical heat loss from an inefficient furnace and water heater, about 20% through the attic, the balance through poorly sealed windows, doors, light fittings and what-have-you.
You really have to stretch the concept of leaky buildings to almost absurd levels to get those 4% and 3% figures. In a well built house windows will be the single biggest heat loss.
Greenest City my ass. The amount of heritage homes scrapped for the dumpster. Plastic Bags? Why can’t we get it done like Seattle did a few years ago? Organics pickup, an entire new stream of giant trucks on the road driving around picking up half eaten apples, driving out to Delta and then people and companies driving out to the facility and back to collect compost mulch.
If you recycled the materials from a dismantled home, or moved a house to create more space for more housing on a lot, etc. etc., all that adds to the cost of already unaffordable housing. I am in no way advocating demolition, but merely regulating against it will lead to higher housing costs without providing some kind of further up-zoning to allow a builder / developer / owner to spread the cost thinner, or make it up in selling an addition unit.
Regarding the green waste program, the composted soil product is excellent. Several municipal parks departments buy hundreds of m3 of the stuff because it is weed-free and comes from known sources (unlike doctored up scrap soil from private sources). City horticulture and forestry crews save thousands in labour costs every year as the result. The alternative was to continue dumping a valuable green waste resource into landfills.
We have the technology (Passive House) to build new buildings that require 10% of the heating/cooling of our average building stock. It tends to add about 10% to construction costs and most of that is saved immediately through lower energy costs: the annual mortgage premium is almost canceled by the annual energy savings. (In Europe it does cancel – and then some – because their energy costs are higher.)
We have a lot of beautiful old houses and buildings that can’t reasonably be brought to this standard and I hope we save many of them for the time being even if they aren’t the greenest. But we also have many many more old, crappy, ugly, leaky, poorly maintained buildings that would be better replaced by super energy efficient ones.
The adage that the greenest buildings are the ones that are already built is definitely not always true. You can often make up the environmental cost of replacing them within ten years and the rest becomes a benefit to the environment.
The outdoor heaters should go. A rising tax on carbon would help.
Like so many of Vision’s initiatives zealotry has trumped common sense. Like Michael I had a colleague decide to demo rather than reno a heritage home because of Gregor’s new draconian rules.
Agree completely. If you look carefully at the many studies that compare the cumulative carbon footprint of existing vs new buildings, more often than not you see that the greenest building is actually the new building. For example, when a study concludes that a renovated building has a lower carbon footprint for 50 years, what it’s actually saying is that after 50 years, the new building has the lower carbon footprint. Since the life expectancy of our buildings is 75 to 80 years and climbing, that means the new building is more efficient for 25 to 30 years, which is significant. And that’s just comparing renovated buildings with ordinary new buildings. When you compare renovated buildings with highly energy efficient new buildings, the picture is even clearer.
Much of it depends on the local climate. We renovated our old timer quite extensively and its energy footprint is a lot smaller as the result. The windows upstairs are essentially triple-glazed with the addition of storm windows. Still, the 2×4 walls would not do well in a colder city on the Prairies or back east.
I feel very sorry for your poor Grandview homeowner that is doing the right thing in renovating her old house and has become a pawn to the ideology that rules.
And then Vision blames foreigners for high housing costs.
The massive ‘new’ Vision PR department is working the spins overtime.
You’re going out on a very thin limb again, Eric, without stats to back your assertion that energy efficiency has caused the 500% rise in Vancouver housing prices over the last decade. And once again, you are purposely ignoring the huge savings in operating costs over the life of the structure.
These repetitive, evidence-deficient, absolutist statements and political digs make me agree with Stephen Rees that you are a troll, albeit one who on rare occasions injects a modicum of humour between ideological statements of “fact.”
I’m certainly not the first one that disagreed with Rees and consequently was denounced by him. It’s his bathwater he’s serving so I guess he can bless whom he wishes. I’ve never sheepishly followed any party line as some blogmeisters demand. I prefer freedom of speech, within the bounds of decency.
Sure, I could put in geothermal and solar, we’ve priced it but we’d have to borrow heavily and live for many more decades to realize the benefits. This is lunacy when considering the life span expected of both the structure and residents.
I know of one green house in Vancouver that spends many hundreds of dollars a month to run their geo-thermal pump system. It’s a topic of humorous conversation. It’s like driving 100km to Trader Joe’s to save $5 on a nice soft brie.
Does anyone still not believe that the green requirements now being made by the City of Vancouver are pushing up the costs, by increasing new demands and permit requirements, as well as long delays for configuring and approving the requirements (which entails higher carrying costs due to the lengthy delays in building)? They only need to speak to one developer or builder to find the answer.
How’s the chronically leaking solar system at the Village doing? Are they going to pull it out?
By the way, MB, that 500% figure is something you wrote.
If the comments are political then so be it. It’s a political ideology and a political party that is writing the rules.
OK. So it’s ~350% in 10 years. Our modest place was 540% in 17 years. It’s only a number on paper to us because we will never sell as long as we’re healthy and can climb the stairs.
But the point is that green initiatives have created a very minimal rise in housing prices compared to market forces, and they certainly do have a payback period and lower the operating costs and emissions from housing. I agree that geoexchange heating is expensive and it’s only worth it in a large rebuild or a new build when considering lifecycle costs.
The lineup at the Building Dept. counter has been long for so many years and didn’t need green policies to make it so. Today, avoiding green policies at all government levels has become a rebellious, ideological statement.
How times have changed.
I feel the COV is forced to do a regulation based approached because they can not shift the taxes from property taxes to carbon taxes. or carbon taxes from low income payroll or income taxes. That would be a win-win for everyone including the poor, the environment etc
So instead of the diligent homeowner, renovating and improving her house and home with modern and inevitably more environmentally friendly and sustainable items and products, you would rather just tax her due to her higher energy usage.
Is that what’s called progressive?
Let me know when the greenest city stops mandating the provision of on-site parking with all new development regardless of market preference or impact on housing affordability…
One thing that has always bothered me is the common rule in condos that do not allow you to dry your clothes on your balcony. So we are forced to use our dryers or hang them indoors. While we are also expected to keep our home’s humidity at appropriate levels. All solutions that involve using electricity.
With the ever growing number of condos, I feel like disallowing these rules on a city wide level and giving residents a way to hang dry outside have more substantial green benefits than imposing “green building codes” on a renovation.
I have heard of neighbours complaining in detached house neighbourhoods of people using a clothes line (not mine fortunately), since it made the neighbourhood look less classy. To my mind, what could be more classy than hanging clothes out to dry?