Resilient City, Toronto Style

lower section of 23 storey apartment building on Sherbourne Street in Toronto
This high rise residential building in Toronto is part of the City's resilient city plan.

“A Resilient Toronto is … Home. A place where housing is a right, and every resident has a safe, decent, and affordable place to live.”

Compared with stories that report conflicts between climate change and affordable housing activists, Toronto’s first resilience strategy seeks to advance climate change and affordable housing goals.

The City built the resilience strategy over two years. It joins 99 other cities world wide that received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. The funding enables the cities to consider how to act to head off the big challenges ahead.

The core of Toronto’s plan rests on equity and opportunity. People with low incomes have few resources to manage when there’s a crisis and are on the front line to be affected by the effects of climate change.

One of the four priority actions in the plan aims to scale up a program to refurbish some 2,000 aging apartment towers by replacing their heating and electrical systems and reducing their energy consumption with insulation and new windows. The project will also improve the housing for the half million tenants living in the buildings and especially the 200,000 living on low or fixed incomes.

Another priority action aims to reduce basement flooding. Fewer floodings mean less clean up and land fill deposits. It will also benefit the many tenants with low incomes who live in basement units.

This won’t solve the affordable housing crisis on its own, but it certainly strikes a constructive approach to build on.

For more on this plan, see City of Toronto: Toronto’s First Resilience Strategy

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