Seniors Housing & Healthcare Trends

NEW YORK: The shortlist for the best multigenerational housing community has been declared.

Over 250 programmes have been considered by the awards secretariat. One of the finalists in this category is shown above.

Ken Soble Tower, an affordable housing high-rise for seniors in Hamilton, Ont., is now arguably the world’s largest residential building retrofitted to the Passive House standard.

Led by ERA Architects and PCL Construction, the project team slashed the 80,000-sf, 18-story building’s greenhouse gas emissions by 94% and its heating energy demand by 91% en route to achieving EnerPHit certification. The total energy needed to heat and cool one of its 146 units is now equivalent to that needed to power three 100-watt light bulbs.

Built in 1967 as part of the “North End Renewal” of West Harbour, an industrial neighborhood on Lake Ontario, the tower and an accompanying three-story walkup provided one-bedroom and bachelor apartments for families and single workingmen.

At the time, the complex, named after the founder of a local radio station and a local TV station, was considered a showcase property in the portfolio of CityHousing Hamilton, the municipal housing authority.

By 2012, however, the property was showing its age. The elevators constantly failed; so, too, the heating and cooling system. Mold, peeling paint, and water damage were apparent everywhere.

Worst of all: the pest problem. Forty-two percent of maintenance calls were for cockroaches, rodents, and bedbugs. The bedbug infestation was so bad the housing agency had to move whole floors of tenants to temporary housing on the 16th floor while crews tried to kill the critters. The bedbugs kept coming back.

The housing agency started relocating tenants. In less than four years, two-thirds of the apartments in Ken Soble Tower were vacant, despite a citywide waitlist of 6,000 families seeking affordable housing.

The Global Award winner will be announced in December in London. (Globals)