Clean Condo Life: Adapting Existing Buildings To A Changing Climate

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When I spoke with Michele Wucker a few months ago, I was mostly focused on her second to last book, The Gray Rhino. I think of climate change and its impacts as gray rhinos we had ignored. Climate change has stepped well past the looming but ignored risks into high-impact reality. I continue to recommend the book, most recently on a call this morning with a Berlin-based green energy investor. Gray Rhino hit in a way that far exceeded her previous books and takes her around the world to consult and speak. Most recently I noted that she was in Milan speaking at the launch of the Italian edition of The Gray Rhino, #rinocerontigrigi.

But her latest book has stuck with me as well. In You Are What You Risk, Wucker adopts a much more personal tone. The book was inspired, at least in part, by people sharing how much Gray Rhino had enabled them to confront the looming but ignored risks in their personal lives, and inspired them to do something about them. She recounts shared stories of weight loss, ending bad relationships, dealing with over indulging in food and drink, and taking apparently self-defeating career risks that made perfect sense from the perspective of the risk-taker as avoiding worse risks, all things which make sense in the context of dealing with often slow moving (but not always) and looming risks while accepting likely long term challenges.

What You Risk contains stories from her life and personal experiences that help us understand risk differently and better, as well as stories she was allowed to share about seemingly perplexing risks others take. Empathy for others who perceive risks very differently features prominently.

What does this have to do with clean condo life? That’s a good question. I hope I have a good answer. Let’s find out.

A few years ago, my global wandering slowed for various reasons. My accident of birth as the child of a technically-oriented British immigrant in the Canadian military meant I’d lived in three provinces and four towns before I was even forming long-lasting memories. The fourth place I lived is the first I remember. It meant I had visited ten countries in Europe before I was ten years old. It meant I lived in multi-unit residential buildings, divided between military accommodations, semi-detached homes, apartment buildings and the like all of my remembered childhood. All I knew growing up was moving and people I barely knew living in the same building.

Thankfully, this didn’t give me a phobia or some sort of weird North American fetish for detached homes and white picket fences. Instead, it gave me wanderlust, a love of living where was a greater concentration of other people, and the ability to live richly in small spaces. I’ve lived mostly without driving in Toronto, Vancouver, São Paulo, Singapore, and Calgary. I’ve visited, sometimes for extended periods, something like 40 cities on five continents. I’m looking forward to an upcoming weekend in the heart of London, walking and tubing everywhere for three days before heading off to Glasgow, where a major private shipping firm has invited me to debate maritime decarbonization with internal and external experts for a couple of days.

But I’m living in one of my home cities, Vancouver. The other home city is Toronto. They have that status because I’ve chosen to move to both of them twice. I love both of the cities in different ways, and am intimate with their oddities and perversities, having walked, biked, motorcycled, subwayed, Ubered, and driven through very large portions of both of them. But I’ve never lived in either city in a detached home with a white picket fence or even considered it.

I currently live in one of the most densely populated area codes in North America. The last time I looked it up, there were something like 36,000 people in my geographically tiny census tract. The block I’m on, an urban block that’s short in all directions, has five multi-unit residential buildings, a multi-story commercial building with offices, a public gym and retail, and has something like 2,500 or 3,000 people living on it.

Does this make me weird? Only by generic North American and Australian aspirational standards. Only by the detached home and white picket fence, 1% of the world’s population reality, surreal moonscape of sprawling suburbs at the edges of cities.

Even in America’s sprawling suburbs, 20% of the residents live in multi-unit residential buildings. Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg might sprawl into detached home suburbs, but Montreal is much more European in its pattern of flats and terraced living. In Asia, 90% of people live in multi-unit residences. It’s North America’s and Australia’s suburbs which are unusual, not my reality of living in densely populated urban areas in big buildings where lots of other people live.

What are the megatrends which led to this? Global population growth is one of them. We don’t spread eight billion people evenly across the world, we concentrate them and specialize them for our benefit, and usually for theirs too. Automation of agriculture and resource extraction is another. Why waste lots of brilliant and creative human minds on hoeing fields or swinging mining pickaxes when we can concentrate them in urban areas and let ideas breed like rabbits? Urbanization and specialization have led to an absurd flowering of human intellectual, creative, artistic, and economic productivity. As a note, population growth was identified as a global problem before climate change, and we’ve been working on it longer, so population is likely to peak between 2050 and 2070 at billions less than some of the more apocalyptic projections, and well before the UN’s 2100 projection of a peak.

But this is about condos. What the heck does any of this have to do with condos?

Multi-unit residential buildings (infelicitously acronymed as MURBs), in the forms of rental, condo, and public housing buildings, are where the vast majority of people on the world live, and they were mostly built before climate change impacts became regular realities. In Singapore, where I spent a couple of years failing to learn Mandarin, paragliding in nearby countries, eating absurdly tasty, cheap food from hawker centers, and trying to make sense of often billion dollar technical transformation deals in China, Japan, Australia, and the rest of APAC, 80% of the population lived in government-owned housing development blocks (HDBs), typically 9-12 story, 99-year lease, apartment buildings. The 22nd-story suite we rented in a non-HDB condo building had a view of Indonesia and mini-split heat pumps (foreshadowing, your clue to quality literature, as Berkeley Breathed liked to say).

In Toronto, I lived in a raft of rental suites in multi-unit buildings, and owned a couple of condos. In Calgary, the view of the Rockies and Calgary’s skyline from the 18th floor came with 595 square feet and was rented for a year, something I contracted for from an internet ad while living in Singapore and furnished completely in a week upon arrival, mostly from IKEA. As a Calgary co-worker said, his home office was bigger than my entire condo. (Of course, he turned out to be climate change-challenged and lived in a community 80 km (50 miles) from almost everything with his point A to point B Porsche, but he had his good points.)

When we visited Copenhagen, we stayed in an Airbnb apartment overlooking the new modernist central market with hipster coffee shops. When we stayed in Sydney, Australia, we stayed in a big condo building near Kings Cross. Etc, etc. We like densely populated urban cores.

And now, I live in a 19-story, 233-suite condo building with town homes, an 8-story podium, a couple of heritage homes in the strata on a plot that used to house a debauched nightclub and a brothel. It also has anti-terrorism insurance, so the trifecta remains a source of delight. Four or five hundred people are living in the building at any time, along with a changing menagerie of dogs and the occasional hallway cat. It’s one of five condo buildings of similar size or bigger on my one small urban block. The building, owners, and residents are starting to struggle with climate change, and need to adapt both to that disruption and to the solutions required for it.

Buildings are vertical villages. They have little town councils, a condo strata in Canada or a condo association in the USA. In Germany, it’s a painful conjoined word, die wohnungseigentümergemeinschaft (WEG). Condos are a fairly heavily regulated form of housing. Do-it-yourself changes to wiring and plumbing are not allowed because they can impact hundreds of other residents. Renovations inside units need to be approved by the strata council, and often the city as well.

Everyone pays some money every month to the strata for grounds maintenance, operational costs like the superintendent and the person who cleans the common areas, the nighttime bike patrol, and the building’s energy costs. That’s about C$270 (US$200) for me right now for context, and it varies quite a bit by city, with Toronto being twice as expensive on average. All of the stuff that detached homeowners pay for themselves, including keeping the exterior looking spiffy, landscaping the grounds, and fixing the roof, is done by the strata from those funds.

Getting anything done requires getting strata council buy-in and often requires approval from the owners through the annual general meeting where things are presented and voted on. Anything outside of the inside walls of condo units, and a bunch of stuff inside them, is organized and executed by the superintendent and the building management firm we pay to assist us, typically with one of the council members trying to help and sometimes succeeding.

The connection with What You Risk is that instead of me talking about what thought leaders are doing, or doing nerdy projections through 2100 of global climate solutions, or assessing proposed technologies (and scams) in detail, my building’s journey is being driven by me. I joined the strata council a while ago, and am now the president of it, which is pretty much a formality since we have a building management firm that does the vast majority of the work, but gives me the ability to move things forward in our little vertical village.

There are four things related to climate change contributions, impacts and solutions that the building has to deal with or accept — embodied carbon, electric vehicle charging, increasing heat, and building energy from natural gas.

The embodied carbon of the reinforced concrete is a sunk climate cost. Nothing to be done about it except accepting and amortizing it. Tearing down the building and starting again with low-carbon cement or engineered hardwood is not a climate solution.

What are the three or four initiatives we’re undertaking, slowly?

The first thing I started was electric vehicle charging for our 330-stall, four-level underground parkade. The building wasn’t built with charging, unsurprisingly, but BC has the distinction of having more electric cars per capita than any other jurisdiction in North America. We’re in a pocket of the future, in that we have had street EV charging for years, one local developer has been including an EV charging stall in its buildings for around a decade, and EV charging is now becoming a factor in selling condos. We have something like ten EVs in our parkade now, and more every year.

I took a picture of seven cars parked on the street the other day, because three of them were electric. Rivian’s showroom is a two-minute walk from my condo, and I’ve actually seen one on the street. I’ve also seen an F-150 Lightning charging at the end of the street, and close to one of every other EV available. Teslas are a dime a dozen, and it’s pretty common to see three coincidentally at the same intersection. Pretty soon, our condos would have been worth less than neighboring condos that were otherwise identical because they had charging and we didn’t, something that’s being observed anecdotally in some places, although the statistical data is still weak.

I joined the strata council over two years ago with the intent to get our building set up for EVs, something which I figured would take two to three years. Well, our first EV and e-bike charging stall just became operational, and it’s going to be another 1-3 years before we’ve spent the ~C$300,000 (US$221,000) it will take (after a C$120,000 rebate from the province) to wire the entire parkade. That’s a story I’ll be telling in this series.

The next initiative is air conditioning, specifically heat pumps. The building is in a northern temperate latitude, and like a lot of buildings up in the nosebleed seats of the 49th parallel and higher, it wasn’t built with air conditioning. But now we are having heat domes in the province due to climate change that are killing hundreds, and the province and city are responding with air conditioning being a requirement for new buildings. Anybody who has lived in a multi-story building without air conditioning knows that heat rises and the top floors get hotter and hotter. For the comfort, safety, and property values of our owners and renters, we have to act.

I’m discussing this with council this week, with my expectation that mini-split heat pumps in units will be the selected option. Then I’ll be arranging for an approved contractor and simple menu of heat pump choices and a group purchase for owners, a win-win for owners and the contractor, and much less problematic than a free-for-all. That solution can be done this year, and have great benefits, including lower winter heating bills for residents, and won’t cost the strata anything except the superintendent’s time and perhaps a building envelope engineer to assess the quality of the contractor’s work.

However, if the council decides to put big air source heat pumps on the roof and plumb lines down to all units, that’s going to be another 3-4 years before it gets through. Remember that every suite in our building shares heat with its neighbors, and so every suite will also share a bit of cool. If I can get 40 or 100 units with heat pumps, everyone benefits.

And then there’s our hot water. While it’s an efficient system, it’s run off of a gas boiler in the first underground parking level in a utility room, the equivalent of the corner of the basement of a detached home where the hot water tank and furnace are. One of my acquaintances is Diego Mandelbaum, business development executive for Creative Energy, an international district heating firm that happens to operate the downtown district heating grid in Vancouver. I’ve been talking with him about connecting our building to the heating grid and eliminating the gas boiler. So there’s another set of stories there, as that progresses or not.

Finally, there’s the classic modern condo problem, walls of glass. My living room has seven-foot high windows wrapping around two walls that are exposed to the sun for hours in the late morning, soaking up heat. I have more windows than exterior walls, which is great all year long and amazing when the cherry blossom trees in the next building’s courtyard fill my views out the windows with pink blossoms. The windows are great, modern and high-efficiency, but they weren’t designed to keep the sun out. And so, transparent window films that block a lot of UV and infrared, without affecting the look and feel of the building, a requirement with condo stratas, just like US subdivision HOAs. I’ll run that in the same way I expect that the heat pumps will work out, as a building-wide approved contractor and product, with owners choosing to opt in or out for their own comfort and condo value.

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And so, this series, clean condo life. Consider it the antithesis to Dwell magazine, van life stories, and DIY guides on home solar and battery storage. This isn’t an aesthetic journey through an influencer’s life. There are no hipsters living authentically in lofts. This isn’t a modernist home in a desert. This isn’t one man’s struggle to get off the grid. This is a very middle-of-the-road living arrangement, a set of accommodations that is representative of 80% of the world, not 1%.

It’s just life. It takes work. It takes planning. It takes time. It takes a bunch of people agreeing. It takes someone to recognize the problem, admit to themselves that they have to help solve them, and start moving the ball forward. In my building, I’m that person. In your building, you might be. I’m going to share my findings and experiences to possibly help you. And please share the things you found out the hard way if you did any of these things before me.