The evolving architecture of affordable housing

The big move, veteran Toronto architects Joseph Bogdan and Elie Newman reckoned, had to do with reimaging the parking lot.

Their client – The Working Centre, a highly regarded Kitchener, Ont., community agency – owned a 1927 warehouse in the city’s core, which it had used for years as a social enterprise for recycled goods, with a soup kitchen, known as St. John’s, on the second floor.

About six years ago, the founders, Joe and Stephanie Mancini, together with local supporters David Gibson and Craig Beattie of Kitchener-based Perimeter Development, decided to add some transitional housing to the structure. Mr. Bogdan, the now-retired founder of BNKC Architects, whose credits include the master plan for Toronto’s College Park, started doing some preliminary sketches for adding a third floor to the warehouse, which was situated next to a small parking lot and loading area.

Then, early in the pandemic, recalls Mr. Newman, BNKC principal, “the idea comes forth: Why don’t we take the St. John’s kitchen and move it out of the warehouse, and that’ll allow us to put housing on the second floor. We’ll add a third floor onto this warehouse so we can have two floors of supportive transitional housing. And we’ll move the soup kitchen into an addition to this warehouse and that will create a courtyard so that the community has its own complex.”

Dubbed 97 Victoria, the project is now under construction, and will feature a light-filled atrium and enclosed courtyard, on the former parking lot, with 44 units of new transitional housing and other 24/7 health and social service programs, alongside the social enterprise. Mr. Newman points out that the facility will serve many of the homeless individuals who were living in an encampment across the street. Some, in fact, slept in the parking lot. “People were always around this building,” he says, “so making it a place for them was important.”

Such developments, fuelled by volunteers, donors and pro-bono professional services, mark an emerging ethic in Canada’s affordable housing sector. Drawing on more accessible pools of public funding, a growing number of non-profits are advancing projects aimed at providing genuinely affordable apartments for targeted groups, like the homeless, low-income seniors or working families locked out of both the real estate market and market-based rental.

“What we’re seeing recently is a lot of first-time affordable housing developers,” says Danny Bartman, a partner at LGA Architects, which is building Mount Dennis Quilt, an ambitious Toronto project in the Weston Road area, with housing, community and office space being developed by the Learning Enrichment Foundation. “They’re developing affordable housing in a different way than some of our more traditional client base, which could be municipal and regional housing authorities.”

As well, with legacy public housing agency clients, architects are proposing extensive energy retrofits, not just cosmetic improvements. “When we’re redesigning this new building, the aesthetic, the look of the design, is still a consideration,” adds LGA intern architect Ivee Wang, who last year published an essay on the new thinking around affordable housing design for Canadian Architect. “But,” she adds, “we would put our emphasis and our energy into considering how this new envelope would perform, especially when it comes to energy performance standards.”

Design is a surprisingly sensitive subject in the world of affordable housing, where architecture has something of a checkered past.

Sprawling postwar public housing projects were informed by utopian and often highly experimental design, which had the unintended consequence of stigmatizing communities of low-income tenants and visually isolating them from surrounding areas. Many were also dogged by cheap construction and poor maintenance, and eventually became highly dysfunctional – so much so that, in some infamous cases, they were demolished by municipal housing agencies.

From the 1990s onward, public and non-profit housing providers often sought to correct this fraught legacy by trying to build projects that were architecturally indistinguishable from ordinary for-profit developments, as was the case with some of the Toronto Community Housing towers in the first three phases of the revitalized Regent Park.

Today’s generation of affordable housing doesn’t seek to hide in plain view, but rather opts for design approaches driven by close attention to the needs of residents, safe and durable materials, sustainability and the use of human-scale urban design to better connect such projects to their surrounding communities.

One of the most prominent exponents of this outlook is Paul Karakusevic, a highly regarded London-based architect whose practice focuses exclusively on new affordable housing and retrofits of Britain’s vast portfolio of aging council housing estates. His studio, Karakusevic Carson Architects (KCA), is also leading the design of phases 4 and 5 of Regent Park, which front onto Gerrard Street (ERA Architects is the local partner and Tridel is the builder).

“We obviously could work in the private sector,” he says. “I’m just less interested in working for the private sector. I love the idea that architects are engaged in a civic and community mission. Public housing, certainly in the U.K., was overlooked for 30 years.”

His firm’s signature look involves clean brick or masonry exteriors, which will figure in the mid-rise Regent Park apartments that will line the south side of Gerrard. Many of KCA British projects involve retrofitting older 1960s-vintage apartments and then intensifying these complexes by developing infill townhouses on estates that had a lot of open space.

Regent Park, by contrast, is a tabula rasa site, and KCA’s design was informed, as Mr. Karakusevic says, by hundreds of consultation sessions with TCH tenants and local residents. “We wanted to bring [in] the grain of Cabbagetown, the pattern of this blocks, the trees, the landscape,” he says. “We want to bring that all the way through the whole of Regent’s Park to the big central garden in the middle and the amazing facilities that are built there.”

These last phases of Regent Park, of course, are huge: 12 buildings with 633 rent-geared-to-income homes along with 2,168 new market units.

Non-profit agencies, for their part, are looking to take advantage of more relaxed zoning to opportunistically add small-scale projects, such as a six-storey affordable seniors’ building on the Queensway, near the Ontario Food Terminal.

The developer, Houselink and Mainstay Community Housing, acquired the site – a double-width corner lot with a small bungalow – and hired Montgomery Sisam Architects (MSA) to develop a plan that maximizes the space while providing some common area and outdoor amenities. The project will have 38 units, mainly one-bedrooms.

“It’s a fairly efficient use of space,” says MSA principal Daniel Ling, who has designed several modular transitional housing projects that were funded through Ottawa’s Rapid Housing Initiative. Working with the City’s expedited approvals team, he and MSA principal Kevin Hutchinson came up with a design that includes no underground parking but an expanded area for docking motorized scooters, an important feature for seniors.

They also found a way to use a rear laneway for loading and waste bins – requirements that can consume large volumes of ground floor space in apartments. “On-site loading would have made it impossible,” says Mr. Hutchinson. Adds Mr. Ling: “You don’t see a ton of five- and six-story housing projects. What made it feasible was taking these costs out.”

While such cost-conscious design choices allow for more units and interior spaces, they don’t undermine the project’s structural durability, which was the Achilles’ heel for earlier generation of affordable housing projects.

Much of Mr. Karakusevic’s practice, for example, involves upgrading 50- or 60-year-old buildings that were constructed with shabby, and sometimes unsafe, materials to cut costs. The legacy of this kind of “value engineering” are energy inefficient structures that cost millions to retrofit, as well as tragedies, such as the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, which killed 72 people, partly due to the contractor’s use of flammable cladding. “I think clients realize that they were getting extremely bad value for money, and it was public money,” he says. “We cannot make great housing without good builders. There needs to be a more collaborative process.”

What’s more, non-profits, which have to operate their housing projects for decades, have become more attuned to the harsh reality that if they seek to shave off cost during the design and construction process, they’ll be on the hook in later years for costly upgrades.

“With the affordable housing clients, we’re having those conversations [about] where it makes sense to spend a little bit more upfront in the capital investment and save on your long-term operational costs,” says Mr. Bartman of LGA. He cites practical techniques for future proofing, such as designing bay windows that can be easily “popped out” and replaced when they reach the end of their usable life instead of undergoing a lengthy retrofit that forces the resident to move.

Unlike an earlier generation, architects now involved in such projects express a heightened consciousness of the needs of the occupants of low-cost housing. When Mr. Newman’s firm was designing the interior open spaces and private apartments for 97 Victoria, his team spent many hours huddled with the people who worked in St. John’s Kitchen, the staff of the social service agencies co-located in the building and some of the clients themselves.

He says that one key resource was the facilities manager – a long-time employee named Aaron who knew the clientele extremely well. “He would tell us over and over again, ‘You got to understand these people. They are rough on stuff. They get angry, they’ve got emotional issues, and they’re hard on a facility. They’ll beat it up. So it has to be durable.‘”

At the same time, Mr. Newman adds, the agency’s managers wanted the new hub to feel like a community, which meant discrete design choices, such as fitting out the corridors in the transitional housing section with small seating areas, a separate entrance and lots of natural light. “That was a lot of the design challenge: making spaces that encouraged people to be with each other, to have a community.”

Editor’s note: (April 21, 2025): A previous version of this article stated that 97 Victoria and The Working Centre are located in Waterloo, Ont. They are both located in the city of Kitchener, and The Working Centre serves the larger Waterloo Regional Municipality.