LORINC: The vital need to renew Tower Renewal
Almost exactly a year ago, a team of American affordable housing experts from the Urban Land Institute came to Toronto to offer up ideas for breaking the logjam on retrofitting our huge portfolio of aging slab apartment buildings that collectively provide reasonably priced accommodation for hundreds of thousands of people.
They spent a few weeks studying this far-flung assembly of buildings, some privately owned and others run by Toronto Community Housing. Then, at a well-attended and upbeat session at the Munk Centre, the group offered solutions, which have subsequently been packaged up in a report. Senior municipal and council officials were in attendance, and there was plenty of talk about not just nosing this fix up the city’s priorities ladder but launching a pilot project with ten buildings. “You need to think about the next 60 years,” former New York City chief planner Purnima Kapur told the audience.