In the midst of the housing crisis, Quebec’s housing stock lacks maintenance and falls under the peak of demolition workers with “disconcerting ease”, underlines a new essay which appears these days. The authors sound the alarm about the importance of protecting existing buildings. Not only to house people, but also to safeguard heritage, take care of the planet and strengthen neighborhood life.
In Quebec, we have the reflex to neglect the maintenance of buildings and leave them abandoned while waiting to demolish them, under the pretext that they have become irrecoverable. Result: hundreds of buildings remain unoccupied in Montreal and elsewhere, sometimes next to homeless encampments.
Rigid safety standards, designed for new construction, make it difficult to convert churches, office spaces and other types of disused buildings into housing. All this while housing prices are exploding due to the housing shortage.
“Our legislative and regulatory framework has been systematically designed for the new. We must change this trend,” argues Léa Méthé, coordinator of the work. Enhance existing buildings. A lever for sustainable developmentpublished by Editions du Septentrion.
This extremely well-researched book, written with architects André Bourassa and Richard Trempe, is both an essay and a practical guide aimed at helping homeowners pamper their homes. There are practically only advantages, including economic ones, to saving existing buildings, the authors conclude: the requalification of an existing building costs between 10% and 22% less than demolishing it and rebuilding it anew. . And the effects on the environment are infinitely less.
The habit of destroying
Quebec’s housing stock is one of the oldest in Canada. In 2017, 71% of homes dated before 1996 and 24% before 1961. Traditional buildings, built before the second half of the last century, were designed to last 120 years without major work. Those that were erected 50 years ago have a useful life that is half as short and now require significant renovations.
However, “when a building no longer meets the requirements of its use, we will prefer to destroy it to build a new one rather than inflicting on ourselves the numerous constraints relating to the conversion”, observes the Belgian engineer Justine Bonhomme in her memoir of 2016 on the churches of Quebec.
An obstacle course awaits owners who seek to convert a church or a commercial building into housing, underlines Léa Méthé. The presence of wood in a church, for example, creates a fire risk. The interior volumes of such a building represent a headache for fitting windows or emergency exits. In other types of buildings, it is the width of the corridors or staircases that poses a problem.
In downtown Montreal, 18% of the surface area of office towers, deserted due to teleworking, remains unoccupied. Dozens of churches and seniors’ residences are also abandoned because of safety standards cast in stone – such as the extremely expensive requirement to install sprinklers.
Part 10 of the Building Code allows a certain flexibility for the requalification of buildings, but bureaucratic obstacles eat up a lot of time and discourage developers, explains the author, who was until recently general director of the Écobâtiment organization, located in Quebec.
Necessary compromises
Given the homelessness and housing crisis, she calls for a paradigm shift when it comes to changing the use of existing buildings. “We must take humans into account in our risk analysis, not just the building,” argues Léa Méthé.
“Yes, we should be able to get out of a burning building. But there are also very great risks in having families unable to find adequate housing. The risk of having a homeless population in a city where there are free square feet is an inhumane, unacceptable risk. On this basis, there are compromises to be made,” she adds.
The housing specialist is not the only one to make this observation. The duty recently reported the same cry from the heart of community organizations and urban planning experts in favor of relaxations to allow “transient occupation” — described as a form of “legal squat” — of unoccupied buildings.
Demolition epidemic
States, notably the United Kingdom and New Jersey, have implemented solutions to facilitate the change of use of disused buildings. In France, the Climate and Resilience Law indicates that buildings constructed from 2023 must be designed in anticipation of a possible change in residential use.
In the absence of a strong gesture from the State, hundreds of buildings capable of housing people will remain disused, and ultimately demolished. The president of the Order of Architects of Quebec, Pierre Corriveau, summed up the challenge: “At present, everything can be demolished, except what must be preserved. »
“He suggests reversing our decision-making processes to consider instead that everything must be preserved, except what can be demolished,” emphasizes Léa Méthé.
The epidemic of demolition of existing buildings is harmful in every way. Buildings that bear witness to Quebec history are reduced to dust. These old buildings, often located in central districts, nevertheless help to slow down urban sprawl. They are generally accessible on foot, by bike or by public transport — an asset for the environment and which, as a bonus, eases traffic congestion.
In the garbage
In addition, the demolition of a building represents a nuisance for the planet: barely 25% of construction, renovation and demolition waste is recycled. They represent 38% of residual materials sent to landfills in Quebec.
For what ? Because the demolition of a building is done using mechanical excavators and bulldozers. The debris is sent in bulk to the sorting center. They are mechanically sifted and sorted to remove the rare valuable elements that have resisted the assault.
Windows, bricks, beams and other materials could, however, find a second life if a circular economy system was implemented in the construction industry.