ENDURING
THE HEAT

On a sunny day in June in Toronto, residents inside a 23-storey highrise on Kipling Avenue, say even if the temperature outside is comfortable, they’re often roasting in their apartments.

Two women, who CBC agreed to not name over fears that speaking out could draw repercussions from building management, said their apartments get sweltering hot in the summer.

Both women have lived in the building for years and pay below-market rent. They say they can’t find anywhere else affordable to live in Toronto.

“In the night [it’s] very, very hot,” one woman said, adding that sometimes it’s difficult to sleep.

She said the building retains the heat, and even when she opens all the windows and the balcony door, there is not enough air circulation to cool her apartment.

“When my grandkids come [visit], they are screaming, ‘It’s hot!’ They remove all their clothes,” she said. 

On the day CBC News visited her apartment, the city reached a high of 24 C. The thermometer in her apartment read about 28 C at 1 p.m.

While she used to have window-mounted air conditioning units, she said she removed them a few years ago after receiving a notice from building management.

Many landlords of highrise buildings in the city issued warnings to tenants about the risks of being held liable after a toddler was killed in 2019 by a falling air conditioning unit in Toronto.

Though city bylaws do not ban window-mounted air conditioning units in apartment buildings, landlords are responsible for ensuring air conditioning units are safely installed. Recently, some building owners in Toronto have tried to evict tenants for using air conditioning.

“I don’t want trouble. I had to remove my ACs,” the Toronto tenant told CBC. 

She said she has considered buying a portable floor unit, but with prices ranging from $400 to $800, it’s too expensive for her.

Lately, the tenant said she has started visiting the mall to escape the heat.

“I go to any store to buy something … for a longer period than I need to, just to cool off,” she said. 

Her neighbour, who lives in the same building, said not only does the building get hot, but she finds the air quality makes it difficult to breathe.

“I have to run outside just to get some fresh air, because I can’t stay in the house,” she said.

“We’re melting.”

It’s not just those in aging highrises who are suffering. 

In Toronto’s city centre, Summer Leigh says her apartment in a three-and-a-half-storey building is typically several degrees above the outdoor temperature on hot days.

“I used to actually really enjoy the heat in the summertime. I mean, my name is Summer,” she said. “But now I feel like I’m trapped by it.”

When she first moved into her apartment 11 years ago as a student, Leigh said she fell in love with the heritage building, which was built in the early 1900s.

But the heat has gotten worse since then, and she said it’s making living there increasingly unbearable. Leigh said she has felt the effects of heat exhaustion more than once.

She said the hottest temperature she has ever recorded in her apartment was 32.7 C. 

“It just feels very much that we’re at the mercy of the elements,” she said.

The three-bedroom apartment that Leigh shares with her partner and her cat is on the top floor, making it more exposed to the heat. But Leigh says what makes it worse is the flat black roof directly above her ceiling.

“On really hot days … you’ll feel the heat just blasting down,” she said.

According to mapping by HealthyDesign.City, her apartment is in a heat island — an urban area with higher temperatures, often due to features like many paved surfaces, large buildings and a lack of trees and vegetation.

Leigh said that if she was able to run a standard window air conditioning unit on full blast, it would help cool things down.

But that’s difficult, because her apartment unit is serviced by just 15 amps. The minimum feeder for a dwelling in Ontario is typically 60 amps, according to the Electrical Safety Authority. 

Leigh said her fridge uses nine amps when its compressor kicks in. When a heat wave hits, Leigh said if she wants to run her AC on full blast, she has to unplug her fridge to avoid blowing a fuse.

To cope on hot days, Leigh and her partner leave all the windows open and use fans. If it gets really hot, they run a small air conditioning unit on energy saver mode, which allows her to keep her fridge plugged in. But it isn’t powerful enough to cool her entire apartment.

“Basically, if it’s 29 degrees outside, it will suck a lot of the humidity out of [the living room], which helps, but it will still be 28 or 29 degrees in here on the thermometer,” she said.

“We really end up kind of like a campfire, huddling around the air conditioner.”

Leigh said her landlord has only updated the electrical systems in the building’s apartments as they become empty. She pays $1,560 monthly; a renovated unit of the same size costs at least $900 more. 

She says longstanding tenants like her who still have affordable rents are left to swelter in the heat. 

“I know the city is trying to move towards making newer buildings more efficient and carbon neutral, which is great,” Leigh said.

“But there are so many people in existing buildings who don’t want their buildings being torn down, but want these buildings retrofitted, which is very doable.” 

Even just painting the roof white, she said, might help shield her apartment from some of the heat.

Architect Graeme Stewart is on a mission to adapt old, affordable housing to be more resilient to climate change.

Stewart, principal at ERA Architects, created the Tower Renewal Partnership to advocate for the renewal of aging postwar, concrete apartment towers in Canada.

“These buildings are an asset, not a liability,” he said.

“Millions of people live in these buildings. More people in Toronto live in apartment buildings than live in single-family homes.”

Instead of tearing down older apartment buildings that weren’t designed to endure extreme heat and other aspects of climate change, Stewart’s mission is to salvage them from ruin so that they can last another 50 to 100 years. 

While he said it’s not going to happen overnight, Stewart points to success stories, like a new project currently under construction in Toronto’s Oakwood Village neighbourhood.

It’s a retrofit of a seniors housing complex run by St. Hilda’s Towers Foundation, a private, not-for-profit charity. Three towers, built in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, and the 474 units inside, are being transformed.

The project will reduce the building’s energy use while updating it with new central heating and cooling systems and individual heat exchangers in each unit. Stewart said rent for tenants will not increase.

“[The units] were in a deep state of disrepair. They couldn’t lease them out and there wasn’t funding available to fix them at the time,” Stewart said.

By partnering with the city and with funding from the federal government and other agencies, Stewart’s firm was able to help come up with a solution.

While he said much of the sustainable, energy-efficient retrofit innovation in Canada is happening with the support of public funding, his hope is that these projects will lead to solutions for the private market.

“There’s a lot of people looking at doing this, and more will come. But we need to accelerate it and ramp it up.”

Research, including a 2013 U.S. study and the B.C. coroner’s investigation into the 2021 heat dome, has shown that air conditioning can save lives, but simply installing more of them isn’t a sustainable solution to heat. 

That’s why climate resiliency experts are calling for solutions that address the bigger picture — more efficiently designed, climate-friendly buildings and better use of tree canopy and the natural environment to help cool cities.

But many who represent the private rental sector are hesitant. 

“Almost all who provide rental housing want their tenants to be comfortable,” said John Dickie, president of the Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations. 

But he said renovating old rental buildings is expensive, and that without more incentives and government support, that cost would only lead to higher rents when Canada is already dealing with a housing crisis. 

“Our view is that we are providing standard rental housing,” Dickie said. “We are not health agencies. We are not social service agencies. That’s not our expertise. That’s not what we signed up to do.”

‘If someone is too poor to buy an air conditioner, let social assistance give them an extra amount of money — two hundred, three hundred bucks — to buy an air conditioner.” 

Tony Irwin, the president of the Federation of Rental-Housing Providers of Ontario, said it’s often impossible to renovate old buildings to be heat-resilient without dislocating tenants.

Instead, he said, some owners have been installing cool common areas or encouraging tenants to go to public facilities when it gets too hot.

Even when landlords do update and retrofit aging buildings, long-term tenants can be left in the lurch. 

In the case of Stewart’s St. Hilda’s seniors complex project, the renovations were organized in such a way that no tenants had to be evicted. 

But in other cases, tenants say future-focused retrofits on their corporate-owned buildings are making life worse for the people who live there now.

In one of the city’s aging apartment towers in the Etobicoke area of Toronto, Bojana Nakic and her family say updates to make their building more energy-efficient have left them living with oppressive heat in their fourth-floor apartment.

“We’ve definitely had ideas of wanting to leave, but the problem is money is the object,” Nakic said. 

Nakic, 21, has lived in the two-bedroom apartment with her parents for 15 years. She says it was a comfortable and affordable home until recently, but now her family is enduring its first summer without AC. 

In previous years, they used window-mounted air conditioning units to keep cool on hot days, but new building management sent out notices informing tenants they’re no longer allowed to use them. 

When the first heat wave of 2022 hit, Nakic said it was stifling inside. Since then, she says, they’ve had several days when their apartment reached 28 C or hotter.

“I have a pretty big fan in my room, but that only does so much. It kind of only redistributes the air,” she said.

Gordana Jankovic, Nakic’s mom, said the heat is unbearable. She has diabetes, which makes her more vulnerable to it.

“It’s really hard to sleep,” Jankovic said.

A new, more environmentally friendly central heating and cooling system is now up and running and tenants have been offered free AC for the remainder of summer 2022 at no additional cost. 

But Nakic worries that if they sign a new contract, they’ll end up paying more than they can afford down the road for the extra cost of electricity, and won’t be able to revert to using other kinds of AC in their apartment unit.

As legacy tenants they pay $1,300 a month, all amenities included, compared to the going rate for a fully renovated two-bedroom apartment in their building, which costs at least $1,000 more.

Jankovic said hot days would be more manageable if she could open up the doors and windows for air circulation, but that would mean spending her day sweeping up construction debris from the ongoing work outside the building.

Nakic said they’re hoping to ride out the summer by buying fans and portable air conditioners, but she worries about how they’ll deal with future heat waves.

“The thing is, you have to be here, because where else are you going to go? Everything costs way too much,” Nakic said.

That’s why many are calling on Canada’s major cities to do more to tackle climate change without eliminating the precious affordable housing that already exists.

Beyond climate-friendly building retrofits, resilience planner Sharon Lam said infrastructure changes must also extend outdoors into shared spaces.

She said instead of installing more air conditioning units, mitigating heat should include sustainable initiatives like planting trees, more equitable distribution of green space and improving access to natural assets like Toronto’s river valleys and urban forests.

Global warming has already reached about 1.2 C above pre-industrial levels and it’s on a pathway to surpass the 1.5 C threshold — a scenario that climate modelling and projections show will lead to catastrophic consequences.

While Lam is worried about the future for Canadians in cities, she’s also optimistic. 

“Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, but also one of the greatest opportunities to create more sustainable, healthy and resilient communities for all, including families like mine.”