Thick Skinned: Using EnerPHit to Conserve Culture and Carbon for Sustainable Affordable Housing

Canada's existing postwar modern building stock contributes greatly to climate change through greenhouse gas emissions but also represents a large resource of embodied carbon. The Ottawa Community Housing Corporation, the second largest housing provider in Ontario, owns much of this building stock. The buildings in this large portfolio are aging and in need of repairs; the average age of an OCH building is 45 years. These buildings can be retrofitted to provide or preserve affordable housing with low operating expenses while simultaneously addressing the conservation of embodied carbon and revitalization without gentrification.This thesis hypothesizes that the sustainable route to affordable housing is in creating buildings with long-term cultural and economic value and attempts to propose some measures and strategies for retrofitting a postwar modern building to the EnerPHit standard in Ottawa's cold climate without rendering it vacant for renovation.