Passive Buildings Canada (PBC)

Led the project team to support a funding application on behalf of PBC, housing providers, developers, and municipalities. The funding goal is to create a set of standardized, and quality-assured technical tools, processes, resources, templates, and best practices to support the pre-development affordable housing initiatives. These resources will expedite the pre-development process derisk the project and deliver cost-effectively strategies for net zero. Workshops and training to educate on the business case for building to Passive House-certified and Net Zero levels of performance. The standardized tools, combined with a robust communication and engagement strategy will ensure a high rate of adoption. Seven partners were identified to support the project.

Proposed Toolkits Features:

Tools, guidelines and resources to enable communities with trusted information for the pre-development process for affordable housing projects:

Section 1.
We will be creating customizable regional green building standards for affordable housing by combining best practice for Passive House, Net Zero and LEED. This is a multi-pronged approach that will enable communities to thrive. There are different trade-offs for each one that need to be examined and there are different solutions that need to be adopted in order to create synergies through an integrated design approach. We will be determining how to best measure success when it comes to energy efficiency, water efficiency, ecosystem impact, human healthy impact and other green, health design goals.

Sustainability Standards, Guidelines and Templates

• Passive Design Guidebook for Part 9 buildings

• Commonly Used Low-Carbon Technologies will be provided for the various housing typologies (heat pumps, HRV’s, solar water systems, etc.)

• Sustainability Bid Evaluation Matrix (RFP templates)

• Roster of common suppliers (Pre-fab, Tiny Homes, Modular Housing Solutions, Container Homes and intergenerational and seniors’ innovative housing models)

• Concierge Program to assist municipalities and private-sector developers to navigate through site selection, funding, incentives, partnerships, and approvals processes

Section 2.
Financial Costing, Pre-Construction Templates

Housing providers, municipalities and other not-for-profits are constantly hiring estimators and highly paid consultants that don’t know the advantages and the business case for building to high levels of performance, such as Passive House-certified and Net Zero. This business case is quickly changing, and the tools that they are often using are outdated. It used to be very expensive to reach these levels of performance and the additional capital investments had a very long payback. That is not the case in the current market, and the business case is only going to get stronger in the future.

We will develop full lifecycle costing scenarios for several housing typologies. We will provide relevant, trusted, and current costing estimates for the range of performance tiers (all the way from meeting building code requirements to our highest performance standard). Our goal is to provide a suite of tools that the housing providers can utilize at every step of the development to ensure that they are able to articulate the business case for long-term operations savings.

• SEEFAR Building Analytics Inc. to support advanced life cycle costing for building projects/Total Cost of Building Ownership (TCBO)

• Developers/Owner Procurement Options Guide

• Customizable Project Pro Forma Templates (Net Zero)

• Pre-Approved Roster: roster of prequalified organizations/companies in the region that are available to support housing projects

• Case studies on Affordable Housing: we will develop case studies that will showcase different housing typologies and tiered levels of performance.

• Net Zero Incentives to support developers and housing providers

Section 3.

Engagement Strategy (including Tutorials, Workshops and Training)

Enable learning and building of knowledge by engaging with Stakeholders and teaching them how to access and use the resources, share, and collaborate.

Solutions will be accompanied with documents, instructions, tutorials, and examples (all customizable for each region). This information will be developed in a user-friendly format that might include checklists, matrix, fact sheets, 1-page instructions and or submittal forms.