Grenfell Tower fire a warning for Toronto

The first glimpse of Grenfell Tower was the most awful thing I’ve seen in person. Shocking. Evil. Seemingly unreal, like the set of a disaster film: a burnt and blackened residential tower rising into a beautiful blue sky in a most tranquil part of London.

I was in London by coincidence last week, arriving a day after the fire that incinerated the tower and has left at least 79 dead. London is a city that’s been dealing with what seems near weekly attacks, and this one was on a catastrophic scale, not due to an outside threat or domestic terrorist, but rather a homegrown political and policy disaster.

Located in the north corner of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the wealthiest of London’s 33 boroughs, Grenfell is a highrise tower on a small public housing estate tucked in between expensive homes.

Closer to the police perimeter around Grenfell, posters of missing children and adults appeared, pasted to walls and poles.

Then there were memorials: messages written on Post-it notes and banks of flowers many dozens deep.

Other messages demanded “Justice 4 Grenfell” and listed the long-ignored complaints local residents had made to both the building management and the Kensington council government.

“London stay strong & stay united. May those souls rest,” read one message written on the pillars of the Westway, London’s Gardiner-like elevated highway that runs nearby.

The neighbourhood is a geography of utter sadness, with hundreds of people standing around the periphery, some crying, reading memorials or just staring at the tower.

People had to come see it for themselves.

Grenfell is the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of the housing crisis cities like London and Toronto are enduring, where even people who identify as “middle class” have difficultly finding decent housing.

That 1911 New York City factory fire killed 146 garment workers and led to major fire safety and worker rights reforms. Suddenly the wider public saw there was a problem, and change came quickly. Similarly, the 1960 Hoggs Hollow tunnel fire that killed five construction workers in Toronto led to changes to Ontario labour laws.

“As an architect your primary responsibility is that buildings are safe for inhabitants, and changes will come from this,” Graeme Stewart, a principal at Toronto’s ERA Architects, said referring to the Grenfell fire. “The Great Fire of London (in 1666) instituted huge changes, like fire walls.”

Stewart was in London to speak at a forum on “Estate Regeneration” organized by Urban Design London, a non-profit agency that works closely with Transport for London, the city’s massive authority responsible for both roads and public tran- sit, and the local borough governments, which build and maintain public housing. He was there to talk about Tower Renewal, a program that aims to rehabilitate our aging stock of residential towers. Toronto has more than 1,000 of them, many built during the same era as Grenfell, and around a million people live in towers across the GTA as well. The project was adopted by the City of Toronto and is spreading to other Canadian cities.

Tower Renewal is just now moving from policy changes to demonstration sites. Part of the program includes recladding existing towers with new insulating skin, and finding ways to add infill housing between existing towers while improving the conditions of older apartments and the public spaces around them. To be certain, Ontario’s fire codes are different than those in Britain — for instance we require more than one staircase in our apartment buildings, and the cladding materials that caught fire are different here — but Grenfell is on the minds of everyone advocating for more and better housing today.

At the Urban Design forum, Stewart remarked that we are 20 years behind where London is, which means though we have much work to do in improving the existing stock of homes and adding new ones, there’s time to make sure we’re doing it right.

“At home, we’re at the beginning, so this will reframe what our best practices are,” he says. “It’s a good time for a sober review of our building codes and existing housing stock.”

So while there is blessedly no reason to panic here about similar tower fires, Grenfell isn’t just about fire safety reform, it’s about the conditions people are increasingly living in and simply building new homes.

Bedbugs, caving in ceilings and other problems are part of a backlog of repairs Toronto’s public housing stock needs: $350 million is required by the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) next year alone or they’ll have to close 400 homes, with $2.6 billion needed over the next 10 years.

These troubles do not have the drama of a fire and are largely hidden, but they affect the quality of life, health and economy of everyone who lives in these conditions, and in turn will affect those who don’t. Yet we’re arguing about who has to pay for this in a city that religiously refuses to raise property taxes and continues to cut services across the board. More things will start falling apart.

The difference between Toronto and London, and a particular challenge for programs such as Tower Renewal, is much of our housing stock is privately owned, with only about 10 per cent of Toronto’s towers in public hands.

“Seventy-six per cent of Canada’s rental housing buildings were built more than 36 years ago,” says Ya’el Santopinto, co-leading the Tower Renewal project at ERA with Stewart and also in London for the forum. “Ownership fragmentation is a challenge.” These are homes that students, seniors and families live in.

Last month, hundreds of residents in Parkdale initiated an ongoing rent strike against MetCap Living Management Inc., a company that owns more than a dozen buildings in Parkdale alone.

It’s yet more evidence deteriorat- ing living conditions are widespread and not limited to public housing. Combined with high rents and a limited supply, all but the wealthiest among us are having great difficulty finding housing in Toronto, yet it seems every new housing development, rental or condo, big or small, is opposed by existing residents.

Santopinto also notes the dichotomy that improving existing buildings can allow a landlord to raise rents, affecting affordability. The light in this dark time, if there is any, is the nascent National Housing Strategy germinating in Ottawa right now.

“We’re at an incredible moment,” she says of its potential to create new housing and fix our existing stock. Will we get behind it, even if it costs considerable money? Will the NIMBYs keep opposing everything?

Grenfell is a warning we need to heed. If we don’t, the ongoing, homegrown tragedy in Toronto and other Canadian cities will continue to corrode both our economy and society. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef