Sustainable and Affordable Housing: Strategies, Innovations, and Policy Directions · Best Practices in Building Systems

Title: Sustainable and Affordable Housing: Strategies, Innovations, and Policy Directions
Abstract: British Columbians are facing a dual challenge: finding homes they can afford and ensuring those homes are safe in a changing climate. The province is now experiencing its largest wave of housing construction in decades, and the choices made in this moment, how and where new homes are built, will shape the health, costs, and security of households for generations. If these homes are not designed to be low-carbon, resilient, and future-ready, today’s housing boom will only deepen tomorrow’s problems, leaving families with dwellings that are unsafe, costly to operate, and difficult to upgrade.

This paper outlines four pathways forward:
- aligning codes and financing so the safest and cleanest homes are also the easiest to build
- scaling skills and supply chains for low-carbon construction
- deepening collaboration among governments, Indigenous communities, industry, and researchers
- expanding data and benchmarks to track progress
Contributor: R. Kumar, D. G. Clark, E. Girgis, A. Dekin, M. Prince, T. Froese, P. Mukhopadhyaya
Date Submitted: 2026/03/05
Format: PDF
Type: Text
Extent: 20 pages
Language: en-CA
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License
Is Part Of: Cross-cutting system threads; Capacity and Constraint, Timeframes and Tolerances; Affordability and Local Resilience; Governance, Roles, and Responsibility; Transition, Not Arrival; Care, Maintenance, and Return
Description: Text, images, graphs and references
Identifier: 32
Date: 2025/10/01

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