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Toronto:Residents in three public housing communities could see badly needed repairs to their units and buildings completed in months and not years as part of a new pilot project.
The Toronto Community Housing Corporation announced on Friday that it is experimenting with a new approach to capital repairs at a cluster of its buildings near Lawrence Avenue and Markham Road, Jane Street and Finch Avenue and The Queensway and South Kingsway.
As part of the new approach, which is known as ReSet, the TCHC says it will “bundle multiple capital repair jobs in each community and deliver them as one project.”The hope is that by using a single general contractor to oversee the repairs at each building or community, the TCHC will be able to speed up the timeline in which they are completed and save costs through economies of scale.
The TCHC currently has a $2.6 billion repair backlog and plans to invest about $200 million in rehabbing derelict units and buildings next year.
“Following more than a decade of underfunding for maintenance and repairs too many of our buildings and our communities have slid into a critical state of repair,” TCHC President and CEO Greg Spearn said at a press conference announcing the pilot project on Friday morning. “ReSet will examine these communities from the foundation to the roof and everything in between to find long term solutions.”
Currently the TCHC awards individual contracts for each type of repair needed in a particular building – windows, elevators, roofing and so on – but under ReSet a single contract would be awarded to a general contractor who would then be responsible for coordinating the activities of various sub-contractors.
“Rather than doing one set of repairs in one part of these complexes and then doing another one somewhere else it is all going to be brought together under one general contractor buildings and neighbourhoods at a time and this is going to result in cost savings and in faster repairs,” Mayor John Tory said Friday. “Quite frankly for anyone who has been through this in a big building, a small building or a house, it just makes sense.”
As part of the ReSet program, the TCHC says that residents will be “fully engaged” in planning and design work and will have a chance to make suggestions about ways to improve building safety and to , “ensure that common and ground floor spaces are put to the best use.”
The pilot project will cover communities consisting of about 900 individual TCHC units but could be expanded down the road.
