One does not need to look far to see that a major concern facing consumers across Canada is housing availability. It’s important for fire and life safety advocates to understand how the installation of fire sprinklers can help.
Because sprinklers are so often used as a lightning rod in the building industry, it may surprise home developers to learn that fire sprinklers are making it possible for local building officials to approve new-home-development projects that can ease the availability burden.
This is an important counterpoint to the narrow focus on the cost of installing residential fire sprinklers so often being used by sprinkler-code opponents as a means to prevent sprinklers’ greater acceptance. Their approach misses the larger point: affordability is just one aspect of housing availability. The real question is what the cost to the community is when new homes are built without sprinklers: injury, death, firefighter exposure, property loss, displacement costs, fire department resources, environmental concerns, and more.
Fortunately, a paradigm shift is now occurring as sprinklers are being accepted across Canada more than ever before. This foundational shift is due to increased understanding and agreement among many stakeholders that sprinklers can be part of the housing solution when they are presented as an option at the planning stages of new developments.
Why? Because increased construction often stretches a municipality’s ability to service new-home developments. Reasons typically include higher demand for firefighting water supplies, adequate staffing, distances beyond the effective response of the fire service, challenges to access and egress routes, and much more. These obstacles may rule out a new development’s approval. But with installed fire sprinklers throughout the developments, obstacles are overcome and the result is a win-win for all parties.
As this strategy has taken hold, more progressive fire departments across Canada are getting engaged in their local development planning. I hope you will too. By working with and educating city planners and developers, challenges such as these are being alleviated through advocacy of installed sprinklers. The result is that sprinklers are increasingly being installed as a method to allow new-home development construction. When introduced as incentives at the earliest stages of planning, the city, developers, and consumers can all reap the rewards.
Recent examples are the Livingston and Hotchkiss developments in Calgary, Alberta. Although sprinklers are not mandated in the Alberta Building Code, the developers agreed to sprinkler the homes as a condition for their developments to proceed. As well, both Richmond Hill and Central York in Ontario had major developments proceed solely due to installing sprinklers as a condition.
These developments would have been curtailed if not for the fire service, planners, and developers understanding the life safety value and agreeing on sprinklers. And it isn’t just the developers and fire service that benefitted. The sprinklered homes will protect hundreds of civilians over many generations. One sign that sprinklers are gaining traction is that in both the Richmond Hill and Livingston developments, installed sprinklers are featured in their marketing campaigns!
Are incentives a good approach for your community? We can help. HFSC Canada has identified several incentives that local municipalities can select from. These have worked well across North America and they’re likely replicable in your municipality. The Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs (CAFC) has also recognized that incentivization of sprinklers is the way the proceed. ICAFC’s recently published White Paper on Residential Fire Sprinklers lists incentives a community might consider and expands on each of these.
HFSC Canada has further resources supporting the role of incentives and even offers free “Lunch and Learn” sessions to bring the key players together to explain and explore incentives. HFSC Canada also offers a free, downloadable handbook for fire chiefs to help guide them on the development review process. https://homefiresprinklercanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/FC-Development-Design-Handbook-Version-1.1.pdf Densification is another major theme in housing affordability. Building more homes in the same space can reduce the costs on each home. Installed sprinklers can be used to permit denser developments in areas outside of the effective response capabilities of the local fire service. Under the NBC, if you build outside of the fire department’s 10-minute response time, then the limiting distance between homes should be doubled. (Fire Underwriters Survey (FUS) publishes response maps on its municipal portal site for all communities in Canada.) This essentially means a minimum of 2.4 m to a lot line. An option would be to sprinkler these new homes and thus retain the 1.2 m distance to the lot line. This allowance can lead to more homes in a sub-division, reducing cost and increasing revenue for developers. The addition of just two more homes in a development can pay for the entire subdivision to be sprinklered.
With almost 45 years of experience with sprinklers being required in all new residential construction (including single-family homes), Vancouver, BC, has included in its municipal building bylaw 72 relaxing code provisions if/when sprinklers are present. The major driving factor for these is to increase housing affordability. Builders can benefit from less restrictive standards for fire separations, opening protections, etc. because we know that sprinklers can suppress or contain a fire to the room of origin and thus save on time and costs.
These provision examples are based on a robust set of building standards that take advantage of the presence of fire sprinklers. Other code relaxations being considered and identified in the CAFC White Paper include the permissibility of a 4th story loft in town homes, and allowance of secondary suites. The bottom line? These improvements are possible because of the proven, outstanding benefits of installed sprinklers.
The key to all of this is that developers, city planners, and the fire service all need to meet at the earliest stages possible in development planning. Developers and builders no longer need to see sprinklers as an added cost or burden on them. Rather, they need to understand building homes with sprinklers is a means to overcome construction hurdles.
Thanks to sprinklers, communities can open new areas for development, meeting the demand for new homes. In the longer-term home buyers and their families benefit with safer homes. Sprinklers just make sense.