By Victoria Foote, Corporate Knights
A third of Canadians and a quarter of Americans live in multi-unit housing, but the shortage of on-site charging stations is stopping them from buying EVs.
Aniseh Sharifi spent the better part of the past six years trying to convince an unyielding condo board they should invest in charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. “A big reason for moving out of my condo was to get a charger,” she tells Corporate Knights.
Sharifi says that she was not the only tenant in her building, located in Toronto’s east end, to make such a request. Other EV owners submitted similar pleas and all were told that the board had other priorities.
They are far from alone in their frustration at the lack of accessible, on-site chargers for people living in multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs). Insufficient on-site charging in MURBs has become a significant gap in the EV ecosystem. Currently, 72% of EV charging in Canada occurs at home. Workplace and public charging stations make up the balance.
But as more Canadians replace their gas car with an electric one – 65,733 new zero-emission vehicles were registered as of the second quarter of 2024, an increase of 37.9% from the same period last year – the clamour for chargers located in apartment and condo parking stalls will only get louder.
Louise Lévesque, senior policy director with Electric Mobility Canada (EMC), says that the anticipated rise in requests for on-site charging facilities has now arrived. “We’re there, and we need to address this,” Lévesque says, although she acknowledges a recent uptick in charging infrastructure installation in the condominium sector, which she attributes to tenant advocacy.
Even so, Lévesque says, efforts to make residential buildings “EV-ready” – equipped to handle a higher electrical load and with circuitry in place to hook up to chargers – are not moving fast enough. EMC submitted recommendations to the federal government two years ago advising that one million MURBs be EV-ready within the next five years. Canada will not come close to reaching that target.
Access to EV charging is an equity issue
As many as one in three Canadians lives in a condo or apartment rental; in urban centres, the share is much higher, reaching 60% in the Montreal and Vancouver metropolitan areas. Americans are in a comparable position: nearly a quarter of all housing structures in the United States have more than one dwelling unit.
Noting that in the United States some 50% to 80% of all battery-electric car-charging sessions take place at home, Eleftheria Kontou, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois, argues that “the current limited access to home charging in many cities constrains electric vehicle adoption, slows down the decarbonization of U.S. transportation and exacerbates inequities in electric vehicle ownership.”
According to a report by Dunsky Energy + Climate Advisors, EV uptake is concentrated among more affluent people. Access to charging in multifamily buildings is an equity issue, the report’s authors write, given the greater prevalence of low-income and racialized people in multifamily buildings relative to single-family homes.
Lévesque echoes that finding, adding that EV adoption rates will continue to track upward over the next few years but that the buyers will be predominantly homeowners. “I think that’s sad,” she says. “It’s unequal. If you’re living in an apartment building, you can’t benefit from the economics of driving an EV just because you can’t install a charging station.”
Lévesque says that municipalities and the charging industry are getting creative in response to residents’ need for easy access to chargers, such as locating charging hubs in parking lots close to high-rise clusters.
Better days ahead for EV charging infrastructure
Property owners and condo boards often cite cost and electrical systems that can’t handle the additional load from EVs as the biggest obstacles to investing in charging equipment. Power sharing, where multiple cars can share a single circuit, can help ease the energy burden, Lévesque says. Government subsidies are also available to retrofit buildings so that they are EV-ready, although provincial support is wildly inconsistent from one jurisdiction to the next.
Still, progress is evident in places such as the City of Vancouver, which raised the percentage of EV-ready parking stalls required in new MURBs from 20% to 100% in 2018. Three years later, Vancouver launched an incentive program to accelerate EV-ready retrofits in existing rental buildings.
The City of Toronto requires that 100% of residential parking in new construction and 20% to 50% of non-residential parking be EV-ready.
As for recalcitrant condo boards, a new movement is underway called “the right to charge.” If adopted as legislation, the right to charge means that boards and property owners can be compelled to make their buildings EV-ready. For example, in the State of Illinois, the new Electric Vehicle Charging Act requires that 100% of parking spaces at multi-unit dwellings be ready for EV charging, with a conduit and reserved power capacity to easily install charging stations. The new law also gives renters and condo owners in new buildings a right to install chargers without unreasonable restriction from landlords and homeowner associations.
According to the Dunsky report, installing charging infrastructure adds an increasingly sought-after amenity that can make a building more valuable. Lévesque agrees: “If you’re selling your condo and you can tell a future buyer that your parking spot is EV-ready or has a charging station, that adds value,” she says. “More and more people will be interested in not having the hassle of getting all that installed and going through the whole process of getting approvals – it’s all done already.”
Sharifi no longer needs to charge her EV at the shopping mall closest to her condo: she installed a charger when she moved into her townhouse last August. And despite the board’s refusal to budge on the issue, Sharifi does not suffer buyer’s remorse. “I save thousands of dollars a year on gas,” she reports. “In all this time, I’ve never had an oil change or needed maintenance work.”
Sharifi also believes that the board will eventually come around. “There are a lot of new buildings going up in that neighbourhood. All of them offer an EV-ready parking stall. They’re going to have to do this.”