Just when things were finally starting to look up for Toronto’s apartment towers, along comes mayor-elect Rob Ford to knock them back down.

Concrete-slab towers built between the 1950s and 1980s have been a growing issue in recent years because they offer poor quality of life, are often physically isolated and waste huge amounts of energy.

In 2008, the city published a ground-breaking study called The Mayor’s Tower Renewal Opportunities Book. It set out in some detail how the city’s ubiquitous highrise apartment buildings could be rehabilitated to meet contemporary environmental and social standards. Given that Toronto has almost 1,200 such structures, that was good news.

Then last Friday,Nick Kouvalis, Ford’s deputy campaign manager and now his chief of staff, decided it was a good time to weigh in on the program. At a campaign post-mortem, the voluble Kouvalis let it drop that as far as he and his boss are concerned, Tower Renewal is just another lefty program that Toronto cannot afford.

“I was getting briefed yesterday,” Kouvalis said, “and … I was like … the Tower Renewal Program — what is that? We’re subsidizing (installation of low-flow) toilets … Guys, you know that stuff’s gotta stop. The priority is the taxpayer, to stop the gravy train, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Apart from his appalling ignorance, Kouvalis’ words indicate the new regime’s hostility to anything that might be the least bit progressive or intelligent.

Fortunately, the province is now interested in the program, and a second report addressing highrise apartments throughout the entire Greater Golden Horseshoe is expected later this month.

An estimated million people live in such towers, representing 13 percent of all households in the region.

The original Tower Renewal study examined various ways to rehabilitate buildings designed and constructed at a time when modernism reigned supreme and no one thought twice about energy efficiency — or the inhabitants, for that matter.

Since then, however, architecture and planning have moved beyond such a limited perspective. More important, perhaps, the cost of energy has increased to the point where it cannot be ignored. At the same time, global warming has become the most pressing crisis of our times.

Though there was initial talk of four pilot projects, nothing has materialized. Because most of these towers are privately owned, some resistance is expected. On the other hand, post-renewal energy costs would be a fraction of what they are now.

“If it’s not Rob Ford’s top priority, it’s not that big of a deal,” insists architect and report co-author Graeme Stewart. “I don’t think it will suddenly disappear. It’s something that’s already embedded in the city and, in a way, decoupled from the mayor’s office. The amount of interest that the province has, in some ways, trumps the city.”

As Stewart also points out, though Ford could stall the funding, too much work has been done to make killing the program practical. Besides, there’s considerable interest from other cities, including Hamilton and Mississauga, as well as the province.

In fact, the city’s economic involvement was unlikely to involve much more than low-interest loans.

More to the point, the program proposes specific techniques that will allow landlords and tenants to save millions of dollars in the future. It also points the way to healthier and happier living conditions in buildings that house many low-income Ontarians and recent immigrants. Indeed, 77 percent of these towers are in areas of high social need.

The gravy train doesn’t stop here any more, if it ever did.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca