You've raised a really important point. Nationally, I think about a third of Canadians are living in multiresidential housing. It often doesn't get the attention it needs when it comes to energy efficiency programming. It's a great opportunity to have efficiencies of scale. You can retrofit many, sometimes hundreds, of homes at once through a single project, so there are efficiencies to be gained there.
These buildings definitely need support for retrofits. The form of support varies a bit depending on whether you're talking about market housing, such as rental apartments, condominiums and strata corporations, or about affordable housing providers.
When it comes to affordable housing providers, whether municipal, provincial or non-profit, significant subsidies or forgivable loans are really helpful, because these providers across the country are really struggling with a very old, on average, housing stock that needs significant renewal. There's huge overlap between the renewal they need just to maintain habitability and the energy efficiency gains that we can make. They're almost completely overlapping. They have a huge backlog of maintenance and renewal needs across their stock. That funding, through programs such as the Canada greener affordable housing program, has been critical to moving those projects forward. We've had great success using those programs with our affordable housing providers.
On the rental side, different kinds of programs are needed. Low-interest financing has been made available through the Canada Infrastructure Bank. One of the core challenges is that they don't currently have a mandate to achieve these energy and carbon goals. They have very high expectations on the internal rate of return they would want to achieve through investments they make. Targeted incentives are really helpful for that sector, but they don't need to be covering such a huge share of the costs as we see with the affordable housing providers.
Condominiums and strata corporations shouldn't be forgotten. They're a huge segment of the housing market. They face unique constraints often in legislation about how they can use the money they raise for maintenance and renewal, limiting how much they can put on that towards energy efficiency upgrades. Similar to private rental housing, they need more targeted incentive programs that help to make that business case viable and attractive for condominiums and strata corps. The federal government can play a key role there as well.
In addition, all three of those housing types really benefit from the kind of support that retrofit accelerators are providing through the deep retrofit accelerator initiative. Retrofits in large buildings are complex. Often there's not a lot of extra capacity within the building management to plan and execute these projects. Having a team of professionals on hand, such as we and other accelerators are providing, really helps make these projects deliverable and deliverable with excellence, especially because in almost all cases we want to retrofit multiresidential housing while keeping residents in place. We don't want to move them out for a year to retrofit the building. It's very disruptive. That creates extra complexity. The support that we and the other federally funded accelerators can provide is essential to preserving occupancy through the retrofit process.