What if Canada Actually Had a Missing Middle Housing Playbook?

Canada’s housing crisis isn’t from a lack of ideas: It’s from a system too fragmented to make them work together. Build Canada Homes (BCH) offers strategies to address Canada’s housing crisis, with early moves in financing, modular tech, and public land use representing an important step toward real progress.

But siloed solutions won’t fix this system-wide problem unless they are in lockstep with zoning and approvals. Without coordinated regulatory reform, the initiative risks becoming just another well-funded plan buried in red tape.

When those pieces align, they act like dominoes, one triggering the next in a chain reaction of building and investment. Done right, and the federal government can unleash a wave of the right homes, in the right places, at the right price points. Done wrong, and we’ll keep building luxury towers instead of rentals, wasting valuable urban land and pushing families farther out just to find a home.

Carney’s plan to “get the government back into the business of homebuilding,” especially through large developments on public land, is a move in the right direction. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. A vast, largely untapped opportunity lies in low-rise, multi-unit infill housing.

Why We Need More Low-Rise Multi-Unit Infill

A 6-unit building under construction, designed by RJH Architecture + Planning

A 4-unit building on a small corner lot in Ottawa, designed by RJH Architecture + Planning.

These often-overlooked, modestly scaled buildings—typically two to three storeys—represent a golden opportunity to fix Canada’s housing crisis.

By replacing a single aging home with a small multi‑unit building, builders can add four to twelve new homes while maintaining the familiar scale and character of existing neighbourhoods. This kind of gentle, neighbourhood‑friendly growth creates more housing in the places most Canadians want to live: centrally located neighbourhoods, on tree‑lined, walkable streets.

These homes aren’t just desirable, they’re achievable, and far more affordable to build, heat, and maintain than high‑rise towers or single‑family homes. With supportive zoning and streamlined permitting, they offer municipalities a cost‑effective path to stronger budgets, efficient use of infrastructure, and higher property‑tax yields. Yet Canada still operates under thousands of local zoning systems that treat the same housing type differently. As a result, few of these homes are being built. 

Harmonizing Zoning Across Canada

A unified national market for low‑rise infill would let builders deliver repeatable, modular homes in every city: fast, predictable, and affordable. It’s an obvious solution to Canada’s housing crisis, and BCH now has the funding and federal mandate to change this through synchronized regulatory reform. The path forward is clear: fast‑track approvals and scale modular, multi‑unit infill built with Canadian materials under one consistent framework. It’s a win-win-win. 

While the Housing Accelerator Fund made strides toward consistency, its one‑size‑fits‑all approach with 4-unit permissions fell short of driving construction. Real progress will come when municipalities align under a unified national playbook, creating one predictable housing market where builders can deliver homes at scale.

A National Playbook for Missing Middle Housing

The solution lies in implementing effective reforms that align with the business interests of developers who build low-rise infill housing. To achieve this, precise market insights are essential, and data-driven forecasting provides the predictions needed to understand how the housing market will respond to changes in regulations and financing.

Evidence already shows this works. In Ottawa, regulatory reforms increased mid-density infill construction by 63% within just a few years. Similar work is now underway in Greater Sudbury, Halifax, and Edmonton: cities proving that simple, repeatable frameworks can align zoning, approvals, and modular manufacturing into one efficient housing system. With this level of insight, planners and decision-makers can reverse-engineer the coordinated shifts needed to unify the interests of modular manufacturers, developers, governments, affordable housing providers, and lenders—unlocking the supply required to deliver the right housing at scale.

With support through winnings from the CMHC’s Housing Supply Challenge, Rosaline Hill founded BuildingIN, a program that helps municipalities use evidence-based forecasts and growth strategies to unlock low-rise infill opportunities. Now poised to expand nationwide, it links federal goals with municipal action through four key steps: tying city zoning changes to federal funding, providing technical help, sharing maps and templates, and running test projects with clear cost benchmarks. 

Such coordinated action would allow municipalities to access funding essential to making multi-unit infill the scalable, practical solution that will move Canada beyond its housing crisis. More than that, it sets a new course for building not just homes, but thriving, vibrant neighbourhoods and communities—homes that Canadians can afford, in places they want to live, today and for generations to come. 

---

Rosaline Hill is a principal architect, planner, and development consultant with over 25 years dedicated to designing homes and communities that work. She founded RJH Architecture + Planning, Walkable Ottawa, Ottawa Cohousing, and BuildingIN, each building on her passion for smarter, more sustainable housing solutions.

With support from her CMHC Housing Supply Challenge winnings, Rosaline launched BuildingIN, an infill consulting practice advancing a data-driven approach that unifies Canada’s fragmented housing market for low-rise, multi-unit infill. Her proven methodology has guided municipalities, large and small, through transformative change. Today, she partners with governments across the country, empowering changemakers to unlock scalable, affordable housing solutions where they are needed most.

If you’re looking for fresh ways to forecast infill, update infill policies, or want to chat about your municipality’s growth goals, we’d love to chat. 

Contact Rosaline at info@buildingin.ca or call 613-262-5480 to begin the conversation.