Our thesis · The whole idea
The missing middle, plainly.
Bigger than a single house. Smaller than a tower. The homes a city actually grows on.
Start here
Hamilton needs more homes. The gentlest place to put them is the streets we already have.
Not every new home needs a new street. Gentle infill puts new front doors on familiar blocks, close to the schools, the shops, and the transit that are already there.
The porches are here. The maples are here. What’s missing is the housing in the middle: duplexes, semis with extra homes tucked in, houses that quietly hold three or four families. They built the best old streets in this city, and then they became strangely hard to build. That’s the missing middle.
The rules, in one breath
Ontario already allows a house with three homes in it.
A detached, semi-detached, or row house in Ontario can hold one principal dwelling plus up to two additional dwelling units. That is a house with three homes in it, the same familiar idea as a basement suite or an in-law suite, done properly.
Put two of those side by side as a semi, and one handsome house-form holds six front doors. From the sidewalk it reads exactly like the house that has always been there.
4 → 6
Where four homes fit on a lot today, six gentle, house-scale homes should be able to belong. That’s the change we’re working for.
Who lives there
Three front doors. Three answers to the same question.
Every argument about density is an argument about people.
The principal dwelling
A young family, holding the deed.
Their mortgage finally works, because the home helps carry itself. They cut the grass. They know the mail carrier. From the sidewalk, the house looks like it always has.
The second home
A nurse on shift work.
Ten minutes from the hospital, her own front door, her own address. The rent she pays stays on the street, with a landlord who lives one door over, not one province away.
The third home
A couple who never wanted to leave.
They raised their kids on this street and want to grow old on it. A smaller place now: same maples, same porch light, same neighbours who wave.
Three households, one house-form, a street that still looks like itself. That is what one house can hold.
Where we come in
We build exactly that. Homes, not buildings.
Family-scale homes that look like the street they sit on and quietly hold more front doors. They fit the lot. They fit the streetscape. And they add homes where people already want to live.
That is the whole idea. More homes, on the streets Hamilton already has. You can see every one we’re working on in the letter.