She could reach one floor of her own house.
Three levels, a dozen steps to the front door, and by the time we spoke she was living on the middle one. The other two belonged to the house rather than to her. She had been in that neighbourhood for decades — knew the people on either side, knew which of them checked on her.
The project didn’t go ahead. The reasons were financial and I’ll come to them.
But I changed how I design because of that afternoon.
What I build now, and why
Every unit is on a single level. No internal stairs in any home I build. Not as an option, not on request — as the default, because these homes are built to last, …. for future buyers, too.
A shared elevator serving the three upper homes. The lift is roughly $80,000 and the structural preparation another $20,000. Call it $100,000, or about $33,000 for each of the three homes that need it.
That is real money on a four-unit project and the elevator is the first thing a cost consultant would tell me to cut. I’m not cutting it. The point of building small infill housing in an established neighbourhood is that people can stay in the neighbourhood — the one they’ve lived in for 30, 40, 50 years, near the friends they’ve had for just as long. A home someone can’t get into is not housing for them. It’s housing for whoever replaces them.
Adding a home elevator is not the difference between a $983,000 townhouse and a $950,000 townhouse. It’s the difference between granite countertops, premium appliances, and fancy fixtures vs more modest choices.
What changed in 2024
British Columbia rewrote the rules on nearly every urban residential lot in the province. Where one house was permitted, three, four, and in some places six homes are now permitted. No rezoning. No council decision. No public hearing. If your lot qualifies, the permission already exists — you don’t apply for it, you have it.
Most homeowners I speak to have no idea this applies to them.
The pattern is consistent: a house built before 1970, larger than it needs to be, expensive to heat, with bedrooms nobody has slept in since the ’90s. The house is near the end of its life. The land is not.
Keep your land and partner with me. You stay the owner. I develop it. At completion you take one of the new homes — single-level, warm, cheap to run, with an elevator if it’s not on the ground floor — and the value of the rest. You never list your property.
Why Fixing the Zoning Problem is not Enough
A construction loan needs someone to guarantee it. If that someone is you, the economics are good and the risk is yours — and most of the mortgage-free retirees I’ve sat with won’t do it. I understand why. They haven’t owed anyone money in fifteen years.
If it isn’t you, I can bring in a guarantor. That costs a flat fee of $40,000 to $50,000 plus a share of the profit, and because a lender expects the developer to have something at stake, I carry a profit share as well. Between us, we absorb most of what would have been your return.
None of that is a fact about your house. It is a gap in the way Canada finances housing.
Federal programs — CMHC’s mortgage loan insurance, the Apartment Construction Loan Program — support a five-unit building generously, provided it is rented. Build four homes for people to own and they support nothing at all. A developer building rental raises roughly 5% equity. I raise 25 to 30% at commercial rates to build a smaller building for owner-occupants.
If CMHC offered owner-occupied projects something resembling what it already offers rental ones, this problem would largely disappear. Your land is security; it would simply be allowed to act as security. Nobody would need to buy a guarantee.
The work I do alongside development. In September 2026 I filed a submission with Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, as part of their consultation on precisely this question — how to finance owner-occupied housing supply in this country. You can read what I sent them.
Ottawa is at least asking the question, which is further along than it has been in a while.
The second question everyone asks
Where do I live while you’re building?
Twelve to eighteen months. Temporary accommodation is part of what we negotiate at the start, not something to work out later — a plan that leaves you without somewhere to live isn’t a plan. It also costs money, and where that money comes from is one of the things we settle in writing before anything begins.
Why hire David
Every home I build meets the Passive House standard — airtight, heavily insulated, cheap to heat in a way that ordinary construction is not. That matters most when the person living in it is on a fixed income.
Seventeen years owning and managing residential rental property. Fourteen brokering real estate. Five years in a tool belt since then. A certified Passive House consultant, and a PhD in mathematics, which mostly means I will show you the arithmetic rather than a brochure.
I am not the largest developer you could call. I’m probably the only one who will sit at your table and walk you through the numbers that argue against doing it – if that’s what you situation calls for.
Where to start
A conversation and a look at your lot. No cost, no obligation. Within one meeting I’ll tell you whether there’s anything here worth pursuing — and if there isn’t, I’ll tell you that too.