Founded in 2023, mddl has established itself as an expert advisor in middle housing – that is, housing at a scale between single-family homes and large apartment buildings. Its aim is to bridge the critical knowledge gap that many small-scale and new-entry developers, including homeowners, experience in the process of delivering middle housing. For this purpose, mddl offers four core educational services: mddl School, mddl Masters, mddl Accelerator, and mddl Municipal Fast Track, with more programs in development. It also provides free online tools for middle-scale developers, and runs the networking and knowledge-sharing platform mddl Community.

Combining education with planning and municipal policy innovation, mddl provides a hub for knowledge and support. Its mddl School, a one-day in-person course on the fundamentals of delivering middle housing, has now been delivered to over 1,400 participants in five cities across Canada. Winter 2026 will see the launch of mddl U, a certificate program hosted within the University of Calgary’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, which will also provide a start-to-finish overview of the missing middle housing development process. The mddl Masters and mddl Accelerator services offer more personalized technical assistance and expert mentorship for middle housing providers with projects already underway. Together, these programs address a previous lack of accessible educational resources for those trying to build middle housing – while also promoting cross-sector collaboration to overcome roadblocks.

Local development communities can only grow and succeed if their regulatory environments allow. To that end, mddl works with municipalities on policy innovations, such as training staff to adopt and use pre-approved designs that fast-track development approvals, reduce red tape, and minimize risk. Thus far, mddl has worked with Calgary, Kelowna, Edmonton, Regina, and Saskatoon to support various policy and program initiatives including launching 10-day building permit approvals in Kelowna.

mddl measures success by the quality of the connections made within the communities where it works, as well as by the demand for its online tools. By these metrics, it has seen great success, with many participants circling back to mddl for additional support as their projects grow, or recommending that their colleagues and teams attend mddl’s capacity-building programs. Part of the mddl School course involves measuring the number of lots that participating learners own and could potentially build housing on, while emphasizing everyone is invited into the circle with no strings attached. The hope is that this approach will translate into an increase in housing starts down the line as community members feel more educated and empowered to build.

Through its educational and advisory services, mddl empowers developers, citizens, housing providers, and municipal staff to create more middle housing in scalable, sustainable, and simplified ways. Every place has its own champions for middle housing; expertise hubs like the ones mddl creates can concentrate and mobilize the experts and resources that already exist within the Canadian middle housing sector, empowering local actors to get their shovels in the ground and turn their plans into much-needed finished homes.