Alkarim Devani has built over 1,000 homes in Calgary — fourplexes, row houses, a 212-unit heritage restoration — and noticed something strange: people kept asking about the small projects. That observation turned into a doctorate, a national education program, and a growing movement to make middle housing a viable career path for a whole new generation of city builders. In this episode, he talks about why the obstacles aren't what most people think, why large developers will never fill this gap, and what it's actually going to take to get more people building.
Good afternoon. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and I'm so excited to bring you another Bottom Up Short today. With me is Alkarim Devani, who is co-founder of Middle and Round Square, two companies that you'll hear a little bit about as Alkarim talks about his work in Calgary, Alberta. His work is taking him into the realm of housing policy, but also crucially getting things built, getting projects over the line, making things happen.
I had the privilege of hearing him as a panelist at a Gentle Density Summit hosted by Small Housing BC out here in Vancouver, British Columbia. As he continues to work in Calgary, it's also been an opportunity to take a message about middle housing to a much broader audience. We'll talk about some of those core elements. Alkarim, thank you so much for jumping on a Bottom Up Short today.
Thanks so much for having me, Norm. It's an honor and a privilege. I'm a big fan of the Strong Towns movement, and it's always interesting to find your people. I'm super honored to be on here and appreciative of the work and the continued emphasis that you folks do on how we build better cities. Thank you.
Are you the principal of the Middle School? Do you want to explain what the Middle School is and how awesome a resource it is?
I'll give you a bit of a story — I'm a storyteller. I've been building in established neighborhoods for the vast majority of my career. You mentioned Round Square. Prior to that, I had an infill company called Beyond Homes. I have a business degree, so I'm not a planner or an architect by trade, and I kind of stumbled into this thing backwards. Things find you when you least expect it, and that's been my experience.
I was born and raised in Calgary. I had the privilege of growing up in an established neighborhood and in a suburb, as my parents were immigrants who understood: we start in a basement suite, we buy a side of a duplex, and then eventually you come to the dream of owning a double car garage and living in a suburban community. I always remembered living in that established neighborhood, even though we had only lived there for five years, because I remember how convenient it was, how safe it was, and how everything was about the pedestrian, not about the car. I didn't know all those things until I started to really think about them as an adult.
I had been building in established neighborhoods, starting with single family homes. We started Round Square with a simple vision: how do we bring more families back to the inner city? You start to do interesting work — we built a four-row house back in 2015, and went on to do over 300 of these missing middle units. But while doing that, we started to do mid-rise, large-scale development. The largest project we did was a 212-unit heritage restoration in Winnipeg.
The thing that started to be really polarizing and interesting to me was that people kept calling me to speak about the smaller projects, not the bigger ones. They'd say, come tell us more about that fourplex that you did — and I'd think, it's just a fourplex, why is that a big deal? I started to pay really close attention to that about two years ago, and I actually went back to school. I'm going to be defending my doctorate this June, and my thesis is about how we take what we've learned in middle housing and scale that across North America. That's the mission I've been on.
You've used lots of different tools to create a community of people that are learning from each other. It reminds me a lot of what the Incremental Development Alliance has done in terms of creating their alumni groups and running boot camps. You've done that not just in Calgary, but in other places, and virtually as well. Can you share a little bit about creating that community of people that can help each other, learn from each other, and sort of follow the steps that others have taken on their journey a little ahead of them?
I didn't answer your question about the Middle School and why the principal. I'm just one key contributor to Middle School, so let me explain a bit of that trajectory. When I started to go back to school and had a bit of this midlife crisis — okay, I can keep building homes in Calgary, or we can take our learnings and figure out how to scale that — I ran into my partner, Darlene Jen, who is a brilliant planner and was the vice president of a company called Base Camp, one of the fastest growing hospitality companies in Canada. I told her what I was about to embark on, and she was having that same moment. We decided to see if there was something here.
We were lucky enough to run into a CMHC federal housing supply challenge. We were one of the recipients, and ended up being one of the top four across Canada funded out of over 260 applicants. That was massive for us because it felt like our idea was being supported, and as we continued to advance and evolve the idea, it kept getting traction.
School and education was never what we wanted to do. We wanted to solve the obvious things — there are policy constraints, let's fix the policy; there are building constraints, let's figure out the building constraints. Everyone always thinks there's one problem, but what we started to realize was there was a multitude of different problems that were ecosystem-wide and siloed within those ecosystems. We stumbled on this idea of being in community talking about change, with a vision of how homeowners get involved, but no one knows how to do this. There's no global understanding of how to build at this small scale.
It goes back to what I was saying — I think why people were interested in hearing from me was because there weren't stories of people who had built this housing form, stayed within it, found a business model that was viable, and continued to do it successfully. So we asked: what if we just opened up our playbooks and gave people everything we knew? The Incremental Development Alliance was one of our inspirations — let's just see if people would come to a full-day session.
The cool thing was we took what we knew, but we brought the local ecosystems and put them on stage to share with others. There was this incredible inertia and momentum that built because we identified someone who had never been given a platform, never been given a voice, and who was too busy trying to build something so difficult that they were never asked to share with anyone. No one ever asked them: what are your challenges, how do we help you, what works and what doesn't? We brought together this group of people to talk about these things, and the community just showed up — not lightly, but in droves. I think we reached 1,500 people across Canada, and there was so much demand we were asking ourselves how we could keep doing this.
We do an intake and an outtake survey. The intake survey showed around 550 lots — meaning one third of applicants had an actual project they wanted to pursue. We made them give us their address and told them what was possible, so we could see there were 5,000 homes that could be built on the land across those cities. We started putting two and two together: there's a need here far greater than purely an education standpoint. The feedback we got was that the day was amazing, but now what? People needed more help with financing and construction.
That's what we opened up next. I'm excited to share that we're launching Middle U, which is our certified — and I believe the first certified comprehensive middle housing curriculum — in partnership with the University of Calgary. It's primarily asynchronous, over 100 hours of instructional content with experts from across Canada. We do case study analysis and cover every aspect of this, so it provides the foundation. From there, we can go into a city and say: the policy needs to be amended, here are the citizens who are willing to move forward if we fix some of the downstream constraints around policy, building code, and financing. You have to take those in steps, and we need a new way to talk about what this housing form is. Part of that new way for us was making sure everybody has access to the fundamentals.
Real estate and development can be very competitive, especially if you're all competing for the same property or trying to capture the exact same buyer. By taking that open-source approach, you've really flipped the script — done the Android to the Apple, so to speak — saying we need the ability of many different participants. Do you want to talk about some of the things that inspire or motivate you to take these steps? Maybe tie it into your story of being in the act of building, getting more and more reps in, but then realizing there's this whole other layer of making it possible for far more people to do this.
As I was working on my thesis, I kept coming to the conclusion that I had bought over 50 homes from people in established neighborhoods — single family homes that were eventually torn down. When I reflected on those, the vast majority were people who had aged out of place, who had passed away, whose estates were being dealt with. I thought there has to be another way.
Everyone I talked to about that says it's idealistic to believe that anyone is going to take this risk. Development is not certain, everything you hear about real estate — it's not easy. Those things are probably all true. The population of homeowners who might embark on this today is going to be very low, but they don't even have a choice today. They don't even have the information.
They're just being bypassed.
They're also selling their real estate without understanding the full potential. When I first started this, my goal was to actually have someone move through the system — which I can tell you we're doing today — who would have never moved through it had it not been for us. What I thought was interesting was that I don't need them to actually do something today or tomorrow or even five years from now, but I do need to help shift the narrative: that it is possible. The more we can stitch this together and make it simpler to navigate, the more people can come to the ecosystem and participate.
The beautiful thing about this housing form is that no large developer can do Brookfield-style established neighborhood redevelopment at this gentle density scale. You'd have to buy 50 homes in a neighborhood, deal with 50 individual owners — it's just so hard. Everyone says that's why there's no industry here, because the scale is difficult. I see that as the opportunity for folks who want to do this themselves, or who want to get into city building as an architect or planner doing their first project. There's no better place to do it.
What we are still trying to figure out as an organization is how we build the right guardrails to ensure those projects succeed — the right builder partner, the right financing partners, the right policy work. We tell every municipality we work with that the goal is to make it so simple that the average person can navigate it. That's what politicians want too. They want to be able to speak to their constituents and say, John was actually able to do this and did it successfully.
Cities get nervous because builders are taking advantage of the process, building forms are landing that aren't great, and communities don't like them. Those are very solvable problems. They don't define the entire program. Let's build the right frameworks and understand why developers are building stucco boxes, or not being respectful of heights. People aren't doing that because they want to take advantage of the community. I tell the industry: if you build a bad product, you might get away with it once or twice, but at some point it's going to affect all of us negatively. We have to understand what's driving those outcomes, whether it be DCC fees or unpredictable processes.
One of the things I've always been keen on with this ecosystem approach is that we have to tackle it collectively and look at the whole thing. I get this feedback all the time — I'm told I'm too broad, talking too much breadth, and to go focus on one thing. I say no, because that is exactly why we are where we are today. You can't just solve policy without understanding the developer constraints or the financing constraints.
That's absolutely the case, especially when land prices are high and there are considerable holding costs you just have to bear until you can find the next buyer, if you are the person coming in and doing the project the traditional way. I got some stats out of Edmonton showing they had record building permits for homes — over 17,500 in 2025 — and for the first time since they started tracking, more homes were permitted as row homes between five and eight units than as single family homes.
When we talk about how our communities, from a Strong Towns perspective, need to thicken up because horizontal expansion is so resource dependent and really harms so many other elements of what it takes for our places to thrive, the work you're doing really stands out. I love that image of a certain type of developer that's never going to come into a neighborhood, work with 50 different homeowners, go through all of that mess. They'll tell a real estate agent to get 50 of them to sell, and if yes, they'll raze the whole block. You're doing something very, very different.
This should be a much longer conversation, and I'm super thrilled that you've accepted our invite to come to Fayetteville, Arkansas for the National Gathering in May. Folks, if you want to do a deep dive with Alkarim, it's right after he's submitted his dissertation, and right before he'll presumably be able to walk the stage. I also want to say it's fascinating to me that you're the opposite of Mike Keen in South Bend, Indiana. Mike Keen is with Neighborhood Evolution — he was a university professor that became a builder through incremental development. I see in your future, Alkarim, the ability to go from being a builder to being a university professor and do the about-face. I love that. What tips or suggestions would you offer to others that maybe aren't yet at your level, but are able to begin to follow in your path?
We just came back from LA, where we did a block week because we're hoping to launch our Middle U program with UCLA. We're working with a few other cities south of the border, which I'm excited about. One of the things I've started to do when I go into any place and have a conversation is truly believe that these people are so much better positioned than I ever was — as a kid, as a young person, as a graduate, I didn't know any of this. The fact that there's so much information, so many people, so many organizations like yours that are championing this movement — I believe these folks are well equipped, and if I could figure it out, all of them can figure it out.
I often hear people undermine their expertise, their knowledge, or their capacity. It's not as hard as you think. There's clearly a risk, and for some reason I was born with a high risk tolerance — I wasn't afraid of doing things. Part of growth comes from being uncomfortable, and so I encourage everyone to explore that discomfort.
What we're hoping to do, and what you folks do as well, is build the right framework to hold someone's hand. Everyone always talks about getting over the finish line, but this is really about getting to the starting line. That's what we tell everyone and every municipality: let's get more people to the starting line. If we can get them there, we can build the rails to make sure those projects succeed. Standing up is one thing. Getting to that starting line is another. I think there are so many people with the skills, knowledge, and capacity to do this, and I want more people to hear that. My parents were immigrants — we didn't have anything, we just had a little bit of heart, and we went from there.
That's fantastic. Especially for members who are municipal leaders in this Bottom Up Shorts audience — think about how you get people to the starting line, and also consider who shows up at the starting line. If it's 60-year-olds, their risk profile is going to be pretty conservative compared to someone who's 40 or especially 20. If you have a long runway to recover from gaps in your system, that's exactly what we need within our housing ecosystem: young builders doing really powerful stuff. We created systems that have begun to restrict that ability, and we're clearly paying for it. On that note — what is something that gives you hope in your work?
Along those same lines — there's a really big developer out of Calgary whose family came here in the early 70s. Batistella is the developer's name. Paul and I were chatting, and they did one of my all-time favorite missing middle projects, which won a Governor General Award in Canada back in the 80s — it's called Connaught Gardens. It's just interesting to see where they got their start. They started in this housing form, did an infill, then did a 12-unit, and Batistella went on to do thousands of units in the high-rise sector.
When people think that not everyone is just going to become a middle housing developer, or that middle housing alone won't solve the housing crisis — I agree with all of those things. There's not one solution. But we need city builders of the future. We need more people willing to step up and do this, and we need to build the right pathway for them.
When people think about gentle density or middle housing, some come from Vancouver and Toronto saying it's too little too late, that we need four to six stories on every corner. I don't disagree, but I know that my first four-to-six-story building almost ended my career — it's much more technically challenging, harder, the financial capacity required is much stronger, and there's more competition from pension funds. What I firmly believe is that this density form is going to replace kind of what building a single family home once was. What I hope to contribute is helping create the right framework for people to be successful. That's what's coming, and that's what really excites me about middle housing.
Check out mddl.co — Alkarim and the team don't like vowels, so it's M-D-D-L dot co. Head to the website and you'll find information about the Middle School, Middle U, Middle Masters, Middle Accelerator, Middle Community, and tons of great resources. Internally at Strong Towns, we've definitely leaned on some of the toolkits they've released and other guides to help create and spark the conditions for this type of change. Many more things ahead. What's a good way for people to reach out to you or follow your work? Would LinkedIn be one of those places?
LinkedIn — I'm always on LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out, send a DM. We're doing a ton of policy work and are always excited to talk to cities and future developers. Hit me up on LinkedIn, or just drop us an email on our website. Happy to connect.
We'll have more people at the starting line, more people midway, and more people beginning to find their way into the homes that we so need in our places. Alkarim, thank you so much. To everybody listening, I hope you're inspired by what you've heard. Take note of the conditions — where is that starting line in your place? What is a way in which we can make it broader, more accepting of more participants, and in doing so, as we talk about at Strong Towns, unleash the swarm of small-scale developers? When we do that truly, we can all benefit. Take care, and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a non-profit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.