Form Architects · Business case · October 2026

One Stair

Objective. Develop and validate a rules engine and parametric fitting method that determines whether a single-stair point access block is permitted and buildable on any Fraser Valley lot. One Stair selects a professionally designed scheme from its library and places the right form on the chosen lot. It simplifies the complexities of municipal plans, zoning, building code and market into parametric, tailor-made solutions for each site, starting in the Fraser Valley, with British Columbia and Canada to follow.

1.0

Executive summary

One Stair is a web application that tells a builder or landowner, in seconds, whether a single-stair point access block fits a lot, and places a predesigned building form on it. It is built in two phases: a three month proof of concept across the Fraser Valley that closes before 31 March 2027, then Vancouver, Vancouver Island, the rest of British Columbia and beyond, with live data. The engine is built to extend across British Columbia.

• The opening. Zoning reform in 2023, a building code change in 2024 and new municipal plans in 2025 and 2026 arrived together, while the pre-sale condo market stalled and rental demand rose.
• The gap. Whether one stair works on a lot depends on seven layers of rules from different bodies in different formats. Today an architect works it out by hand, over days.
• The market. 17,074 houses on land the new Fraser Valley plans designate for apartments, from 15 to 19 m lots in Surrey's SkyTrain areas to larger assembled sites in Maple Ridge and Chilliwack.
• The product. A knowledge base, a library of standardised forms, an interactive map, and a Build step that joins them into a buildable scheme for one lot. Three parts are free; Build is paid.
• The path to market. Phase 1 builds the firm: One Stair runs in-house behind a new feasibility and site acquisition service and earns its first income from paid site reports. Phase 2 stands on its own, as a platform with subscriptions for developers and licences for municipalities.
• The ask. Phase 1 is a three month proof of concept of about five person months from Form Architects and a contract developer, with an IRAP contribution of $40,000 to $50,000. A second phase follows in the next fiscal year, scoped from what the first proves: Vancouver, the Island and the rest of BC, with the data kept live.

2.0

Background

2.1 The landscape

Fraser Valley housing comes in three types and no more: the detached house, the townhouse row, and the apartment bar, a long double-loaded corridor with two stair cores and shallow homes facing one way. Nothing sits between them. The bar needs five to eight assembled lots, a developer with deep pockets and a pre-sale market, so it lands only where a whole block can be bought at once.

The result is sprawl. The valley grew outward for fifty years while the wide, front-loaded house lots in the middle, on roads and pipes already paid for, stayed as they were. Infill is hard here for reasons Vancouver's answers do not solve: no rear lanes, lots of 15 to 24 m rather than 10, and real parking minimums because transit is thin. The valley has had no tool of its own.

2.2 The Market Shift

For two decades housing was financed by the pre-sale condominium: assemble land, sell off plan to investors, borrow against the contracts, build. Since 2022 every leg of that model has weakened at once, and British Columbia felt it first. The need has not changed; it has moved to rental, and to anything that can be built in one go and held.

• Rates are up. From near zero to 5 percent in 2022 and 2023, eased only part way back.
• Pre-sales are dead. Investor buyers have left; launches across the region have been cancelled or shelved.
• Costs have not fallen. Labour, materials and development charges stayed high while revenue fell.
• Rentals are up. Demand, rents and purpose-built rental starts have all risen.
• Starts are down. Fraser Valley starts have fallen from their peak as the region keeps growing.
• Small projects still pencil. One to three lots, one owner or local builder, one phase, held as rental. That is the point access block's opening.

2.3 Housing Reform

Politicians watched the same market stall and stepped in. Between 2023 and 2025 British Columbia took zoning power from municipalities, set density floors around transit, rewrote the building code and changed the tax treatment of flipping and rental. It was a shotgun approach: each measure aimed by a different ministry on its own timetable, none written with the others in mind. The rules only work together when someone reads them together.

• Taxes changed. The GST rebate on purpose-built rental, BC's home flipping tax and speculation tax changes now favour building and holding rental.
• Zoning changed. Bills 44 and 47, November 2023: three to six homes on most lots, minimum heights and densities in transit-oriented areas, no resident parking minimums.
• Local plans changed. Every municipality rewrote its OCP and zoning by 31 December 2025, drawing the map of where six storeys are now expected.
• The building code changed. August 2024, BCBC Subsection 3.2.10: a single exit stair up to six storeys. One lot is enough.

2.4 The point access block

The point access block is the new tool in the developer's toolkit: the building type that unlocks the in-between properties, the tens of thousands of wide house lots on paid-for streets that were too small for an apartment building and too valuable for a house. For the first time in a generation, one lot and one owner are enough.

In plain terms it is a mini apartment building with one staircase instead of two. Every home opens off a shared stair and lift; there is no corridor, and homes reach from front to back with light from both sides. On a 19 m lot that is four homes a floor, two of them three bedroom, up to six storeys.

Almost nobody has put the pieces together. Developers know the code changed, or that their lot was redesignated, but not both, and not what the overlap means for a specific site. Lenders have no precedent to price. Planners have maps that assume buildings nobody is yet designing. Form Architects' aim is to break this opportunity open and show the development world what is possible, one lot at a time.

3.0

The market

Form Architects screened all the Fraser Valley municipalities for land the new plans designate for apartments that still holds a single detached house. The conclusion, in October 2026: over 17,000 lots ripe for opportunity, 17,074 across the seven municipalities with usable data.

3.1 A valley upzoned

Under direction from the Province, every municipality has spent two years up-designating and up-zoning its land across whole cities at once. Surrey 2050 paints Low-Rise and Mid-Rise across thousands of house lots and designates all seven Surrey Langley SkyTrain stations as transit-oriented areas, where six storeys and 3.0 FAR are the floor and parking cannot be required. Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Maple Ridge and Mission have adopted plans that expect apartments where houses stand today. Some areas are pre-zoned, so a project needs a permit rather than a rezoning, and municipalities are beginning to meet the code halfway.

For a landowner or builder this is the rare moment when the plan, the zoning, the code and the transit investment all point the same way. The lots are there, the permission is there, and the SkyTrain opens in 2029. What is missing is a way to see it, lot by lot.

3.2 The opportunity by municipality

The opportunity is not evenly spread. Surrey holds two thirds of the lots and the SkyTrain; Abbotsford has the clearest land economics; Mission and Chilliwack the lowest entry cost; the Langleys and Maple Ridge smaller, well-defined pockets. Each rewards a slightly different building.

Municipality	Lots	Opportunity
Surrey	11,518	The largest single-lot opportunity in BC: thousands of 18 to 21 m lots inside SkyTrain transit areas. The 2029 opening sets the clock
Township of Langley	1,622	Apartment and mixed-use sites along 200 Street and around Willowbrook, where the SkyTrain terminus lands
Mission	1,438	Wider, cheaper lots near the West Coast Express and downtown; the lowest land cost on the list
Abbotsford	1,048	Apartment streets where the house is worth 8 percent of its land: the clearest redevelopment economics in the valley
Maple Ridge	831	Three area plans drawn for this scale of building, best suited to two-lot assemblies
Chilliwack	385	A fresh OCP and the lowest entry cost outside Metro Vancouver
City of Langley	232	Small but ready: transit designations around the terminus and single egress already acknowledged
Seven municipalities	17,074

Source: Form Architects lot screening, October 2026, from municipal open data. Nearly every lot falls between 15 and 24 m wide on 36 to 38 m of depth, which is what makes a small library of standard forms possible.

3.3 Many moving parts

For the builder in front of one of these lots, the path is anything but clear. The code is provincial, but everything else changes at every boundary: designation names, the zone the plan points to, setbacks, minimum assemblies, parking, servicing, fire department capability, and the local market. Surrey's R3 zone still allows only two dwellings inside a transit area; its apartment zone MR7 asks for 36 m of frontage that no single lot has. Abbotsford's RMM leaves 9 m of width on a 21 m lot. The code ties the single stair to fire department capability without a measurable standard.

A builder has to reconcile the OCP, the zoning bylaw, the transit regulation, the code and its notes, the servicing map and the assessment roll for one parcel. Most do not. That is why a 17,000-lot opportunity has produced so few buildings: not a lack of permission, but a lack of a way to see it.

4.0

The product

One Stair is a web-based product, graphic and intuitive rather than a typical website. It has four parts in sequence, from open knowledge to a buildable scheme for one lot. The three parts a visitor explores are free; the part that brings them together for a specific site is paid.

4.1 Data

A single structured record of everything that decides what can be built on a lot, gathered from municipal GIS portals, bylaws, OCPs, the building code, BC Assessment and market reports, and kept current. It holds parcels, plans and zoning, the code as auditable rules, local conditions, market data and the typical site patterns that recur across the valley. Every entry carries its source and version, so a verdict traces back to a clause and a changed rule is an update, not a rebuild.

4.2 Form

A curated set of predesigned point access blocks, drawn by Form Architects, tested against the code clause by clause, and matched to lot sizes and rule sets that occur in the valley: a four storey form for a 15 m lot at about 1.5 FSR, six storey forms for 18 to 24 m lots at 2.5 to 3.5 FSR, a two-lot assembly form, and variants with full, minimal and no parking. Each comes with plans, a section, a unit mix, a code checklist and its numbers.

4.3 Site

An interactive map of the Fraser Valley, built to feel closer to a game or a drawing than a property listing. A user finds a lot, sees it to scale with its setbacks, neighbours and nearest station, and gets a verdict: fits on this lot, fits with a named neighbour, or does not fit, with the source of every rule. It serves the visitor with a strict rule, who needs an answer in a minute, and the visitor looking for an opportunity, who filters and explores where opportunities cluster.

4.4 Build

Build is where data, form and site come together in one realistic, buildable building. The user presses Analyze, and One Stair runs the seven checks, selects the best fitting form, fits it to the actual parcel and setbacks, and returns a scheme: site plan to scale, floor plans, section, unit mix, floor area, density against the plan's minimum, parking, and the code checklist with the clause behind every line. It is a building a builder can price and a planner can read at a pre-application meeting. Build is the paid step, and each Build can be carried into a tailored scheme by Form Architects.

4.5 Go-to-market

One Stair reaches the market in two phases, in step with its development.

One Stair is also the cherry on the cake for The Future Fraser, Form Architects' book on residential development in the valley. The book makes the case for the point access block, and One Stair lets readers test that case on a real lot.

5.0

Development

5.1 How One Stair works

At the centre of One Stair is a rules engine joined to a parametric fitting method. The rules engine holds every applicable bylaw, plan and code clause as structured data, each tied to its source and version, and evaluates them against a lot to produce a set of hard limits: setbacks, height, density and the single-stair conditions. The parametric model describes each predesigned form as a set of variables, such as width, depth, storeys and core position, with the ranges it can flex within and still work as a building. Fitting is a search within those ranges for the version of a form that best fills the lot's limits, which the rules engine then checks again before anything is shown.

Data sets the limits, Form supplies the building and Site says where it goes. The rules engine reads the data for the chosen site and sets its envelope: what may be built there, how high, how dense, and whether one stair is allowed. Parametric fitting takes each suitable form from the library and flexes it into that envelope. The rules engine then checks every fitted building, ranks the ones that pass and states how sure it is. If a form fails, the engine tries the next one. What comes out is a verdict and the best form on the lot, and in phase 2, the Build: a full scheme for that site.

5.2 Technical uncertainties

The project is research because the answers are not known. A competent architect or developer cannot resolve these from existing knowledge; each must be built and tested.

1. Data: one source of truth. Can OCPs, bylaws, transit regulations and the code, published as PDFs by dozens of bodies, be consolidated into one structured source and kept current when a city amends a bylaw or the Province revises the code? Phase 1 proves the consolidation from one import; phase 2 proves it can be kept current daily.
2. Data: one map. Can the municipal GIS systems, each with its own parcel fabric and schema, be consolidated into one mapping system that reads true frontage, depth, corners and neighbours correctly for every lot?
3. Form: parametric assignment. Can a small library of forms be assigned to lots parametrically, including irregular, angled and corner lots, while staying code compliant and buildable?
4. Site and Build: lot to scheme. Can the database and the library be joined so a chosen lot returns, in under a minute, a verdict with evidence and a scheme a builder can price?
5. Judgment under vague rules. Can fire service capability, servicing capacity and Note A-3.2.10 be represented as a defensible confidence level rather than a false yes or no?

5.3 Schedule and budget

Two phases, each inside its own IRAP fiscal year. Phase 1 is a three month proof of concept from December 2026 to February 2027, leaving March as a margin before the fiscal year closes on 31 March. Phase 2 starts in April 2027; its scope and length are set with the ITA once phase 1 has results. Each stage of phase 1 ends in something NRC can verify.

Phase 1 covers the seven Fraser Valley municipalities, from Surrey and Maple Ridge east, and is static on purpose: the data is imported once and each verdict shows the date of its data, so the work goes into the rules engine and the forms. Phase 2 takes One Stair to Vancouver, Vancouver Island, the rest of British Columbia and beyond, and turns the data into a live service with daily updates to zoning, municipal regulations and the code.

Budget. The phase 1 request is $40,000 to $50,000, at IRAP's maximums of 80 percent of eligible salaries and 50 percent of contractor fees. [Insert Form salary rates and the developer quote, so the total cost matches the ask.] That is a first-time scale: comparable 2025 awards to BC firms in this space ran from $30,000 to $160,000. Form Architects funds the balance and carries the cost of the work ahead of reimbursement. Phase 2 is scoped with the ITA once phase 1 has results. No cost is incurred before the agreement is signed.

5.4 Team and capability

Form Architects is a boutique architecture and design studio in Fort Langley, founded in 2022, working on residential, commercial and industrial projects across Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. The firm has already done the manual version of this work: the October 2026 screening of 17,074 lots, the Surrey setback and frontage tests, and the code audit behind its book The Future Fraser.

[Revenue history since 2022, clients and headcount.]

Who	Background	Role
Jochem Moerman Co-founder and principal	[Registration, years in practice, projects.] Author of The Future Fraser	Project lead; rules and code logic; interface
Brent Wiebe Co-founder and principal	[Registration, years in practice, projects.]	Predesigned forms and code review
[Developer] Contract software developer	Based in Canada. [GIS data, web applications, parametric geometry.]	Data pipeline, rules engine, application
Advisors	Fire protection engineer, municipal planner	Review of the rules engine during validation

6.0

Benefits and risks

6.1 Benefits

One Stair answers both halves of the housing problem: not enough homes, and homes that cost too much to build.

• The affordability crisis. The valley is shortest of family-sized homes near transit. One Stair opens 17,000 lots on land and services already in place, and the single stair keeps the three bedroom homes the corridor removes.
• Construction affordability. One lot, no assembly, no corridor, one core, a standard form. Drawings and code work are done once and reused, approvals are faster, and the project is small enough for a local builder or a single owner to finance.
• Architecture, not just commodity. The valley is rich in landscape, farmland, river and community, and poor in building expression: three types, repeated. A form small enough to design with care and repeated enough to make that care affordable puts architects' work in the hands of people who would otherwise never commission one.
• A national priority. Housing supply is a stated priority of the federal and provincial governments. One Stair puts Canadian software behind that goal where it is hardest to reach: small sites in existing neighbourhoods. [Cite the housing measures current at submission.]
• A growing Canadian company. In phase 1 One Stair grows Form Architects through a new feasibility and site acquisition service, and the hires that come with it. In phase 2 it becomes a software business in its own right, with subscription and licence revenue. [Confirm the hiring plan.]

Also: Canadian IP, and skilled work in software, architecture and construction in BC.

6.2 Risks

Risk	Answer
Single-stair rules narrowed or reversed under fire-service pressure	Rules are stored by version; a change is an update, not a rebuild. The forms remain useful as compact buildings
Municipal data missing, or parcel geometry not surveyed frontage	Every verdict carries a confidence level and names its data. Paid schemes start from a survey
Permission does not turn into building	One Stair addresses the certainty gap: knowing quickly what a lot can carry
On large assembled sites a corridor building is the better answer	The engine says so when it is. Honest answers build trust
Users treat a verdict as an approval	Stated on every verdict; tailored schemes are prepared and sealed by registered architects
An architecture firm building software	Named developer; Form holds the domain, the data and the forms

Jochem Moerman
Principal, Form Architects

Sources: Form Architects lot screening, October 2026; Province of BC releases of 18 June 2024 and 29 August 2024; BC Building Code 2024, Subsection 3.2.10; PUBLIC Architecture for BC Housing, Single Stair Residential Buildings, 2023; NRC IRAP program pages; Open Government grants database, 2025 awards.