a love letter.
My Dearest CMHC Seed Funding Program,
Do you remember me? Back when things were simple. Back when a small non-profit with a dream, a borrowed feasibility study, and an alarming number of volunteer board members could still whisper, “Maybe we can build housing.” And then you arrived. You weren’t flashy. You weren’t a ribbon-cutting. You weren’t the glossy rendering with impossible trees and suspiciously happy cyclists.
No. You were the first $50,000. You were the environmental study. You were the architect deposit. You were the traffic study nobody wanted but everyone required.
You were the consultant invoice that didn’t immediately trigger a board discussion titled: Can someone’s nephew do this instead? You believed in us before lenders did. Before municipalities did. Before anyone had a capital stack that wasn’t mostly vibes. Small builders and non-profits looked at impossible sites and said: “We could maybe do this.” And you said: “Here. Buy yourself six months of hope.” You made predevelopment feel less like gambling and more like planning. Then somewhere along the way things changed.
The forms got longer. The thresholds got stranger. The timelines got tighter. And suddenly our sweet little first-date coffee turned into a twelve-tab spreadsheet and three rounds of clarifications.
And now… You’re gone. Not evolved. Not replaced. Not rebranded with a new portal and a cheerful PDF.
Gone. And somehow nobody really talks about it. There are bigger funding programs now. Bigger announcements. Bigger dollar figures. But nothing quite like you. Nothing that says: “You have an idea? You have community support? You have exactly zero cash and one Excel workbook held together by conditional formatting? Let’s see if this deserves a chance.” Today, predevelopment feels increasingly reserved for organizations wealthy enough to self-finance uncertainty. Which is a strange way to encourage innovation in affordable housing. So this letter isn’t just nostalgia. It’s grief. Because affordable housing doesn’t begin with construction financing. It begins with someone taking a risk. And once upon a time, you helped pay for that.
Forever missing our little feasibility-study subsidy,
Piotr
