Q1-Q2 2025 relative to Q1-Q2 2021-24 average, across 34 Ontario municipalities: - Condo apartment starts down 54%, pre-sales down 89% - Non-apartment ownership starts down 42%, pre-sales down 70% Not just a Toronto problem, not just a condo problem

New report by Jesse Helmer. We grade 34 S. Ontario municipalities in 5 housing start and sales categories. Across the region, sales of new condos are down 89%, and sales of new ground-oriented homes are down 70%. Read here: www.missingmiddleini...

We've been getting a ton of great questions about MMI lately - really delighted people want to know more about us. We've updated our "About Us" page to help answer those questions:

Special early MMI post. We do some disheartening math to illustrate how Canada is at risk of losing 100,000 jobs related to new home construction. We need our governments to take this as seriously as they do job losses in other sectors. Read here: www.missingmiddleini...

The Ontario Liberal Party just called on the Ford government to eliminate the HST on newly constructed primary residences (with details TBD). We discussed the merits of the idea a few months ago, how it could shave $100,000 off the price of a home:

I don't know if you guys have noticed, but it feels like society is fraying a little bit. On this week's episode of the Missing Middle, @SabrinaMaddeaux, @MikepMoffatt, and I debate how return-to-office mandates may (or may not) help with that.

New episode! We look at return-to-office mandates, particularly for the GTA. We debate whether or not they're a good idea, and discuss why they're likely to make your commute take even longer. Watch here: youtu.be/208zVYQWfh4

“Growth should pay for growth” is a political choice to socialize the benefits of immigration while privatizing its infrastructure costs onto younger cohorts, insulating established homeowners and corporations from financial responsibility. Read here:

Spoiler for tomorrow's piece. I'm shifting from "econ nerd" to "grammar nerd".

Sat down with The Canadian Press for an exclusive interview on my new book Run Like A Girl. We discuss finding your own path, activism, and my journey or reinvention. Full interview: www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/environment/...

A very meta piece over at Storeys, on the Missing Middle podcast (as well as a few others). Check it out here:

New MMI episode! We talk about Vancouver and Toronto's condo crash, housing "shrinkflation", and how governments, particularly the federal government, have seemed to lose interest in middle-class homeownership, focusing only on rentals. Watch here:

New wonky MMI report out today. We've updated our RoCA Model, which can be used to provide housing needs forecasts and estimating housing shortages. The model confirms what we already knew: Affordable communities have more housing per capita. Read here:

Statcan released their monthly job numbers today and they're... not good. I have some thoughts.

New employment numbers out from StatCan, and they're not good. The student numbers are particularly grim. This summer had the third-highest rate of unemployment for students since 1976, with only 1997 and 2020 (due to the pandemic) higher. Read here: www150.statcan.gc.ca...

New MMI piece! Development charges need to come down. A lot. However, if the federal government is going to compensate municipalities for cutting DCs, it must ensure that it doesn't reward Vancouver and Toronto for making poor decisions.

There's been a lot of discussion about the Temporary Foreign Worker program today. Here's an episode of ours, from 2024, on the TFW program, and why, IMO, it needs to be massively scaled back, with parts of it eliminated outright:

For the lowdown on think tanks, here's the link to the full episode of today's episode of the Missing Middle with @MikePMoffatt & @SabrinaMaddeaux

Today's episode gets very meta. We do a deep dive into think tanks. What we do all day, how the business model works, and the tensions between funding and research independence. Watch here: www.youtube.com/watc...

Is the federal government giving up on middle-class homeownership? Their proposed response to a fall in condo construction is more rentals and more low-income housing. We need a whole lot more of both, but they don't create middle-class homeownership.

Today's MMI piece - From Boom to Bust in Population Growth. We examine the recent decline in population growth and its implications for housing affordability. Read here: www.missingmiddleini...

In the first half of 2025, the combined population growth of Ontario and British Columbia reached record lows. (Records date back to 1954).

Really good news - Ottawa is extending three-storey permissions across the City, instead of having lower limits in urban suburbs. A web of secondary plans makes this less effective than it should be, but we'll take the win. www.cbc.ca/news/cana...

Why the left is losing two generations of young people.

Jon Lovett’s face when LA City Councilmember Imelda Padilla said she forced an affordable housing project to go down from six stories to three stories and add in EV charging spaces

New MMI episode! We speak with MMI researcher and former London, ON Deputy Mayor Jesse Helmer about his study of 4000 planning decisions and what they reveal about how to (and not to) get community buy-in on building infill. Watch here: www.missingmiddleini...

We've had the weirdest issue with Riverside FM (@RiversidedotFM) today, involving my microphone. Has anyone else experienced this? My mic works fine in every other program. Zoom, the Browser version of Teams, etc. Everywhere. But not in Riverside - in either Edge or Chrome.

Really interesting piece - the PBO finds that Canada only needs to build around 3.2 million homes from 2025-35; around half of what the CMHC is projecting. Their analysis draws heavily from MMI's RoCA Benchmark 2.0 method: www.pbo-dpb.ca/en/pu...

New MMI piece! The MMI team has had strong concerns about the design of Build Canada Homes, the federal government's new flagship program to build affordable housing at scale. Today, we provide advice on how the program can be made a success:

I did that here, going back to 1968: www.missingmiddleinitiative.ca/p/southern-o... (Scroll down to the bottom of the article - it's a long one).

I find the "home prices skyrocketed in the last 20 years due to money supply growth" argument a bit strange. Money supply growth hasn't been historically high over that period (though it has been incredibly volatile in the last 5).

I'm trying to contact a couple of people in the federal government, and I noticed a lot of the information in GEDS is at least 18 months out of date. Is this widespread, or is it limited to a few departments?

Since you asked for it... We've had a few people ask us for a list, with links, of the research reports and studies that MMI has released in the past. Here is the list. Happy reading!

New MMI episode! Sabrina and I channel our inner-Richard Florida (@Richard_Florida) and discuss how high rents/home prices, and the cost of living are impacting the creative class and the arts in our big cities. Watch here: www.youtube.com/watc...

New MMI piece! Housing policy should not abandon the option of homeownership as a goal, and Gen X and Boomers must understand the corrosive impact of telling Millennials and Gen Z that it's okay for them to be denied the options that we took for granted.

Housings starts are up in Canada, overall, but the building trends in 2025 look very different in different cities. Calgary and Edmonton are up. Montreal, way up. Vancouver pretty flat. Toronto way down.

Interesting US research on why new homes are more expensive in some places than others. What explains the differences: Land costs, permits, regulatory costs and fees. What doesn't: Material costs, labour costs, and builder profit margins.

My son struggles with most tasks that we all take from granted. But he also can do stuff like this.

For the Friday crowd, my YouTube episode where @mikepmoffatt.bsky.social and I talk about the recent bout of bad housing data #cdnpoli

I'm the guest on today's episode of CBC's Front Burner podcast, talking about homebuilding and the federal government's Build Canada Homes (BCH) plan. Short version: Love what they're trying to do with BCH, but the plan is far too complex. www.cbc.ca/radio/fro...

The NDP at *six* percent with young Canadians. This is what happens to a party that ignores housing and has nothing to say to a cohort that (mostly) would like to own a home some day.

For the morning crowd, my latest YouTube episode where @mikepmoffatt.bsky.social and I discuss why things seem to be getting worse and not better for the housing crisis #cdnpoli

New piece by Alex Beheshti ( @beheshtialex ), on an OLT ruling, and how a tweak to the federal gas tax fund could lower municipal development charges. Read here:

My take on this week's Build Canada Homes announcement. I like everything BCH is trying to accomplish, but the sheer number of goals, many of which are contradictory, risks causing BCH to collapse under its weight. thehub.ca/2025/08/14...

Fascinating new piece by the CMHC. Among other things, they find that once you control for age of building, amenities, and so on, there is no difference in the apartment rents charged by REITs and non-REITs.

Are you getting rich by building or creating something, or are you getting wealthy by sitting on an asset for 40 years doing nothing? One of the big questions @SabrinaMaddeaux & @MikePMoffatt discuss on today's episode. PS The answer matters a lot to the health of the economy

New episode! Are young Canadians being taxed like millionaires while living like broke students? We dive into the jaw-dropping disconnect between salaries, taxes, and the cost of housing. Watch here: youtu.be/rW9QZ91lF9k...

Premier Doug Ford was in Windsor, ON, today, calling for a temporary two-year elimination of HST on new home sales, as well as discussing the need to lower development charges. He stated he'll be meeting with the PM on Monday to discuss how to cut the cost of homebuilding.

Statcan just released June 2025 building permit data. Ontario experienced substantial declines in Q2 2025 in both multifamily and single-family permits (rel. to Q1), which will eventually translate into lower starts and completions. Release is here: www150.statcan.gc.ca...

New MMI piece. A direct-to-buyer development charge system can reduce the price of a new home by over $50,000. The system is simple, but implementation does require some coordination to ensure that there is no increase in closing costs for buyers. Read here: www.missingmiddleini...