What is the Missing Middle Initiative?

The Missing Middle Initiative, housed at the University of Ottawa’s Institute for the Environment, seeks to revive Canada’s urban middle class. We’re devoted to addressing the challenges facing young urban Canadians, for whom the middle class is getting harder to join. Through research, a Substack newsletter thought pieces, videos, and the Missing Middle Podcast, we explore the barriers preventing young Canadians and new families from entering the middle class and the policy solutions needed to help them achieve this.

We are big believers in creating a vision of success — a North Star that can help guide one’s thinking and choices. For Canada’s young, urban middle class, our vision of success is as follows:

Missing Middle Initiative’s North Star: A Canada where every middle-class individual or family, in every city, has a high-quality of life and access to both market-rate rental and market-rate ownership housing options that are affordable, adequate, suitable, resilient, and climate-friendly.

In the piece Launching The Missing Middle Initiative, we explain who we are and what we do in greater detail. If you want to know how we define terms like “high-quality of life” and “middle-class,” check out The Goal of the Missing Middle Initiative: A Detailed Look.

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