Ask Me Anything: Housing, Transit, and Our Podcast’s Future

And why seniors don't volunteer to be punched in the face.

Mike Moffatt, Sabrina Maddeaux, Cara Stern, and 2 others

Jan 07, 2026

In this special Ask Me Anything episode of The Missing Middle, the full team answers your biggest viewer questions on housing, transit, immigration, and affordability, and we share a major announcement about the podcast’s future. We also introduce our newest team member and discuss candidly why this work resonates so deeply with many Canadians.

The conversation dives into walkable neighbourhoods and small businesses, why governments struggle to act on housing affordability, the taboo around discussing immigration and housing together, transit as a pressure valve for urban sprawl, and why seniors are stuck in family-sized homes. Plus, we explain what’s changing on the show, including two new weekly episodes, DemograFix and Classonomics, and what it means for listeners going forward.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.

Mike Moffatt: So, Sean, you’ve been working with us for a while now, and it’s been great having you on the team. You’re mostly behind the scenes these days. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sean Foreman: Thanks, Mike. Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. It’s pretty weird to be in front of the microphone in front of the camera. So thanks for the invite.

I’m basically the mascot for the housing crisis podcast. I’m a millennial who can’t afford to live anywhere other than a cramped apartment. That’s why I wanted to come work here at the Missing Middle. And that’s why it’s more than just a gig for me, right? This is something that we see again and again in this country. So, if I can use my video-producing skills and my audio-producing skills to get the word out and potentially improve this crisis for others, that’s something I feel is important to do. The stuff we talk about here on the podcast, it really hits close to home because I can’t afford one.

Cara Stern: Have you been looking?

Sean Foreman: I actually have. We saw a condo yesterday, and it was underwhelming. It’s a little bit of a defeating feeling. It was a newer build. It was in South Etobicoke. I think it was an eightplex, which is rather rare. It still felt so cramped for a baby and two adults. It is the perpetual millennial struggle, and it’s not unique to me. I know a lot of people are in this situation; I’m lucky enough to have an apartment. Some people can’t find a home, and it’s a total drag.

Mike Moffatt: Well, despite your housing challenges, you’re still the new guy, and I’m going to pick on you because of it. So you get to ask the first question. So have at’er, Sean.

Sean Foreman: OK, the first question is for Cara. Cara, what is this announcement about the future of the podcast? (No one’s told me I’m out of the loop here. I just got a link to this meeting, and here we are. So what is it?)

Cara Stern: Well, we’re going to two days a week. We’ve decided that we’re going to take the Missing Middle podcast and split it into two shows. One of them I’ll be hosting. It’s called “DemograFix”. We’ll be examining how Canada is doing through a demographic lens. We’ll look at how different generations are experiencing Canada’s economy. We want to talk about whether different generations are experiencing culture differently, if they’re making different choices. Are they making decisions based on economic circumstances?

The inspiration for the podcast came in part from the 1990s Canadian classic Boom, Bust and Echo, which talked about how demographics shape a country, and by looking at the demographics, the authors were able to predict a lot of what came to pass in Canada. They were able to see a lot of the problems we’re living with nowadays.

The second show will be hosted by Sabrina! So, Sabrina, tell us what you’ll be covering.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Sure, I’ll be hosting “Classonomics,” which will focus on how the Canadian middle class is economically squeezed by the rising unaffordability of everyday life. It’ll be a mix of the wonky data and candid takes you’ve come to expect from Mike and me, all driving back to the idea that no community can thrive without a healthy middle class.

So Mike, what does this mean for our audience? Do they have to do anything? How will it change our channel?

Mike Moffatt: So the short answer is they won’t have to do anything. We are making it nice and simple for everyone. The Missing Middle YouTube channel is going to stay as is. We’re simply arranging things a bit differently, but if you subscribe to the YouTube channel, you’ll get all the episodes. For audio listeners, the same story. The feed is staying as is. You’ll just be getting two episodes a week in your feeds from now on.

There’s still going to be all kinds of classic content you love. We’ll still be talking about housing — I think as long as I’m on this planet, we’ll be talking about housing — and all of the other great topics you’ve come to expect from us.

Though that’s actually more Meredith’s call than my call. So, producer Meredith, I’m going to throw the show over to you.

Meredith Martin: I’ve been thinking about what we hope to achieve with these two new shows, and it got me thinking about how far we’ve come. I’m most proud of the fact that we’ve become a reliable source of data-driven information about the Canadian economy for people, young people in particular.

I’m really excited for what we’re going to be doing, taking a look at the economy through a demographic and class lens. I think there are a lot of lessons there, and I’m sure we’re going to learn lots of new things.

I wanted to point out that all of us have kids, except for Sabrina, who has talked openly on the show about how she’d like to have children one day. My girls are 18 and about to launch into this economy and world. I grew up in Canada, and it doesn’t feel like they are going to have the same opportunities that I had growing up. I think we are very motivated by wanting to make Canada a better country and provide solutions.

I’m really excited about the future of the podcast. I’m hoping to grow our audience. I hope you guys will stick with us and share the podcasts and tell your friends about it, because this is an all-hands-on-deck type of situation. We’re also super appreciative of all the time you’ve spent with us. I know that there are many demands on people’s time, that you have many opportunities to watch things like fun cat videos, and yet you choose to spend time with us. We all really appreciate it and are looking forward to the future.

Cara Stern: I know that Meredith, your kids are 18. We didn’t have enough time to solve the affordability crisis before they were launching as adults. I’m just going to put it out there. Sean and I both have infants. Hopefully, by the time they’re 18, things will be resolved. That’s our long-term stretch goal over here.

Meredith Martin: Well, my goal is much shorter than that. Like, we need to get this done in the next couple of years, so that’s my motivation. I don’t think that you should need generational wealth to have a stable home. Like what Sean was describing for his kids, I think for my children, they need to have a lot more housing options and that most good things will come from there.

So anyway, to get the show on the road. We’re going to go to our first viewer question, which is from Matthieu Gagnon, and this is to Cara, and it’s about housing perceptions.

He asks, “How can cities counter perceptions that missing middle housing reduces quality of life? Could compact walkable neighbourhoods actually help small businesses compete with large corporations?”

Cara Stern: First of all, the quality of life thing, I find it funny how so many people will see it as like, “oh, we’re downgrading our quality of life,” even though I hear people who aren’t necessarily the ones who are supportive of changing their neighbourhoods, they go to places in the world and they’re like, “I walked everywhere. It was amazing. I didn’t ever have to do anything other than just walk to my destinations. I loved it.”

People tend to like those kinds of things, but people find it hard to imagine what change is like in their own neighbourhoods. It gives you the option to spend less time commuting, which, well, there are lots of studies out there that show that people are happier with shorter commutes. I remember reading one that said 17 minutes was the ideal commute, and that is not what most people are spending in our cities these days.

I know it’s good for community building. If you can have so many people around you to support you as you have a family, that helps tremendously.

If you are looking at the business side of it, there’s a study that looked at how walkable neighbourhoods affected customer satisfaction, and in many cases, it really does seem to be the case. It showed that restaurants on pedestrian-friendly streets tended to get higher customer satisfaction based on reviews.

I remember when Toronto added bike lanes to Bloor Street, and there were a lot of businesses that were really concerned because they had parking right out front in a little bit of street parking, and they were thinking, you know, there’s a bike lane there. “How are people going to park to get to my store?” And a lot of the businesses fought against implementation. But then they realized through a lot of research and studies, they found that there actually was an increase in the amount of business they were doing.

There was also a Strong Towns report that was looking at how walkable neighbourhoods create better economic situations. For example, you don’t need as much public money to pave a sidewalk compared to what it takes to maintain roads where people are driving a lot. Things last longer if you’re not driving heavy automobiles on them.

It takes a lot less tax money to sustain areas. You get a lot more bang for your buck if they are in walkable neighbourhoods.

I’m going to go to the next question, which is for Sabrina. This is from Rahim Ismail, who asks, “To what extent do you think the government is aware of how unaffordable housing has become? Is this simply an issue of them being out of touch?”

Sabrina Maddeaux: I’d say partly, yes, that’s a huge part of it. I mean, you think about how long it took politicians to even say the words “housing crisis.” And while most of them will say that today and acknowledge that there’s a housing affordability issue, there is a gap in how urgent they feel it is.

Even if they understand the numbers and that there’s a problem, they don’t necessarily understand how it impacts younger people and young families — whether they’re having kids or how close they can live to grandparents or how social groups are so fragmented these days as people are having to move two, three hours away from each other and how it impacts where you work. I mean, all these different pieces that I think you really only understand if you have lived experience.

The reality is, a lot of our politicians and decision makers tend to be older. They’re in older generations. They tend to be wealthier, and they tend to be homeowners, if not landlords themselves or multiple-property owners. So, it is a big problem that we don’t have enough people with this lived experience of what it’s like to struggle with housing affordability in both politics and in other policymaking functions.

At the same time, our entire system seems to be set up so that the voices they hear the most, and who have the most influence on them, often tend to be also older homeowners and often the ones who don’t want development in their communities and don’t want change.

When we look at consultation meetings, who tends to show up to those? Who has the time? It’s a handful of retirees who can do that.

Older Canadians still vote in higher numbers. So all the incentives are there for them to cater to people who already own homes rather than younger Canadians who are still renting.

Cara Stern: I was excited thinking that it would get better when they started moving to virtual consultations. I’ve attended many of them when I was at home, fed my kids dinner, and I had it open on my laptop so I could listen in and jump in and give my opinion on something when I felt like I needed to. Now we’re seeing, at least in Toronto, people are like, “Let’s go back to in-person consultations.” It excludes so many people from actually participating in the process. It’s very frustrating. And I hope they’ll change their mind on that.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, the process is set up to lead to “no.” And while consultation is important, I actually think we need less of it because the way it currently is, it presents so many roadblocks and hurdles. Again, we need more paths to quick “yeses” rather than many paths to multiple “nos.”

Cara Stern: So the viewer went on to explain that the reason he’s asking this question is that he said: “I’ve reached out to my representatives, but their responses don’t make logical sense. To what extent do you believe these policy decisions are intentional, such as intentionally pumping immigration to unsustainable levels and now capping our population size at all-time highs at a level known to be causing stress to infrastructure and housing?”

Mike Moffatt: I think the messaging doesn’t make sense because our politicians are intentionally trying to be incoherent or push an incoherent message. They talk about housing affordability, but then you have the federal housing minister saying that home prices shouldn’t go down, which is incoherent because there’s no way to create affordability without home prices going down.

We can’t have a situation where in our biggest cities, home prices are 10, 12, 15 times income. There’s no way to create affordability without prices going down.

Now, whether or not high home prices are intentional — and I don’t think they are — I think the belief that governments are doing this on purpose is actually giving governments way too much credit. Governments are incompetent. This is a problem of competence.

Policy is done in silos. Innovation policy looks at innovation. Higher education policy looks at higher education and doesn’t worry about the downstream effects. Immigration policy looks at immigration and doesn’t look at the downstream effects. So nobody ever asks the question, “Hey, if we increase immigration targets, what is this going to mean for housing?” Because that’s housing’s problem. That’s not immigration’s problem.

Cara Stern: Has that changed? That used to be the case, but haven’t they started talking to each other?

Mike Moffatt: Well, they tend to talk to each other after there’s a fire and after there’s a problem. So no, policymaking is always done in silos.

When it comes to population growth, a lot of it came from colleges and universities adding a lot of international students, and the federal government could have stopped that at any time by changing the visa rules, but they didn’t because they’re not proactive. They don’t look at these things.

There’s a real problem with governance and the state’s capacity to do anything. It infiltrates everything we do. It’s the same reason why we haven’t had high-speed rail in 60 years of trying. It’s the same reason why we’ve talked for the last 20 years about developing the Ring of Fire in Northern Ontario and never do it. It’s a lack of state capacity that our governments seem fundamentally incapable of getting things done, and suggesting that they had some master plan to goose up home prices is giving them way too much credit. Don’t confuse stupidity for evil. They’re two different things.

Sabrina Maddeaux: I do want to say, though, I think it’s less about an intentional master plan to raise home prices and choosing certain interests and stakeholders over others. For example, with the massive immigration surge, that clearly wasn’t sustainable. Trudeau’s government was warned. We’ve seen this in the news, with policymakers, that this would lead to rising house prices and put pressure on the system. They chose to ignore that advice because they wanted to instead bring in cheap labour for businesses.

The one other piece where I will say it was actually intentional to raise asset prices and home prices to create a wealth effect was the central bank, the Bank of Canada, when they engaged in quantitative easing. That’s what QE is. So that was a deliberate monetary policy choice to increase asset prices with the hope that it would trickle down, but it didn’t, and now we have this uncontrollable spiral of housing inflation.

Meredith Martin: I am going to just point out right now that there was a question about monetary policy and its effect on the housing situation in Canada, and we decided to spin it out into its own show. So that will be a topic we’ll be addressing in the new year for sure!

Sean Foreman: The next question has to do with immigration. Obviously, it’s a very sensitive topic, but it’s an important topic, and it comes from Vanessa MacDonald. Mike, this is you, you’re on deck here, OK?

“Some adamantly believe that immigration has zero impact on housing, to the point that you will be banned from some subs on Reddit, like /r/canadahousing, for any mention of the topic. How can we best approach this taboo subject, given that we live in a highly multicultural country and don’t want to feed anti-immigrant sentiment?”

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, this is a huge problem. I would say, particularly on the left, the centre-left and with progressives, that we refuse to engage on certain topics, and it leads those topics to bad actors.

I have been talking since about 2017 about the relationship between population growth and home prices. I saw it in my hometown of London, Ontario. In 2017, our population started to surge, and we had a big increase in home prices. Now, a lot of that surge was from people moving in from the GTA, which is a little bit easier to talk about than immigration.

There’s certainly an international migration aspect to it, particularly in recent years. I would bring this up from time to time, and I got called every name in the book. I even, in a side-conversation in the first Liberal cabinet retreat I went to, I got called a racist for bringing this up. I won’t say who said that.

I would always couch this discussion by saying, “Hey, if we’re going to grow at this rate, this is how many homes we need. Five, six hundred thousand,” and look at it through a housing lens, not an immigration policy lens, basically, because I got tired of being called a racist all the time.

First of all, that instinct for centre-left and progressive people like me to go, “Okay, well, I’m not going to go there because I don’t like that topic.” I think the instinct to use that slur against anybody who wants to talk about these issues is really harming progress.

Now, what I try to do in this discussion is actually centre the discussion around the newcomers themselves and point out the fact that it’s the newcomers themselves who have the worst housing outcomes. We’re setting up newcomers to Canada and international students to fail, and we’re making false promises to them by not keeping our housing stock up with population growth.

I also just like to point out that it’s not the job of an 18-year-old from Warsaw or Bangkok or wherever else to make sure that Canada has a functioning housing system. The blame for any issues with our housing system or immigration has to do with our policymakers. They have nothing to do with the newcomers. That’s how I try to navigate it. But overall, it is a very difficult subject.

Cara Stern: I find as journalists, there’s a hesitancy to discuss these sorts of things — or there has been historically. I feel very grateful to be part of a team that is willing to talk about these issues because it isn’t something that goes away if you don’t talk about it, and we’re doing a disservice to the public as journalists.

If you aren’t willing to engage in this, the best thing to do is have long-form, calm conversations, reasonable discussions. That’ll let us be able to talk about some of the consequences and the choices we’re making as a society without it becoming inflammatory.

Mike Moffatt: So our next question comes from Daniel D’Angela, who writes, “During your conversation about outward migration from the GTA, I was wondering if there was anything to share on how transit could make some of those pressures more tolerable, especially with return-to-office mandates, making work-from-home less feasible.” So I’m going to throw that to Cara.

Cara Stern: We do need much more transit. We see that getting into the city, in Toronto, especially, is brutal. It is so hard to commute every day. I can’t even imagine what that does to you when you’re spending an hour, two hours each way on the road. Sometimes more if there’s a problem.

I hear lots of stories of people I know who have moved out to Hamilton or St. Catharines or I don’t know, wherever else they moved out to, where they’re like, “it’s a reasonable commute,” and then something goes wrong, and they’re screwed.

Because people tend to drive into the city, we need transit that’s actually better than driving. So we need to be building fast transit. We just opened in Toronto, the Finch LRT just opened, and people realized that a good, moderately fit jogger could outrun it. It is extremely slow. It’s much slower than the cars that are passing and zooming alongside it. That’s not going to get people out of cars.

I think that anyone who drives in the city would like to see less congestion. I don’t know how you can do that without building more transit, and high-quality transit is so important. We really need to focus on that.

It can’t just be along the streets because if it’s a bus, it’s gonna get stuck in traffic alongside the other cars. We need stuff that’ll get people there so that they make the choice to want to be on transit instead of driving. And that will improve it for everyone, especially for those who have no other option but to drive.

I think a lot of times, for a while now, it seems like the conversation about transit has been about being better for the environment and that sort of thing, making those good green choices. That’s not actually what changes people’s minds. We have to make a better product.

Meredith Martin: Yeah, innovation is key to progress. That’s for sure.

The final question goes to Sabrina and Mike, and it’s from a viewer who wanted to stay anonymous. She wrote to us after the tax reform episode with a couple of questions. She says, “You mentioned that we should make it easier for seniors to downsize. How is it difficult for them to downsize now? How about banning all foreign ownership going forward?”

Sabrina Maddeaux: So it is very difficult for seniors to downsize, and that’s why a lot of them aren’t doing it.

I mean, number one, there’s the psychological barrier where you’ve probably lived in your home for many years, if not decades, and moving in and of itself is — it’s change, right? They say the worst events in life are death, divorce and moving. Then you add in the expense of moving. On top of that, where are they going to downsize to?

For a long time, a lot of urban planners seem to think that seniors were going to move out of their nice big homes in the suburbs en masse and come downtown to small 400 square foot condos, and that’s obviously not going to happen. Seniors also need appropriate places to have the quality of life that they’ve come to expect, but where they can age comfortably. The reality is, there aren’t a lot of places for them to go in their communities.

There is that missing middle, not just for young people and young families, but for seniors. So we need to find ways to reduce that burden because it is clogging up the entire system. We have older empty nesters occupying family homes, which we have a severe shortage of for young people.

We talk a lot about housing when it comes to younger generations and young families, but we also have to think about the senior demographic, as more and more people move and get into that category. We’re going to have the silver tsunami.

People who also need smaller places before they go into nursing homes or long-term care. They want to, and they should be aging in place at home, but they need appropriate places to do it.

Cara Stern: That’s why I never complain when I see a condo go up in the neighbourhood and people say it’s just luxury condos — which of course, sometimes that just means slightly nicer appliances in a terrible building, but some buildings are actually true luxury condos. I think those are the condos that are going to get seniors out of family-size homes when we’re not building enough of those family-size homes. Ideally, you would have a situation where they do downsize so that those homes can be used by families who actually need that space right now, but they’re not going to do it unless the option that they get is better. So that’s why I’m like, yeah, build more luxury condos. Build nice ones that people will be happy to move into. Meredith, I think your parents did that, right?

Meredith Martin: My parents are... I love them. They’re so smart. They downsized to a rental before everything went kind of crazy. They’re in their late 80s now, and my parents did a lot of good future planning.

One of the things, though, I’ve been thinking about— and I don’t have data to back this up — but I would suspect there are some older people who are holding on to their family-size homes because they’re worried that their children won’t find an appropriate place to live. They’re like, well, “What if they need to move back here because they can’t launch into such an uncertain economy? Or they get married, and they want to have children, and they won’t be able to afford it.” And they’re thinking, “Well, I'd better hold on to my home because there is room in this large home.”

It’s this self-perpetuating cycle of dysfunction in our housing market. If you don’t have more choices, then people just get stuck. Those bad choices reinforce other choices. So I’d be interested to see if anybody has any data on that.

Mike, can you take the second half of the question about the banning of foreign home ownership?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, well, I’ll actually take both parts. If you think about it, you’ve got a senior who wants to stay in their neighborhood and we have to create a home for them. So let’s look at how governments deal with that. Trying to build any kind of infill, there’s a massive amount of red tape and planning that goes on. So we make it exceptionally difficult.

Then, if you somehow pull that off, there are massive development charges that we place on that. So we place these massive taxes, which didn’t exist when those seniors bought their original home back in the 1970s or whatever. So they’re facing a bunch of new taxes.

They have to pay GST on that new home that we’ve exempted first-time homebuyers from — GST on new homes, but we haven’t exempted downsizers. They have to pay land transfer taxes, and if they live in the City of Toronto, God forbid, they have to pay two. They have to pay a land transfer tax to the provincial government and a land transfer tax to the City of Toronto.

So all in, they’re losing about 35% to 40% of that wealth to taxes. So we’re asking, why aren’t they getting voluntarily punched in the face? That’s a stupid question. We make it impossible for these folks to do it.

Then we’ve got municipal planners who complain when seniors don’t downsize at the rates that their Excel models say they’re going to. It’s just absolutely ridiculous. If you want to create the conditions for seniors to downsize, then get rid of the land transfer tax. Get rid of the GST. Make it easy to build infill and have reasonable development charges. Until you do those things, seniors are going to stay where they are.

That’s a good transition to the second question because governments, instead of doing all of those things I mentioned, basically are doing stuff like foreign buyer bans. We’ve seen this at the federal government level; we’ve had provinces put in foreign buyers’ taxes and things like that. They’ve accomplished absolutely nothing because they don’t get to the core of the problem, which is that we make it impossible to build anything in this country. We’re just kind of tinkering around the edges.

We did this foreign buyer ban at the federal level. It hasn’t really accomplished anything. In some cases made it even harder to build new housing because foreign investors provide a very useful source of pre-construction capital.

Australia recognized that and put an exemption in the rules for foreign buyers. They still have a foreign buyer ban. They’re saying, “Well, if the foreign buyer is helping build new housing, we’ll create an exemption for that.”

So overall, I think governments are trying to solve the wrong problems. They’re choosing the problems to solve based on which problems are politically most convenient and who makes the better scapegoats. Foreign investors make a fantastic scapegoat, even though there’s not a lot of evidence that they’re contributing to this crisis.

Can we continue doing it? Yeah, absolutely. We continue having foreign buyer bans, and I expect we will, but we can also continue just not accomplishing anything when it comes to the housing crisis.

Meredith Martin: And we can back this up because you just put a report out late last year called the Homes Report, which actually looked at the foreign buyers ban to see if it had an impact, and it didn’t. So we’ll link to that in the show notes.

Thank you so much for watching and listening, and to our co-op student, Djeima Ramos, who has been really helping us out last semester.

Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about the risk of getting punched in the face and how that might change your behaviour, please send us an email to [email protected].

Meredith Martin: And we’ll see you next time!