With municipal election day approaching across Ontario, Cara Stern and Mike Moffatt take a closer look at the housing promises being made by mayoral candidates in nine cities. Which proposals could actually make housing more affordable for middle-class families, renters, and first-time homebuyers, and which ones fall apart under scrutiny?
In this episode of DemograFix, Cara Stern and Mike Moffatt break down the good, the bad, and the bizarre housing platforms of Ontario’s municipal candidates, why some politicians are proposing policies that throw middle-class homebuyers under the bus to appease older voters, the problem with forcing all new density onto polluted arterial roads, and what an actual, realistic blueprint for solving the housing crisis at the city level should look like.
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: It’s almost election day across Ontario. We’re just ten days out. For the past few weeks, I’ve been emailing campaigns with one request: send us your housing platform. We now have documents from many campaigns and offices in nine cities in this province. Some sent specific numbers and timelines, and some sent just a slogan.
Mike Moffatt: Housing is one of the few areas where a mayor has real levers. They have real powers, and you learn a lot from whether a candidate is willing to use those levers and powers, whether they try to blame another level of government, or whether they choose not to say anything of substance at all.
Cara Stern: Today on DemograFix, we’re going through these plans to help you figure out what to look for in a candidate’s plan if you, like me, are a one-issue voter on housing.
Mike Moffatt: I’m a policy nerd, so I spend way too much time scrutinizing candidate platforms, but you’re also into housing and almost equally as nerdy as I am. So when you were going through these platforms that all of these various candidates sent to you, what specifically were you looking for?
Cara Stern: There are kind of three things that I look for when I’m trying to see if their housing policy will help the middle class. First, do they remove barriers to building in neighbourhoods where people actually want to live? Second, does it cut the taxes and fees that add tens of thousands of dollars to a new home to make it cheaper to build? And third, does it shorten the time from proposal to the time that they actually have shovels in the ground?
Mike Moffatt: That’s pretty much my list, too. I mostly want to know whether the plan is grounded in reality and acknowledges that, yes, we need more social housing, but we really need more homes that middle-class families can afford. It’s not just one or the other—it’s both. I also want to know if they’re making expensive promises, and whether they make it clear how they’re going to pay for those promises. The plan should obviously recognize the limits of municipal powers and not make promises that can only be delivered by the federal or provincial government.
Finally, I want the plan to acknowledge that we have a particular shortage when it comes to family-sized homes—that cities shouldn’t just be setting an arbitrary unit target saying, “Okay, we need 10,000 homes,” and then hitting that target by building a bunch of shoebox condo units and nothing else, which we’ve seen in many of our cities.
Cara Stern: I compiled all of the different responses and sent them to you. What was your initial reaction when you saw these platforms?
Mike Moffatt: I’m going to do the ultimate Gen X thing while I wear my Atari shirt and quote something that hasn’t been relevant since 1986: my thought was, “Where’s the beef?”
I did find more to analyze on the social housing and homelessness side, and that’s great—we need many more policies in that area. But when it comes to housing issues facing young, middle-class Ontarians, there really wasn’t much beef there.
Cara Stern: I noticed that, too. When some candidates emailed me, I would respond saying, “Hey, just wondering, is there anything for middle-class homebuyers or middle-class families?” Not necessarily just homebuyers, but renters, too. Most people are not aspiring to live in social housing. Despite the lack of content to analyze from some people, there were some proposals worth discussing—some good, some not so good. Let’s start with one that made both of us pretty annoyed.
Mike Moffatt: You selected this just to set me off, so gee, thanks! The first one on our list is from Mississauga candidate Alvin Tedjo. What made me so annoyed is that this is a guy who spearheaded upzoning in Mississauga to allow for fourplexes citywide. Historically, he’s been pretty good on housing, he’s young, and he seems to understand how challenging it is for young families. Yet he proposed an idea—and I’ll have you walk us through it—that is basically about taking resources from those who are already struggling to afford a home and giving those resources to people who are already well-housed.
Cara Stern: His idea caught more attention because it’s frustrating when someone you know understands the issue proposes something that goes against what they claim to believe in. Basically, he proposed a plan that allowed seniors to defer their property taxes if they’ve owned their Mississauga home for at least 20 years, live in it as their primary residence, and don’t own multiple properties. They would keep paying their baseline property tax, but the bill would never go up, and every future increase would be deferred to later. He claims that means young families wouldn’t be subsidizing it because the city still collects the money down the road.
Mike Moffatt: That argument really frustrates me because the city and taxpayers do subsidize it. What the city is essentially doing is giving an interest-free loan to seniors. If the city’s cost of borrowing is, say, 5% or 6%, then every year, every $100 they’re deferring interest-free is costing the city $5 or $6 in interest, and everyone else has to pay for it.
He’s a candidate who understood the need for infill before many others did and understood the need to help people struggling to afford a home, yet he’s throwing them under the bus to appeal to seniors in order to win an election.
What really frustrates me is that we have politicians and municipalities constantly talking in their official plans about how we need seniors to downsize. They say, “We don’t need to build that many single-family homes because all the seniors are going to downsize and young families can move into those homes,” but then they put policies in place to make sure seniors don’t downsize.
It’s one of the things causing the shortage of family homes: our official plans assume seniors will downsize, but secondary policies prevent them from doing so. It’s an incoherent mess of policies.
Cara Stern: His defence was that this is similar to deferral programs in other cities, which many municipalities have, but I don’t know of any other that has a 20-year tenure requirement. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but if you play out the situation: imagine you’re 70 years old, you’ve lived in your home for 25 years, your kids have moved out, and three bedrooms are sitting empty. Every year you stay, your tax bill stays flat and that deferred balance grows. As soon as you sell to downsize, not only do you have to pay that deferred bill, but you also lose the opportunity to defer going forward.
Mike Moffatt: As a parent—and even from my own childhood—I remember that the argument “Mom, the other kids were doing it too!” was never a defence for my bad behaviour. If it’s a bad policy, we shouldn’t be copying what other cities are doing. If seniors want to stay in those homes, it’s their right to, but we shouldn’t be subsidizing it. This is a terrible, terrible idea. He got flamed on social media for it, and I think he was appropriately roasted.
Cara Stern: Okay, let’s move on to something we did like. I liked Brad Bradford’s proposal for removing the Toronto portion of municipal land transfer taxes on the first $1.1 million of a home’s value, and completely eliminating them if the home is under that price. He arrived at that price by looking at the average sale price in 2025. That would apply to people buying principal residences, including first-time buyers, but not to investment properties.
Mike Moffatt: We like this because land transfer taxes discourage people from rightsizing their homes by taxing the act of moving. It should be well understood by now that if you want less of something, you tax it. If you want less smoking, you raise the tax on cigarettes; if you want fewer carbon emissions, you price carbon. If you want people to buy and sell homes less often, you put a tax on home sales, which is essentially what the land transfer tax is.
If you get rid of the land transfer tax, people are going to move more often and rightsize their properties. At a high level, I like it, but my only question is: how on earth is he going to pay for it?
The City of Toronto is the only municipality in Ontario that has a municipal land transfer tax—I believe it’s the only one allowed to have one—and the city collects an absolute ton of money from it. How does that revenue get replaced, and what spending is reduced to make up for the shortfall? I really don’t get a sense of that.
Cara Stern: He estimates that it will cost around $300 million, and he says he’ll pay for it through his plan to turn Toronto Water into a public utility. He also says he’ll change how big projects are funded, which sounds like taking on long-term debt to pay for capital expenses instead of paying for them out of the current year’s operating budget.
Mike Moffatt: I’m all for municipal service corporations, but none of that really answers the question. Those reforms are really about lowering development charges; they don’t change the operating costs of how a city runs. It feels like a Rube Goldberg device—hugely complex, with stuff moving all over the place, but I don’t get it. If I don’t get it, I don’t know how anybody else is supposed to. That said, I love the high-level idea of limiting the land transfer tax, and finding better ways to pay for infrastructure is also a good thing. I just don’t know how those puzzle pieces fit together.
Cara Stern: Now I want to go to maybe the worst proposal I saw: incumbent mayoral candidate Drew Dilkens in Windsor. He promised that if council puts citywide fourplexes on the table—as many cities in Canada have—he will use his strong-mayor powers to veto it.
Mike Moffatt: Sadly, I’m not surprised, given both the mayor’s and most of Windsor City Council’s longstanding opposition to fourplexes. They famously got into a dispute with the federal government over the Housing Accelerator Fund regarding fourplexes. For what it’s worth, I think sometimes we focus too much on unit counts when there are more important things in rezoning, like harmonization and height limits. I don’t even think we should have arbitrary unit counts, but that’s a discussion for another time.
My big frustration is: okay, you don’t want fourplexes, but what are you going to do?
Windsor is one of the least affordable markets in Canada based on home prices relative to incomes, because it’s one of the lower-income areas in the province. You have high home prices and relatively low incomes, and I don’t see any municipal politician in the Windsor area who has a plan to address that or even seems to care.
As a Londoner, it’s my job to pound on Windsor, and I’m playing that role here, but I just don’t get what they’re doing down there.
Cara Stern: I can’t let this one go without pointing out that Doug Ford said strong-mayor powers were supposed to be used to align with provincial policy. When council goes against something that doesn’t align with provincial priorities, mayors can use those powers to veto or override council. So I have to ask: Doug Ford, is keeping density low part of your priorities? I don’t think you’d want to say that. They’re supposed to be for increasing housing supply, not decreasing it. I’d love to see him come out and say something, but I think I’ll be waiting a while for that.
Here’s a response I really liked, though: Jim Lee in Oshawa, who is currently a city councillor. He wrote back to me highlighting what the city can do and what is out of municipal jurisdiction, which is a great start.
One of the things he wants to focus on is as-of-right fourplexes, garden suites, and mid-rises on transit corridors, ending the year-long rezoning and infill fights that kill small projects before they start. He also highlighted how Oshawa currently doesn’t charge development fees if you’re building in their downtown core as part of an effort to incentivize building there. He wants to expand that to rental and missing-middle homes citywide.
He says the money will come from provincial and federal infrastructure funding that rewards these cuts, so the existing tax base wouldn’t have to cover the hole in the budget.
Mike Moffatt: Municipalities have the ability to set development charges at different rates in different parts of the city. Ottawa does this as well: homes built near downtown pay a lower development charge rate than homes out in the suburbs, and you can set different rates for different housing types. All of that is doable, and a lot of it is actually a good idea.
Once again, though, my question is: how are you going to pay for it? I have an idea of what he means—that the money will come from provincial-federal infrastructure deals where cities get funding under a three-year development charge reduction plan—but those deals all have conditions attached on how the money is used. A city or mayor can’t simply do whatever it wants; it has to live up to the agreed-upon terms. I don’t see how that’s the case here. My understanding is that a city can’t just do that, and if it can’t, it would have to lower development charges in some areas and raise them in others. That might be worth doing, but that money isn’t coming from provincial or federal coffers.
Cara Stern: There’s another response I wanted to highlight in Guelph: Ken Yee Chew. He noted that he wanted to improve the approvals process to make guidelines clearer so projects can move faster. A lot of people mentioned approvals timelines, because that seems to be an area with red tape that municipalities can correct without facing a ton of opposition.
One thing I really didn’t like, however, is that he highlighted the need to prioritize density—including infill—along arterial roads, with what he called a more “tailored approach” to established neighbourhoods. That sounds to me like not allowing a lot of multiplexes in quiet residential areas.
I don’t love the idea that if you can’t afford a single-detached house, not only do you need to accept a smaller unit in a multiplex, but you’re forced to live on busy, polluted arterial roads that aren’t as nice for families. A lot of people look for quieter streets where they feel comfortable having their kids play outside.
It’s better policy to spread density throughout the city and give everyone the opportunity to live in all different parts of the community, rather than forcing people who didn’t get into the housing market early enough to live on busy streets while everyone else gets quiet neighbourhoods.
Mike Moffatt: This really bothers me a lot, and it’s something we see from progressive politicians and urban planners alike. One of the historical arguments for zoning was keeping residential neighbourhoods away from dirty, polluting factories—keeping people away from sources of pollution. Over the last 20 years, we’ve flipped that on its head. We now have a cohort of urban planners who force people to live closest to the sources of pollution, which in modern cities are major traffic arteries.
We’ve gone completely backward. It shows that either we’ve lost the plot on zoning, or zoning was never really about keeping people away from pollution in the first place. Forcing everyone onto arterials isn’t good for kids, either. I couldn’t agree with you more: this focus on putting all density on arterials is regressive as hell, I’m totally against it, and I don’t know why it has so much support.
Cara Stern: Because it helps existing homeowners in quiet neighbourhoods avoid dealing with change, and that’s the political play. I understand why they do it politically, but it’s bad policy.
Guelph has a huge problem: a few years ago, there was a news story about a student’s parent who rented him a parking spot so he could live in a camper van because there were no student rentals available. That situation has improved slightly in Guelph, but the market is still very tight, and it won’t be fully fixed for a while.
Mike Moffatt: Student housing shortages across Southwestern Ontario have been really bad, but particularly in the Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge area. A lot of that is due to the international student debacle, where hundreds of thousands of students arrived with no new student housing built. It caused massive shortages, vacancies dropped to zero, and rents shot up. They have come down a little bit, but they remain highly elevated. Things are far more challenging than they should be.
It didn’t just affect the student market, either—there has been a large loss of single-family homes as older properties near colleges and universities were bought up by investors and turned into de facto student rentals. It’s a massive problem, and while it has improved in the last couple of years, it’s still not an affordable situation for young students.
Cara Stern: That just shows that refusing to build multiplexes doesn’t mean the population won’t grow; it just means people who move there are forced into worse living conditions.
I keep seeing comments online—especially regarding Alberta forcing cities to downzone—where people say, “Well, we don’t want so many people moving here.” Restricting housing supply has nothing to do with stopping population growth. If people need to live in those areas, they will move there regardless and face overcrowding.
Mike Moffatt: I would also point out that Premier Danielle Smith promised to double Alberta’s population, so they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth over there.
Cara Stern: Let’s pretend for a moment that you have a blank slate to write the housing policy for a big-city mayoral candidate. Give me a few policy points that you would definitely highlight.
Mike Moffatt: First of all, I wouldn’t use the exact same template for every city, even among large cities, because context matters. In Ottawa, development charges are much lower than in Toronto. Ottawa also has the choice to expand outward to build family homes, whereas Toronto really can’t unless we call up the Dutch to figure out how to drain parts of Lake Ontario! So context matters.
I wouldn’t start with policy alone; I think it comes down to having a vision and creating a plan based on reality.
Here are the core realities I look for in a candidate’s plan:
Acknowledge population growth and supply shortages: The plan must recognize that population growth is real and that we have a genuine shortage of homes.
Recognize housing diversity: Not all homes are created equal. We need a diversity of housing types—high-rise rentals, mid-rises, multiplexes—because we can’t house everyone in a single building type.
Focus on family-sized housing: The biggest shortage of homes is for young, middle-class families who need three bedrooms, green space, and places for their kids to play.
Reduce the cost to build: The only way to get prices and rents down to reasonable levels is to make it cheaper to build by lowering taxes on construction, lowering land costs, making efficient use of land, and streamlining approvals processes.
Support homeownership: We have to recognize that young families want to own a home, and nine times out of ten, they will leave the city to go where they can afford to buy one. We need more rentals, but we can’t ignore the reality that middle-class families aspire to homeownership.
Cara Stern: Those themes apply across most cities. How do you turn that vision into actual municipal policy for a mayoral candidate?
Mike Moffatt: Politicians need to set that vision and describe the problem first, but here are specific policy ideas:
Revise Official Plans: Commit to updating official plans to reflect actual population growth and explicitly accommodate families with children. Setting these conditions in official plans forces necessary downstream changes, such as rezoning or expanding urban growth boundaries, to house everyone.
Implement Form-Based Zoning: Adopt form-based zoning for new low-rise neighbourhoods by aligning zoning rules with the building code to make it easier to build factory-built and gentle-density family homes.
Streamline Approvals: Cut approval times by integrating technology. Cities like Edmonton are using AI—similar to spell-check or Grammarly for planning documents—to identify errors in hours rather than the weeks it takes human reviewers.
Audit Development Charges: Review development charge plans to ensure cities aren’t collecting money for infrastructure projects that will never actually be built, which unnecessarily drives up home costs.
Reform DC Rate Structures: Restructure development charges to charge less for small, entry-level starter homes and more for McMansions. It makes no sense that a 1,200-square-foot bungalow pays the exact same dollar amount in development charges as a 12,000-square-foot McMansion.
Cara Stern: I wonder whether good, detailed housing policy can actually win elections, or if politicians need to make broad promises about the kind of city they want, while keeping quiet about the specifics until they’re elected so they don’t set off NIMBY voters.
Mike Moffatt: It’s both bad politics and bad policy to rely on single, silver-bullet promises. People don’t find them credible, and from a policy perspective, there is no single big fix to the housing crisis—it requires dozens of incremental system-level changes. That’s why establishing a clear vision is so important.
There are areas where good politics and good policy align. Reforming development charges to lower the price of starter homes is something 80% to 90% of people can agree on. Almost everyone I talk to asks why we can’t build small bungalows like we did in the 1950s and ’60s. A politician can explain that tax policy is part of the problem and offer a clear fix. That kind of policy is popular and faces very little opposition.
Cara Stern: And I guess you get people who then can analyze the specific plans and are able to say, “This is good, this could actually work.” Maybe that helps.
Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin, and this episode was edited by Canadian Civil.
Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about 1980s Wendy’s commercials, please leave us a comment on YouTube!
Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
Why Toronto’s Next Council Could Be Decided by Renters
Affordability: Keeping Costs Down for Mississauga Families — Alvin Tedjo
The Priorities — Ken Yee Chew for Mayor of Guelph
Brad Bradford Will Eliminate Toronto’s Land Transfer Tax for the Average Homebuyer