Our Team

The Missing Middle Initiative is housed at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of the Environment, and all of our staff are University of Ottawa employees. MMI’s vision is to revive Canada’s young, urban, middle class, and 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.

The MMI team is relatively small, comprising only five full-time employees and an annual budget of under $1 million. Through hard work, occasional help from freelancers, and collaboration with partners like the Smart Prosperity Institute, this small team is accomplishing big things.

Our team members are as follows:

Alex Beheshti, Senior Researcher Associate

Alex Beheshti is an urban planner and land economist with experience as a consultant providing insights on development charge reviews, fiscal impact analysis, economic studies, municipal performance benchmarking, employment conversion assessments, and housing need analysis.

He holds the Registered Professional Planner (RPP) designation from the Ontario Professional Planners Institute (OPPI), where he also volunteers on the Governmental Relations Committee.

Passionate about tackling Canada’s housing crisis, he advocates for data-driven, evidence-based policy creation. His commitment to public education on homebuilding aims to foster a deeper understanding of challenges and solutions in the sector.

Alex has appeared in various media outlets, providing his expert opinion, including TVO’s The Agenda, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and 640 AM Toronto.

Jesse Helmer, Senior Research Associate

Jesse Helmer is Senior Research Associate at MMI, where he focuses on climate-friendly housing policy and the real costs of urban sprawl. Based in London, Ontario, where he has served two terms as a city councillor, including six years on the planning and environment committee, two years as deputy mayor (2018-2020) and eight years on the transit commission. He is particularly interested in the intersection of housing, mobility, and climate policy, as well as actionable strategies to build cleaner, greener, and more affordable cities and communities. He was named one of London’s Top 20 Under 40 in 2019.

Jesse is a graduate of the University of Waterloo (BA) and Queen's University (MPA), and is currently a Ph.D candidate in political science at Western University, where his research focuses on the political participation gap between homeowners and tenants (www.greatsuppression.ca). He teaches part-time at Western in the local government program and Huron University College in the governance, ethics and leadership program. Jesse lives with his wife, Kate Graham, and their daughter, Flora, in Old North.

Meredith Martin, Senior Producer

Meredith is a journalist and content producer with 20 years of experience explaining complicated topics, from clean energy to the economy to human psychology, in an easily digestible manner. Meredith produces the Missing Middle Podcast, so if you have any show ideas you'd like to pitch, she’s the one you should send them to.

Mike Moffatt, Founding Director

Dr. Mike Moffatt is the founding Director of the University of Ottawa's Missing Middle Initiative (MMI) and co-host of the Missing Middle Podcast. Mike’s family is from Whalen Corners, Ontario, but Mike grew up in London, Ontario, around the corner from a tire rim factory and near Pottersburg Creek. Mike has spent most of his career analyzing environmental policy and the evolution of Southwestern Ontario’s manufacturing sector and housing markets, motivated by these experiences.

Prior to joining MMI, Mike served as the Chief Innovation Fellow for the Government of Canada, advising Deputy Ministers on innovation policy and emerging trends. He has also previously held the titles of Founding Director of the PLACE Centre, Senior Director of Policy at the Smart Prosperity Institute, Interim Director at the Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management, Director of Policy at Canada 2020, and Chief Economist at the Mowat Centre, University of Toronto.

Mike has worked with politicians and policymakers of all political stripes in several countries to craft more effective public policy. From 2013 to 2015, Mike served as an economic advisor to Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

Mike holds a Ph.D. in Management Science from Ivey Business School and an M.A. in Economics from the University of Rochester.

Cara Stern, Senior Producer (on leave)

Cara is a journalist who has spent her career creating educational content to help people understand the intersection of housing, affordability, and politics. She spent almost a decade as a producer on The Agenda with Steve Paikin, the flagship current affairs program on TVO, the Ontario public broadcaster. While at TVO, she created discussions on a wide range of topics, with a particular passion for debates on housing. She also produced several political leadership debates.

She is the co-host of the Missing Middle Podcast, where she conducts conversations with economist Mike Moffatt and guests about the decline of the middle class in Canada.

She holds a Bachelor of Journalism from Carleton University, with minors in Sociology and History.

Sabrina Maddeaux, Missing Middle Podcast Co-Host

With Cara on leave, Sabrina has graciously agreed to join Mike as co-host on the Missing Middle Podcast.

Sabrina Maddeaux is a National Magazine Award winner and political columnist whose work has appeared in the National Post, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, The Hub and many other outlets. She frequently appears on Canada's top radio and TV programs, as well as at premier thought leadership forums, to provide political and economic analysis, often from a millennial perspective. In 2022, she was indefinitely banned from Russia under sanctions imposed by President Vladimir Putin as a result of her writing on the Ukraine invasion and international corruption. Sabrina has also passed the Canadian Securities Course (CSC) offered by the Canadian Securities Institute and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science (Honors) from St. Bonaventure University (NY), with a double minor in Journalism and Theology.