The Hidden Tax on City Living: How Crime and Disorder Undermine Density

And how having to show ID to get into a Rogers Mobile Klinik makes us feel unsafe.

Mike Moffatt, Sabrina Maddeaux, and Meredith Martin

Jan 21, 2026

From breath mints and car break-ins to bouncers at the Rogers store, urban life is starting to feel a lot more “on alert.” In this episode of The Missing Middle, Mike Moffatt and Sabrina Maddeaux examine the rise of crime and disorder in our cities, as well as the disturbing data behind transit violence. However, this isn’t just about safety; it’s about the future of our neighbourhoods. If people don’t feel safe on the streetcar or the sidewalk, can we ever truly build the dense, walkable, “missing middle” communities Canada so desperately needs?

This surge in disorder acts as a "hidden tax" on urban living, forcing residents to choose between the convenience of the city and the perceived security of the suburbs. By analyzing these shifts, we uncover how a lack of safety might be the biggest hurdle yet to solving our housing goals.

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

Sabrina Maddeaux: So, Mike, the other day, you mentioned in our group chat that your car was broken into. Can you tell us what happened?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. We live in the Glebe, in Ottawa, off a major arterial. And once every couple of months, someone tries to break into our car, and we notice this because we actually have security cameras that film when somebody’s monkeying around with our car. And it’s just that proximity to a major arterial that we are a prime target for porch pirates and people trying to break into our car.

Now, most of the time, we keep the car locked. That doesn’t always help us, because we have had our windows smashed before. But this time - I’m going to blame myself. I don’t know who it was, so I’ll take the L on this one - the car was left unlocked, and somebody rummaged through the car. Luckily, nothing of value was in there, so they got away with a couple of packs of breath mints and some gum. That was about it.

But there have been other things in the Ottawa area that have surprised me. About a month ago, I drove out to a suburb of Ottawa to get my daughter’s phone repaired. It was a Rogers-type center, and as soon as I got there, I went to open the door, and I couldn’t open it. And then, I saw that there was a sign on the door, and the sign said as follows: Due to the increase in robberies, we limit access to only two clients at a time in our stores. We apologize for the inconvenience. We require ID. Thank you for your understanding. I actually had to wait until the customers in there were done, and it felt like going into a nightclub or something -not that I do that anymore at my age - and then some bouncer lets me in.

I found that the whole thing threw me for a loop. This idea that I couldn’t get into a store to get a new phone for my daughter. Have you noticed these types of things happening in your neighbourhood? Whether it be cars getting broken into or stores taking these types of measures, which make it difficult for you to get products?

Sabrina Maddeaux: 100% it’s the same thing with the Rogers store in my neighbourhood, and I’m in The Beach in the east end of Toronto, which is one of the safer, quote unquote, nicer neighbourhoods in the city. And even here, you see that. Last time I had to go to the Rogers store, same thing, I was so confused I couldn’t open the door, and I saw the little note, you had to put up your driver’s license to the camera to be allowed into the store. It was a surprising moment.

There’s a pet food store in the condo building next to me on the ground floor. And every single night when they close, they put out their empty cash till in front of the glass doors to signal to thieves that there’s no cash kept in the store. And even then, they had their windows smashed and were broken into a few weeks before Christmas.

And I’ve seen that happen to other stores in the neighbourhood as well. And that wasn’t something that I think was regular, certainly pre-pandemic.

In terms of my commute. I take the streetcar every day, and honestly, more often than not, there’s some type of incident of varying levels. Sometimes it’s someone doing a drug deal in front of me on the streetcar. It’s someone yelling and getting into a verbal altercation or threatening to fight someone in front of me. It’s someone who’s very visibly intoxicated or on drugs of some kind.

Before the holidays, on my commute to work, we were in a vehicle driving by someone on the street, and he randomly got punched in the face by another man walking by him, and I didn’t see the end of what happened there. But there always seems to be some sort of crime or disorder, and it really puts you in a state where you’re constantly on alert. And, I think, reasonably scared.

And this isn’t just my freak experience or bad luck of happening to pass crime and disorder all the time. According to a collaboration between the CBC and the Investigative Journalism Foundation, more people are reporting incidents of assaults on public transit, not just in Toronto but across the country.

They say that between 2016 and 2014, reported assaults on transit systems in eight of Canada’s ten largest metro areas doubled, and this significantly outpaced the general increase in crime, which was 53% during the same period. Now, just to break that down locally. In Toronto, reported assaults on transit jumped by 160%. In Winnipeg, violent crime on transit nearly tripled, which was a 281% increase in Montreal, Edmonton and the Kitchener-Waterloo Cambridge region.

Those all more than doubled, and the only outlier was Vancouver, where the transit crime rate has trended slightly downward over the last decade. And based on my own personal experience, most of these incidents that I see, I don’t believe, were reported. Certainly, if it’s something that doesn’t escalate to a level where someone was injured… First of all, who are you reporting these to? And it’s very well known that whether it’s TTC security or the police, they don’t have the capability to deal with these incidents. So even if you report them, what’s going to happen? Nothing. So people don’t. I would think that these numbers significantly undercount what’s actually happening on transit and the streets of our cities.

We know there’s an increase in crime on public transit. And we opened the show by saying we’re going to talk about how crime and disorder impact urban planning and our ability to build dense, walkable neighbourhoods. Can you tell us what one actually has to do with the other?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think it’s interesting to note that you live in The Beach. I never know whether it’s The Beach or The Beaches in Toronto.

Sabrina Maddeaux: There’s so much controversy. I go back and forth, and you can’t win. It’s a problem.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah. So we’ll do that in a different episode. Please leave a comment letting us know if it’s The Beach or The Beaches. Let’s start that argument in the comments section.

I live in the Glebe, and these are older neighbourhoods, but at some level, they are the types of dense urban neighbourhoods. That we’re talking about building more of these days. And, one of the things that I notice is that, the these issues that I have, with porch pirates, people trying to break into my car all the time is not it’s not something that my parents have to deal with in, the suburbs of London, Ontario, out in the West End, I’m sure it happens, but not nearly to the same frequency.

And it’s not just me noticing it, but a few weeks ago and the guy by the name of Chris Arnade, whom I would highly recommend. He’s got a great book, he’s got a great Twitter feed. He dropped a post on X, which was really the spark for this episode. His post was as follows. He says that everyone who advocates for walkable, dense cities with mixed zoning must understand they work when and only when people trust each other and don’t mind living close together and sharing stuff like subways and buses.

Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌@Chris_arnade

Everyone who advocates for "walkable dense cities" with mixed zoning must understand they work when, and only when, people trust each other and don't mind living close together and sharing stuff, like subways and buses and that only happens if you punish, lock up, and remove the

Ed West @edwest

The murder of the young Ukrainian woman in Charlotte was so appalling and disturbing, and all the more enraging for being totally preventable. https://t.co/h0z0yczlgr

10:40 AM · Sep 7, 2025 · 639K Views

209 Replies · 969 Reposts · 7.29K Likes

And that only happens if you punish, lock up and remove the bad actors. You can’t have your abundance unless you put at the very top of the policy pyramid zero tolerance for disorder. Your citizens must trust each other, or your dense cities will mean fetid, dangerous cities that few want to live in other than the super-rich who can buy private security.

That really resonated with me, because I believe that if urbanists want to create more dense, walkable neighbourhoods and encourage transit use, they need to take far more seriously people’s perceptions of crime and disorder. Otherwise, people won’t use transit and will have yet another reason to move out of the downtown core.

I know we’ll get comments in the comment section where people will cherry-pick crime data and say, No, no, it’s not that bad because of this and that. And despite being an economist and a number nerd, I don’t think just spouting numbers at people is a useful way to deal with their concerns. Just throwing stats at them. But it seems that it’s often the go-to for people say, No, no, the crime and disorders aren’t that bad because, look at here and we cherry-pick the endpoints.

You and I, separately and together, whether it be in the podcast or where we’ve written about this outmigration that’s happening from the GTA and from the Hamilton region. And we’ll discuss how people are going to your Woodstocks, your Brantfords, your Tillsonburgs, and so on - moving out to those smaller communities. And one of those reasons could be this feeling of crime and disorder in dense urban areas. So it makes sense to me that if we are going to ask people to accept more density, it is a necessary condition that they feel safe and protected. So that’s my view. Does that resonate with you? Do you think people in our major dense urban cities, do you think they feel safe right now?

Sabrina Maddeaux: No, they don’t feel safe. I can tell you that for sure. My experience isn’t an outlier. When I talk to colleagues, friends or family, everyone sees and experiences the same thing. And it leads, yes, to this constant anxiety and fear. And you don’t want to use transit.

For me personally, when the return to office happened after the pandemic, one of the biggest adjustments was the state of what was going on with the TTC being not policed at all -a lot of open drug use, a lot of assault.

There are mental health issues that need to be addressed as well, outside of the criminal system. Anyone who raised these for a long period was told, You’re anti-mental health. Or, You’re stigmatizing homelessness or even drug use. But the reality is that people need to feel a level of safety and predictability, and especially that if something does go wrong, there will be an appropriate response by either security or law enforcement.

And right now it feels a little bit like the Wild West, honestly. People will find transit alternatives as soon as they can, or they will move to safer neighbourhoods or towns, especially if you talk about raising children. We know that it’s young families leaving the city. A lot of that is affordability, or young couples who want to have kids, but there is also, I think, a safety element there, for sure.

I’ve written and talked a lot about increases in crime in Canada, in particular in the suburbs, but in some respects, what matters more than crime data, which varies from region to region, is the public perception of crime. Now, our friend David Coletto from Abacus Data released some recent survey results on this very topic.

They found that 4 in 10 Canadians say crime has gotten worse over the past year, with 18% saying it’s improved. (I don’t know where those 18% are living. I’d love to know.) While no single type of crime dominates what Canadians see as the biggest issue, the top contenders are drug-related offences, property crimes, violent crimes, and car theft.

When asked what they think the cause is of the rise in crime, nearly half of respondents, 48%, point to homelessness and addiction, 42% blame weak sentencing and the justice system, 39% cite broader economic pressures like the rising cost of living.

Anyone who’s taken psychology 101 knows that feeling unsafe makes people more risk-averse. And, in order to have a growth agenda, citizens need to feel safe. That’s now politics 101. Whether you want to talk about building or starting businesses or even participating in your community, you need a high-trust environment, not a low-trust environment. And Canadians have enjoyed high-trust environments for a very long time. And I think a lot of it is that we’ve taken that for granted, and now we don’t know how to respond.

People need to be able to trust their fellow citizens and neighbors and also trust their elected representatives to make hard decisions, including cracking down on disordered behaviour and crime. And I would argue that it shouldn’t be hard decisions. Those are basic things that should be done.

There is a lot of ideologically motivated resistance to that, where people feel it’s cruel or unkind. But no, it’s unkind to leave people in distress on the streets and also to subject people to victimization on things like their ordinary commutes to work.

We also know in general that women use public transit more than men, and are also much more likely to feel unsafe on public transit and in other areas. So there’s also a gendered aspect to this.

Do you think policymakers even start to get this? Do they make the connection between getting people to accept more density, public trust and safety? Because on the ground in Toronto, it sure doesn’t feel like they do.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah. I would say no.

And there is this weird disconnect. I think the politicians who are willing to talk about this more are completely different than the ones who want more urban density. So you get this strange disconnect where the politicians who are more than happy to see young families move out to Woodstock and Brantford and Tillsonburg are more likely to talk about these disorder issues than the politicians who want dense, urban, walkable communities.

And I think that’s a problem. And to be clear, I don’t think the solution is, okay, let’s just lock everyone up and so on. We have to deal with the mental health crisis that we have in this country, and we have to deal with the lack of housing, which is causing issues around homelessness and so on.

And you get these loops that happen where you’ve got somebody who’s already struggling with mental health issues, and now they can’t afford the rent. That’s not going to make those mental health issues any better. So you get these spirals that happen.

And I don’t think those of us on the progressive side of the aisle are willing to talk about this enough. We’re not willing to understand that this is a necessary condition - that if we want to create modern versions of the Glebe and modern versions of The Beaches and European-style courtyard housing, higher family-friendly density - that’s going to require taking measures that make people feel safer.

That could be any number of things, like having more police presence on the ground, any number of things that don’t just provide better outcomes, but are actually visible to people. It actually shows that the government is out there trying things. So, I don’t think that the political class is dealing with this well.

I get the sense that you don’t think the political class is dealing with this well, either. So what would you like to see around, making it safer or feel safer to take transit?

Sabrina Maddeaux: We do need to address, obviously, housing affordability because homelessness is a major issue, and transit shouldn’t be used as a homeless shelter. So we need places for people experiencing homelessness to go where they can feel safe. And then we also need to actually figure out how to help with affordability.

Mental health as well. We’ve been talking about mental health for so long now as a top issue. And our systems are still failing people. But at the same time, we really do need justice system reforms. We’ve been hearing about bail reform and sentencing reform for a long time now. Seems like every time you hear on the news, someone actually is charged or arrested, they’re out on probation or bail. And it’s the same offenders over and over and over again. So that really needs to be pushed through.

Looking at mandatory minimums for some things. The ability of law enforcement to actually respond to and charge offences. A lot of this is going underreported, and even when things are reported, there just doesn’t seem to be the capacity or the political will…And this isn’t an issue with frontline officers. It’s more of a systemic issue that’s coming from leadership and the political class about enforcing, especially the sorts of crimes that fall more in the disorder and chaos category. I think we’ve lost the political will to prosecute those and take them seriously, and that comes from the very top.

How would you like to see the issue of rising disorder addressed at the political level?

Mike Moffatt: Well, this is going to sound weird, coming from an economist, but I would like to focus less on throwing out numbers of people and data and things like that and recognize that people view the world in narratives and they view the world in videos and photos.

I don’t think our policymakers understand how much it erodes belief in the system when you see these videos online of people just walking into LCBOs, taking stuff off of shelves and walking out. I think that creates the conditions where people think everything’s just going to hell.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Well, if the government can’t protect its own stores, what can it protect?

Mike Moffatt: Well, exactly right. And then people throw in that there are really not that many robberies at LCBOs. And that, at the end of the day, a lot of these guys get caught, so it’s not that big a deal.

I say it’s a huge deal. Because the video matters, right? That the images matter. And I don’t think our politicians understand that because they’re operating in a world of data and spreadsheets and so on.

And I get it. I operate in that world. After we finish recording this, I’m sure I’m going to have my nose pressed into an Excel sheet. But you have to understand that the video matters.

The other one that really gets me is the jewelry stores in malls. You get these gangs that come in with hammers; they break everything. And often you’ll have the security guard just standing there watching. And then all of these people run out. Again, I don’t think policymakers understand how corrosive that is to our discourse. People say, well, crime hasn’t gotten that much worse. But ten years ago or 20 years ago, when I went into Walmart, they didn’t have the toothpaste locked behind the glass cage. Right?

When you see that. When you go to a store, and you have to ask somebody to unlock something to get it, even if the data isn’t showing that the crime is getting worse, people go, Well, God things must be getting really bad if stores are having to take these measures. So I think working with retailers to try and scale that back. I think that would help people a great deal. Looking at the most egregious of stories and doing something about it.

You mentioned bail. One of the things that I often see stories of is people who are accused of sexual assault. Then go off unprosecuted because there were such delays in the trial that their charter rights had been violated. And to be very clear, I’m not suggesting that we should ignore those rights and allow these trials to go on forever. That justice delayed is justice denied. But we have to reform the justice system. We’ve got to get these trials happening faster. We have to allow people to have their day in court. It erodes so much faith in the system where you have these slam dunk cases, but they end up going scot free simply because we don’t have the resources in our justice system to prosecute offenders in a reasonable amount of time.

I think the high level is getting policymakers to really focus on the things that concern people the most and make visible progress on those. I think that would make a huge difference.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Absolutely. People need to see enforcement happening and know that their concerns have been taken seriously and that they will be protected. And right now, there’s the sense that there’s no political will to do that. So we’ll be keeping a close eye on it.

Thank you so much for watching and listening. And to our producer, Meredith Martin and editor, Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about the type of breath mints that are most likely to be stolen from a 2021 Nissan Rogue, please send us an email to Missing Middle podcast at gmail.com.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.