The Humble Genius of Uytae Lee

The Vancouver based urban planner and Canadian YouTube star on the secret to making viral videos on nerdy topics like single staircase apartments and housing taxes

May 07, 2025

He's got 215,000 YouTube subscribers and millions of views. The urban planner and YouTube creator Uytae Lee sits down with Sabrina Maddeaux and Mike Moffatt to have a fun and wide-ranging conversation about housing and the systemic hurdles to building more of it.

Uytae shares insights on creating engaging content about housing, urban planning, design and the realities of YouTube monetization. The discussion also touches on the challenges of prefabricated housing, the need for innovation and some free advice for the new prime minister of Canada.

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

Sabrina Maddeaux: So, Uytae, you're based in Vancouver, and I feel like we've been sleeping a little bit on BC issues here on the podcast. Your recent video, The Housing Tax Crisis, got 100,000 views in just days. (The link's in our show notes, by the way, for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.) Can you break down just how bad these housing taxes really are, and also how the BC situation compares to what we're seeing across the rest of Canada?

Uytae Lee: Yeah. Well, first off, I want to say thanks so much for having me on the show. I'm honestly, I can't even exaggerate, I'm such a huge fan of this show. And it's great to bring on some Western representation here for once. You know, maybe we'll reconsider the alienation comments, whatever, I'm not Alberta…

Sabrina Maddeaux: It all hinges on you. If you do well, there's more Western representation. If not, done forever.

Mike Moffatt: No pressure.

Uytae Lee: No pressure. No pressure at all. And also, no pressure because, okay, so you've asked me to explain development fees and taxes to who I think would be the expert on these fees. So I think in many ways, this is going to be incredibly redundant for you guys.

But I kind of like to start by saying they're not really taxes that are very transparent. You don't see them show up anywhere on your bill, at least on the consumer side of things. If you're buying a house or renting, you would never see a breakdown of where your money is going to or how that money is going into some of these fees.

But really, where they happen, where they occur, is on the developer side of things. So if you're someone who's building housing in, say, Vancouver, you could expect up to 20% of that total project budget, like including land, including the building itself, including all the soft costs, architects, whatever-20% of that could be going towards these development fees or charges as they're called.

But from what I understand, Toronto and Ontario might be even worse because they're up to 24% there. It's a messy topic in the sense that every city kind of has its own sort of regime in how they apply these taxes. The trend you see is that some of those cities that do have such a pressing housing crisis or a supply crunch tend to have really high fees on development.

So yeah, I thought that was sort of worth going into.

Mike Moffatt: Well, it's such a great video, and we'll link to it in the show notes. I was a big fan. And also, I have to say, it's great to see you again. Last time we got together, you were interviewing me for a podcast when I was out in Vancouver. So it's nice to be able to do this virtually.

And you've got so many great, great videos. So we can't promote them all here, but I would like to promote my all-time favourite, Why North America Can't Build Nice Apartments. Clearly it's your audience's favourite. It has nearly 2 million views, the highest, I think, of any of your videos, and only about half of those are from me.

The video puts a really heavy emphasis on the need for the legalization of single egress designs. And I know British Columbia has made some reforms to legalize them, though those reforms don't necessarily apply in the city of Vancouver. So first of all, can you walk us through the video? And secondly, I think your video has caused some changes in British Columbia. So what's the current environment look like on single egress out there?

Uytae Lee: Oh, for sure. I mean, I'd be hesitant to take too much credit for whatever has happened since the video, but gosh, yeah. I'll start by saying I was just so surprised at the attention that video received. When I was doing the research and scripting, I was like, okay, this one's going to be for a niche audience.

It's about a building code, and it's one building code that we're changing. But man, like you're right, it's been by far the most popular topic I've ever covered. And I think part of the reason for that was it met the right kind of moment where there was a ton of momentum behind the scenes and politically to talk about this one issue.

So the crazy thing that happened is literally a week before I published that video, the province of British Columbia announced that they would be looking at changing that code. And so they make that announcement and a week later, this explainer video pops out. So what I'm saying is I got very, very lucky in terms of timing.

Besides all that, to walk your audience through the issue there's this one code in most of North America, with the exception of a couple cities, where every apartment above two or three stories is required to have two staircases.

And that requirement is really there in case there's a fire in the building, and one of the staircases is full of smoke or on fire, you would ideally want another way out, right? You'd want a backup staircase.

It's one of those codes [that] totally sounds reasonable on paper, but [in] so many different ways results in a lot of massive trade-offs.

You know, I'll try not to walk through all of them. But I think the biggest one that sort of was my “aha moment” was that it makes it difficult to design a family-sized apartment. When you think about the makeup of apartments throughout North America, you'll find that just right across the board, the vast majority are studios, one bedrooms, and maybe like a handful of two-bedrooms sprinkled throughout. It's very rare if you're someone with a family to find a three bedroom apartment. And a lot of that comes down to this to egress code requirement.

Because you know, okay, if I have to really quickly break it down, this is a very visual thing. So like, I don't know how great this will be for a podcast. But if you have two staircases, you need a hallway connecting those two staircases. And so, where are all the housing units going to be located? They're going to line up alongside that hallway. And what that means is they only have access to windows on one side, if you kind of think about how they would all line up, because of that. It's just really difficult to fit any more than one or two bedrooms into that sort of layout.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, that requirement - think of it like a hotel. You've got the central hallway, then you've got apartments on either side. You couple it with the requirement, the sort of necessary requirement that bedrooms have a window…if you're only building these long things, you know, you have to build a very wide apartment unit to have three bedrooms, all with windows all on one side, right? So it's a geometry problem. And I love the video, because it really breaks it down, it is quite visual in a way that we can't be on the podcast.

But again, I really encourage all of our listeners and viewers to check it out.

Uytae Lee: Thanks so much.

Sabrina Maddeaux: You know, I'd love to build off of that by talking to you about the mechanics of your About Here YouTube channel. You've built this community of over 200,000 subscribers, but with just 34 videos that range from quick takes to deep dives. So you're not like a content mill doing rage bait, like so many channels are. So with literally 1000s of housing issues out there, what's your process for deciding, like this is the one that people need to hear about next?

Uytae Lee: Yes. I mean, thanks for mentioning. I am very inefficient. That is probably at the root of that. But yeah…

The process, you know, with each story, I really kind of try to think about two things: What is sort of the gateway into this topic?

I'm sure you guys have conversations like this, too. It's like housing policy is a very dense, on the surface, seemingly boring kind of topic. But the way you can really bring in an audience is you kind of find that you know, clickbaity title or that anecdote that really gets people to have curiosity about the problem, the issue and to make that investment up front.

I mean, YouTubers, we talk all the time about things like click-through rate and retention. And really, it sounds like cold, algorithmic sort of advice. But like, I think it boils down to curiosity. Like, how can you turn your story into something that sparks curiosity in the viewer?

And I'll add one last thought, which, you know, it's a little bit woo woo, whatever. But like, I have this kind of philosophy that a lot of stories are, you can kind of boil it down into this one kind of dynamic, which is you're bringing viewers from a place of uncertainty to a place of certainty.

You're like: here's a question, here's a situation that challenges you in some way and surprises you. And it makes you think, ‘OK, I want to continue watching or continue reading to find the certainty, find the answer, find the solution, find the resolution to that story.’

And so I guess that informs a lot of my videos. It really starts from this really intense problem, and I try to steer you towards solutions and some sort of resolution. You know, fill out that story arc.

How you maintain momentum throughout a story is also really important to me. And I think every point sort of needs to have a connecting sort of consequence to the other points. It's like this happened. And because of that, this happened or but this happened. And there's sort of like a relationship between all of those ideas.

Yeah, I'd be kind of like in a nutshell how I do it. Yeah.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, well, I'm curious to know what lessons you've learned in your process over the last couple of years. You know, what have you found works? What doesn't work? And in particular, in the lens of YouTube creators who are interested in videos that explain issues, explain concepts, ideas, policies for that kind of 18 to 35 year old demographic who isn't always, you know, have these issues as sort of top of mind to them.

Uytae Lee: More explosions.

I mean, to some extent, one thing that I really like to, you know, remind myself with these videos, and it's sort of the harsh reality, like this is entertainment first before it is, you know, whatever other purpose you have.

And of course, it is important to have that bigger purpose. Like I want people to know and learn about the issues through these videos. But if it isn't entertainment, if it doesn't have some amount of fun and some kind of momentum to it, that, you know, it's just in itself such a good story. It's kind of dead in the water.

We're on YouTube and on these other platforms. We're competing with cat videos and Mr. Beast videos and some of the most, you know, like eyeball-capturing content out there.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Like, the cats are very competitive.

Uytae Lee: Oh, yeah. And I completely understand. You know, on my days off, that's what it is. Or at least that's the reminder I have to give myself.

So yeah, like if a video starts feeling like it's just an info dump, and I'm just kind of listing, you know, this reason after this reason, I find myself cringing at that a bit and, you know, needing to write some humor or write some fun analogy or, you know, whatnot.

Sabrina Maddeaux: For sure. That makes a lot of sense.

You know, I'm also dying to know about your production timeline. So, from idea to hitting publish, what does that journey look like? And I also know our listeners are curious about the business side as well. So, if you're comfortable sharing, what is the reality of YouTube money for a channel like yours?

Uytae Lee: Yeah, maybe I can start with the money side, because, you know…

Sabrina Maddeaux: Are you broadcasting from your super yacht right now?

Uytae Lee: The harsh reality check with, you know, this sort of YouTube lifestyle as it is, just it's not a very glamorous existence.

I mean, I'm very lucky in that I'm able to make probably 75 percent of my income with YouTube and through a mixture of AdSense revenue and sponsorships, which affords me rent in Vancouver, which I think is a success.

You have to piece it together through many different ways. You know, I teach part-time at the journalism school out here at UBC. And, crazy enough, I was appointed to the board of B.C. Housing. And so there's a small stipend that comes with that. And that's been an interesting sort of experience, too. And through other various speaking gigs, random opportunities, it all somehow comes together. And I think other YouTubers would report the same sort of setup. It's very hard to just do it purely based off of eyeballs on your content.

I have this sort of more personal philosophy that I don't want YouTube and content creation in general to take over my life, and for me to only be making videos. I know it's a huge part of my work, but I think, for me, living a more holistic lifestyle is to have other passions and hobbies and jobs and have YouTube just sort of be an extension of that.

Now, in terms of timelines, like I kind of foreshadowed before, I am, in the world of YouTube, I'm relatively slow. I take a while to put these together, especially something like development fees. Man, I nearly broke my brain researching and writing that video.

So I say, it's anywhere from two to six months. A bulk of that is actually in the research and writing. I find the production side of things seems to go pretty fast. Like three to four weeks is enough to sort of film and edit a video. But for me, I put a lot of effort into just trying to understand the subject matter as best as possible. And it takes a while because I'm not an expert in these things.

I've kind of, you know, stumbled into this career and through necessity and curiosity, learned about all these issues. But I certainly can't say that I'm starting from a place where I know a lot of things already. So, yeah, there's just a ton of effort up front to just kind of make me like a mini expert on a topic.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So I want to shift things to get a little political here. During the recent federal election, housing was a major part of the political discourse. When you were listening to politicians from any party talk about it, what moments had you thinking either ‘finally they get it’, and what had you screaming at your screen? Like, did you leave feeling more hopeful about the housing situation in Canada or just as worried as before?

Uytae Lee: You know, I do feel some hope on a very broad scale in the sense that, you know, I feel like every election and every year that the issue of housing has just. only increasingly gotten on the radar of the federal government and our federal political parties.

So to me, that trending upwards makes me feel like even though maybe in the details, they aren't quite, you know, figuring it out or that maybe they're playing catch up, that like in a broader sense, there is momentum.

Sabrina Maddeaux: They say the words housing crisis now. So that is an improvement.

Uytae Lee: Yes, they acknowledge one exists and plans are being written and whatnot. But I guess where my skepticism and where my criticism comes in is in the details and sometimes in the lack of details too.

I think at least in this election, there was clearly a choice between the progressive Conservatives or the Liberals. And I thought both parties had more or less the right take on housing, you know, like broad strokes. They both recognize that they need to work with municipalities to get this housing approved and built and reduce development fees.

And I think where they really differed was on how much carrot they wanted to use or how much stick they wanted to use. Personally, I felt like, you know, vibes wise, the Liberals were more carrot, the Conservatives were more stick. But I think, for me, not much detail as to what those mechanisms would be.

But a specific moment that was interesting for me was when the Liberal party released their housing platform and it mentioned a lot about things like prefabricated construction and having Build Canada housing, or whatever their government developer program is, to really become a big player in financing and almost becoming like a guaranteed buyer for prefabricated homes.

I thought that was an interesting idea. I did another video on that topic recently and I've also been a bit more…I think skeptical wouldn't be the right term here, but I'm cautious in seeing that as like a silver bullet solution. In theory, it makes sense that you could build housing in a factory, like we do iPhones and cars and all sorts of things that are mass produced and gain benefits in that sort of economies of scale.

But what I've really learned through that video was that there's so much outside of the factory that needs to be figured out to actually deliver housing at scale. I mean, things like municipal design guidelines and all the way down to transportation rules and differences between provinces. There's so many factory startups that have attracted a ton of venture capital and failed and gone bankrupt because maybe they were able to get their own factory in order, but once it came to actually delivering the housing to the sites and dealing with some of those local regulations, it sort of fell apart.

And the worst case scenario would be our federal government investing a ton of money into the factory and the production side of things and not paying enough attention to the implementation and the local regulation side of stuff.

So that'd be my mess of thoughts there.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And I think we need to do more on this because the history of prefabricated and manufacturing housing is not great in North America. We get all these great startups and they hit a wall or a recession happens and they evaporate.

And yeah, you're absolutely right. Like there's so many challenges. Like let's say if you're building cars, you've got a big plant and you've got these cars and either the demand is not there or you can't get them to the dealer in time. It's okay, you just park them in a giant parking lot and they can maybe put a tarp under them and they sit there for two, three, four or five weeks. You can't do that with a manufactured house, right? It's gotta be climate-controlled. So we have a manufacturer here in Ottawa and if they can't get those on-site, they just sit in the factory, but you can only have like three or four of those before you run out of warehouse room. So it's the ultimate kind of just-in-time industry.

So obviously, the housing crisis there are a lot of different things we need to do. But if we look at the Lower Mainland BC context and the real shortage of family-size homes, I'm thinking three-bedroom plus. If you had to sort of rank one or two or three most important things to facilitate that happening, like what would that focus be?

Is it development charges? Is it single egress? Is it approvals? Is it something else? Like, what are the big things that you think…

Uytae Lee: I think you listed them, Mike.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I know. I kind of answered my own question.

I did not mean to, I didn't. But I think I put them in alphabetical order, not order of importance. So I can let you rephrase that.

Uytae Lee: I mean, you know, maybe what I can elaborate on is, I think if there is a form of housing, like, and I really like to think what that solution would look like on the ground? I think it's this kind of five to six-story single egress. I guess, would you call it a multiplex or an apartment?

As part of my research for that single staircase apartment video, I came across some of these apartment style designs in Germany, where you'd have one staircase and there'd be six units, each unit occupying one floor of the entire building. And yeah, I guess like a townhouse, but flipped 90 degrees. And I thought that was like a really compelling idea. Yeah, like I was like, ‘Oh, I would love to live in one of those units.’ You have windows on all sides, you get the entire floor to yourself, and there's ample opportunity to fit all kinds of different bedroom layouts and configurations into that design.

And so, you know, how to achieve that? Yeah, we have to legalize those single-staircase apartments. I think, you know, there's a whole sort of can of worms of different regulations and development fees that we need to address to make that form of housing work within our existing single-family neighbourhoods. I think that's what the end game would look like for me, is like that kind of building.

I love to throw out this term, but it could be the “new special.” It could be that's the new thing that, you know, cities just build a lot of on all of these different single-family kind of standardized lots throughout a city.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So let's pretend the Prime Minister is listening to this podcast -Hey, Mark - What advice would you give him based on your experience as a housing expert going forward?

Uytae Lee: Oh man, I mean, I'm not sure what sort of, gosh, okay. No pressure. You know, I mean, I've already mentioned the modular housing. I know that was a big part of their platform and I would just add a bit more caution, you know, on the execution of that.

But putting that aside, I feel like a lot of our housing crisis boils down to issues of governance. And just the way…like how the rules and regulations around our housing; where they're housed, who has jurisdiction over them, or, you know, kind of traditionally has had jurisdiction over them. And I feel like in this moment, especially, but throughout time, I think Canada has been a real model for good governance. I think people have looked to our country as being a place where people respect the results of elections and so I feel like if anything, maybe there's an opportunity right now to build on that brand and walk the talk, if we are to present ourselves as the alternative to the politics south of the border. That we care about governing well, and in the interests of the public. Like, I think that's a way to sort of frame making the changes to some of those governance challenges in our housing industry.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, one other area, I'm curious what your thoughts are - this would be some of my own advice - we focus so much on housing as a supply issue, and it is, obviously, we need to build more, but ultimately, it's an imbalance between supply and demand. And I think we often forget about the demand side of that equation. And it can lead to some more controversial policy proposals that politicians would rather avoid. And we see that even with the hesitancy to talk about immigration policy in a serious way. What are your thoughts on that side of the equation needing to be addressed?

Uytae Lee: It's a mixture of needing to validate and also educate. It's… Mike, you've written so eloquently about this before that we did have a real shock in the population. Like the pace of immigration was certainly jarring and…from housing to jobs to infrastructure, it really felt it. And I think it's understandable that people are frustrated about how that was rolled out and perhaps the lack of coordination between various ministries to smooth that transition a bit more.

I imagine there's a very good economic reason that our country has immigration. And there are people that can talk much better about this, but I think it would be one of those things where if we really sort of clamp down on this thing, another issue will likely just pop out the other end.

I mean, just speaking frankly, I think the rhetoric can sometimes shift from we did this too quickly and too fast to… they don't fit in our culture or they're causing danger in our streets.

And there was a ton of content that was coming out in Vancouver that did concern me in that sense, where it was just really implying some other issues that resulted out of our immigration policies that weren't just about housing and infrastructure, but really about cultural stuff. And that's what gets me a little bit more concerned.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. And I think that this is part of what motivates what I do on housing, because you see what happens when there are these shortages and we become kind of a zero-sum society. You know, we get into this “us versus them” kind of mindset, or at least some people do, and it's problematic for society.

To answer the question of advice that you give the Prime Minister…

Uytae Lee: I'm curious for your advice, yeah.

Mike Moffatt: Well, actually I'm going to steal yours. Like something you just said five minutes ago.

I really liked the idea that you kind of posit actually starting with what you want to build first. Going, ‘Okay, you know what? How about we legalize these six-story kind of stack townhouse type models where every unit gets a floor?’ Like, okay, that's a great idea. Okay, ‘What do we have to do to get there?’ And that's single egress, that might be development charge reform, that's the approvals process.

One big one is elevator regulations. Like all of those elevators that they put in Germany, none of them are legal here - but that's a whole other episode - but it's really wonky stuff like that, right? And I love that, I love that approach. That would be the advice that I give.

You can get into the space where you take the approach where you're just promoting policy without really trying to figure out what you accomplished, right? It's just like, ‘Oh, I have a hammer. Now everything's a nail,’ right? Or stepping back first and going, ‘Well, what is it that we're trying to do here? What are we trying to have happen or not have happen?’

And I love that vision that you have of saying, ‘Okay, we want to make it possible to build these six stories, six units, stacked townhouses. Okay, that's beautiful.’ And then build the policy from there rather than starting with the policy first and then kind of hoping it all works out.

Uytae Lee: Totally. I'm seeing some connective tissue to the, just how you tell a good story, right? Like you can't start with the fricking info dump. Just give me something - what will capture people's attention and imaginations? And I think for a lot of people in my age range, like that kind of stacked-townhouse-style-building would really capture my interest upfront. And that becomes the welcome mat into negotiating all of these housing policies and rules.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Absolutely. Well, I think the bottom line is there's a lot of work to be done and hopefully the new Prime Minister moves on some of these ideas quickly.

Thank you so much, Uytae, for coming on today. We really love chatting with you.

And thank you to our audience for watching and listening and to our amazing producer, Meredith Martin.

Uytae Lee: Pleasure was all mine.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, thank you. That was fantastic. And to our audience, if you have any thoughts or questions about YouTube monetization, please send us an email to [email protected]

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