Eastbound and Outpriced: The Great GTA Family Migration

From Toronto to Trenton, the housing shortage continues to spill out faster than politicians can react.

Mike Moffatt

Sabrina Maddeaux

, and

Meredith Martin

Oct 08, 2025

Once upon a time, Ontario’s housing crisis was a GTA phenomenon, but over the last decade, it has spread across Eastern and Southern Ontario. In this episode of The Missing Middle Podcast, Sabrina Maddeaux and Mike Moffatt delve into a new report that reveals how the shortage of family-friendly homes in the GTA has driven young families east and south, reshaping entire regions from Peterborough to Ottawa.

They break down why politicians and planners still don’t “get” what families need, how skyrocketing demand is pricing out smaller communities, and why even with ambitious targets, the GTA will never build enough ground-oriented homes to meet demand. From population booms and migration patterns to the failure of one-size-fits-all housing policies, this episode explores what it’ll take to create real, family-suitable housing before the crisis gets even worse.

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

Sabrina Maddeaux: Hi, and welcome to The Missing Middle. I’m Sabrina Maddow

Mike Moffatt: And I’m Mike Moffatt.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Today, we’re talking about a new report that shows how the GTA shortage of family-friendly housing created a ripple effect throughout eastern and southern Ontario. And, spoiler alert, it’s going to keep getting worse unless we face reality about what families actually need.

Mike Moffatt: Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So Mike, you’ve got a new report out this week. We’ll link to it in the show notes on housing shortages in eastern Ontario, but reading it, it’s really about how young GTA families are struggling to find affordable homes where they can actually raise kids. You think it’s going to get worse because politicians and planners just don’t get it, and in my experience, that’s very true.

We’ve talked about this many times on the show, about the trend of shoebox condos that are really made for investors and not families. When you’re a young person, even just living with a partner, and let’s say you work from home, it’s hard enough to find somewhere suitably sized to live, let alone having a child or children.

Your report lays out a narrative in seven parts, and I’d like to go through them one at a time. Now, first up, you estimate Ontario had a shortage of 500,000 homes as of 2021, and nearly 400,000 of those were what you call ground-oriented ownership homes. So first of all, how would you calculate that? And what does ground-oriented ownership home, which is a mouthful, even mean?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, it’s not a great term. I think a better term would be something that’s not an apartment that you own, instead of rent. So it includes single-detached, but it also includes duplexes, townhomes, stacked townhomes, fourplexes, a lot of missing middle housing that we talk a lot about here.

Why that’s important is that families are looking for that type of housing. Families with kids want three-bedroom homes, and they don’t want to be on the 57th floor somewhere. They don’t want to be in a six-floor apartment along a busy arterial. They want space where they can send the kids outside and run around and play. So that tends to drive migration patterns.

We have this tool called the Roka Benchmark, which basically says, given the size of the population and their age distribution, how many homes and of what type do we need?

What we found was that while we had this 500,000 home shortage, what we were really short of was the ground-oriented ownership homes. The vast majority of that shortage was in the GTA, not surprisingly. What the report shows is that over time, that shortage has gotten worse and worse in the GTA because we’re not building those homes, and the population is growing.

It’s causing an out-migration, an increase in out-migration of families looking for those types of homes. In our view, I don’t think planners and politicians get this because they’re in this a unit is a unit is a unit mindset where they say, “OK, Toronto needs this many homes and Mississauga needs this many and Kingston needs that many.” But they don’t differentiate between the types of homes.

What we’re seeing, particularly in the GTA, is planners and politicians making all these plans to add tons of apartments everywhere. And we do need more apartments, the report shows that. But we need a diversity of housing types.

The subtext of the report is that as politicians and policymakers and planners really ramp up apartment buildings in these cities in the GTA, that’s going to cause a further out-migration of families to places like Peterborough and Barrie and even up to Kingston and Ottawa. Politicians and planners in your Kingstons, your Ottawas and Peterboroughs, we don’t think they’re ready for that because we think they’re underestimating the amount of these drive-until-you-qualify families.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Interesting. Now, next to make the point that back in 2016, this wasn’t really an Ontario problem, it was a GTA problem. So the GTA wasn’t building enough housing, and what was getting built didn’t work for families. Am I reading that right?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. So if you go back and look at the census 2016 data, there was a bit of a housing shortage in non-GTA markets, and it was pretty isolated. Like Hamilton had a housing shortage, there was a bit of one in Ottawa, but if you look at your Londons, your Windsors, your Kingstons, they had about the amount of housing you would expect relative to the size and demographics of their population.

There might have been some rental apartment shortages here and there. But for the most part, they had enough housing. Fast forward to 2021, and this kind of housing shortage emerged in these cities. That was partly because of increases in international students and immigration, and so on. A lot of that shortage was people moving to Tillsonburg or Woodstock and places like that. Those communities are just not able to keep up with the demand. And again, where that shortage manifested itself was in that ground-oriented ownership housing. Apartments, both rentals and condos, were largely able to keep up.

There were some shortages in ground-oriented rental housing, because that was a popular thing with students, both domestic and international. But the GTA really did export its housing crisis to southern and eastern Ontario, because of this influx of what we call drive-until-you-qualify families.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Next, you get into population growth. And I’m sure our listeners know a lot of this story, but give us the quick version.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, because the question becomes, okay, what makes 2016 so special? Why were things fine outside of the GTA in 2016? Then all of a sudden, by 2021, not? The answer is: population growth. Ontario had consistently been growing by about 100,000 to 120,000 people per year. Then, almost overnight, in 2015, our population growth rate doubled.

We went from like 100,000 to 200,000 overnight. There were a few things driving that: the immigration targets went up, and the real start of the international student boom was around 2015-2016. The other thing that we saw was that when we had the oil price collapse in 2015. A lot of Ontarians who had moved out to Fort McMurray or Calgary, or Edmonton five or 10 years earlier started moving back.

Planners planed for none of this. You and I are often hard on municipalities and rightfully so, but this is one where I think that we have to give municipalities a bit of a pass on that they don’t set immigration targets; they didn’t see the international student boom coming, though, perhaps they should have. Obviously, they can’t predict global oil prices. So that’s not on them.

But I would suggest that what is on them is that the systems that we have at the municipal level aren’t particularly flexible. They don’t deal well with sudden increases in population. You don’t all of a sudden go, “Oh, wow, the population is going up quickly. So let’s immediately change zoning, or let’s immediately open up a bunch of new land to development.” So we have these systems that don’t really respond. They’re not very elastic to when other things change.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, the population boom is just so frustrating to me, because especially at the federal level, they were warned of the impact this would have on housing availability and affordability, and they went ahead anyway.

Then it’s not just housing, either. I’ve written about this a lot, which it also led to shortages and increased wait times in our healthcare system. We look at the impact on employment now, and these numbers were just never sustainable.

Your fourth and fifth points explain how the GTA’s housing mess broke markets across Ontario, using your favourite term, drive-until-you-qualify. Now, families literally get in their cars and drive as far as they need to to get that home that they can afford, and the numbers are pretty wild.

The GTA went from losing 20,000 people a year to the rest of Ontario before 2014 to over 40,000 per year pre pandemic to 70,000 a year since 2019. So who exactly is leaving the GTA? Why are they leaving? And where are they going?

Mike Moffatt: So basically, we’re seeing all ages leave, but not in equal proportions. There are two groups leaving far more than anyone else and it’s adults between the ages of 25 and 39, and kids under the age of 15.

You could imagine why. You’re someone who lives in a condo. And I can’t imagine raising a kid there. I’m sure you couldn’t either. So that’s where you get this drive-until-you-qualify. You get people in their 30s, baby is on the way, and they’re like, ‘This ain’t gonna work, this is a non-starter. So, we’re going to move,’ and this has happened for a while.

It used to be that 25 years ago, they moved to Mississauga or Brampton. 10 or 15 years ago, it might have been a place like Hamilton, which we’re still seeing. You have these traditional destinations for Hamilton, Barrie, Kitchener, Waterloo, and so on, but we’re now seeing further and further out-migration. Places like I mentioned, London and Woodstock, and Tillsonburg in the southwest, that we wouldn’t really have seen prior to 2015. We’re also seeing big migrations east to eastern Ontario, so Peterborough, Belleville, and smaller communities in Prince Edward County.

It’s clear what they’re looking for. They want a home they can own, they don’t want to rent for the most part, and they want three bedrooms or more. You look at the data in Ontario, over three-quarters, more than three-quarters of all couples with children live in that type of housing, and it’s because 87% of all ground-oriented ownership homes have three or more bedrooms…

… whereas only 10% of rental apartments do, right? So if you want a three-bedroom home, you’re not going to find it in a rental apartment. You need a ground-oriented home, just because of issues around zoning and building code and so on.

We’ve created this shortage of ground-oriented housing in our GTA communities because of both supply and demand reasons. Demand, obviously, is just population growth, but supply, we created all of these restrictions around urban growth boundaries.

We could get into a conversation about the greenbelt, and we will sometime, I know, that’s one of the most popular questions we get from our listeners.

Sabrina Maddeaux: We’re gonna need a whole other episode for that, Mike.

Mike Moffat: We’ll save that one for later.

And then, some of them are just a lack of land. In the city of Toronto, there’s not that much greenfield land left available, because it borders cities on three sides, and then you’ve got Lake Ontario to the south.

So this demand-supply imbalance is causing this out-migration. This out migration is causing skyrocketing prices and rents in your Londons, your Woodstocks, your Tillsonburgs, and so on.

One of my favourite data points is that back in the peak in 2022, a home in Tillsonburg, Ontario - the Tillsonburg of stomping Tom and tobacco country, and so on - cost more than a home in Tokyo, Japan. People might say, “Okay, well, Mike, that’s not a fair comparison, because the home in Tillsonburg’s a lot larger than the home in Tokyo.” And my response to that is, “Yeah, but what’s the subway system like in Tillsonburg?”

So in Tillsonburg over the last 10 years, prices have grown there faster in percentage terms than anywhere in Canada. The GTA’s housing dysfunction has caused a wave of unaffordability all across these regions.

Sabrina Maddeaux: We’ve covered the past, but your report looks ahead to 2051 and projecting how much housing each region needs to keep up with growth and fix past shortages. And you basically conclude the GTA will never build enough of the homes middle-class families actually want. And that’s pretty bleak. So how’d you land on that?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, so we just use our Roka benchmark model and looked at both ground-oriented homes and apartments, and looked at projected age distribution over time and go, “Okay, this is how many homes will be needed.”

So to be clear, this takes into account population aging, this takes into account older people going into long-term care homes, passing away, that kind of generational turnover. So we’re taking that into account. We say even when we take that into account, the GTA, which we define, and I should back up a little bit, we define for this report, the GTA to be Peel, Peel region, York region, City of Toronto, and Durham region, so the Oshawa area as well. We say, you look at the data, and:

That region is going to need somewhere in the range of 900,000 to a million new ground-oriented homes in the next 30 years, and there‘s just no way. Like, there’s no way that’s going to happen. Even if we were able to build those homes at the rate we did in the past, it would take about 95 years, and we’ve got less than 30. So it’s not going to happen. Then you look at issues around the amount of land and so on. It’s just a non-starter.

What we’re saying is that because that’s not going to happen, what we’re projecting is what cities will do is they will try and build more and more apartments. And again, the report shows that we need more apartments. But what we’re saying is that what cities are not counting on is that this desire to own a three-bedroom home is not going to go away. The families are going to keep moving to Peterborough and Belleville, and so on. We just have to deal with that, we have to plan for that.

This report is designed to be a wake-up call to mayors and councils across eastern Ontario, saying, ‘You can’t just rely on population forecasts when doing your planning, because those population forecasts are assuming the GTA is going to build enough homes to house all the families that have. That’s not going to happen.’ It’s just not realistic, and we need to understand that.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, families need a place to live, and that’s definitely not going to change.

And your final point is that if the GTA keeps falling short, even more families will flood Eastern Ontario, and those communities aren’t ready. So what should they be doing that they’re not?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, so there are a few things that we recommend in the report. So number one is that we suggested the province of Ontario, like right now they have their housing targets for different areas as part of their building faster fund, but there’s no differentiation between the types of homes, and it’s not even clear that the province took into account things like land availability and infrastructure or so on.

The first thing that we’re saying is that the province needs to have targets that are more granular, saying “this is what we expect in apartments,” which again will be some mix of condos and non-condos. This is what we need in terms of ground-oriented housing. So that’s number one.

Number two is that we need the Ontario Ministry of Finance when they’re doing their population projections to take better account of this drive until you qualify, and we’re saying until that happens, mayors and councils in their official plans in Ontario need to go above and beyond just what’s in the population forecast, because it’s just not sufficient.

Then the final thing I’ll point out is that we also need to figure out how to create a better diversity of family-friendly homes because I know some are going to interpret this as saying like ‘Oh, Moffatt and MMI are just saying, ‘okay, we need a sea of single detached homes everywhere.’ We’re not saying that either, right? We are saying that we need all types of housing suitable for families.

We need to figure out how to create great three-bedroom homes that suit the needs of families. This is multiplexes, small apartments and so on. There are a lot of zoning and building code changes that need to happen. We’ve discussed some on this show, like staircase reform and elevator reform and so on.

So to be clear, we are not suggesting for a moment that this all has to be single detached homes. We need policymakers to make it easier to build family-friendly missing middle type housing so we can have efficient use of land, but we can still have homes that work, that are affordable, that work for families with kids.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, I think the point is you’re not going to tell you know millions of young Canadians to suddenly change their preferences to live in apartments when they want spaces that are big enough for families and to think that you can do that is just not realistic.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and that’s that’s the implicit assumption. Yeah, like you’re absolutely right. That’s the kind of unstated assumption in a lot of this municipal planning and even provincial planning that young generations are going to be fine raising kids on the 57th floor of a condo building or on the sixth floor of an apartment that opens up to a heavy arterial Road. They’re just not!

Sabrina Maddeaux: In their windowless den with the streetcars screeching nearby.

Mike Moffatt: …That’s it as well, right?

They treat a unit as a unit, as a unit, right? That a shoebox condo is somehow equivalent to a three-bedroom townhouse, that they both count the same, and we need to recognize that these targets that we’re setting up don’t really understand the diversity of family needs.

I’ve done a lot of talking on this podcast. So I’ve got a question for you because this report is all around, this idea that families will leave the GTA and move to either Southern Ontario or as this report focuses on Eastern Ontario. Is this something that you would consider doing? And if so, what would make moving to a community in Eastern Ontario more attractive for you?

Sabrina Maddeaux: Potentially. I mean, ultimately, if and when I have a child, I am not in a place that would be suitable for raising a family right now, and I would need to be in one that’s larger and one that I can afford and right now that place isn’t in Toronto.

The thing that complicates this is, of course, jobs, especially with return-to-office mandates. We just did an episode on that that we can also link to in the show notes. That’s really difficult for young people because when you move outside of the GTA, your employment options, especially in certain industries, really diminish or go to zero in some cases.

Then you look at unemployment and long-term unemployment right now. Young people are really facing these pressures from all fronts, which is just leading more into that frustration and anger and disillusionment with everything, because:

Even if you do decide to move outside of your community or Toronto, where you prefer to live and where you have social connections and families, it’s then well, where do you work? Where do you make a living?

It’s a really difficult decision all around, and it’s not an easy one. It’s unfortunate that it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get better anytime soon. And the answer isn’t for politicians or planners to think young people will just get over it and change their preferences.

Well, thank you so much, everyone, for watching and listening and to our amazing producer, Meredith Martin.

Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions, or want more trivia on Tillsonburg, Ontario, please send us an email to [email protected]

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