What to expect from the Missing Middle Initiative in 2025

We're looking forward to a big year!

Since we launched MMI earlier this morning, we have received quite a few questions about our plans for the year and how this relates to our past work. We’re delighted that there is so much interest in this Initiative and happy to tackle those questions! If you’re new here, you may want to start by reviewing our launch piece, which details our focus on young, urban, middle-class Canadians.

The MMI team will still be working on larger projects and reports, like our past work on the National Housing Accord and the Blueprint for More and Better Housing. Jesse Helmer and Mike Moffatt are each authoring a couple of larger reports for release later this year.

Those reports are vitally important, but MMI’s primary approach will be different from that of other Canadian think tanks, including ones the MMI team has worked for in the past. Think smaller, more frequent, and through multiple media channels.

In 2025, MMI will have four large, broad projects, each one associated with a day of the week.

Monday: Municipal Data Mondays

Municipal data, including data involving fees related to housing construction, is exceptionally hard to track down because it is spread across hundreds of websites if it is available at all. This makes it incredibly expensive for researchers to conduct studies on, say, how infrastructure money is spent or the accuracy of population forecasts in municipal official plans. It also makes it difficult for the media and general public to fact-check statements, such as how quickly development charges have increased relative to inflation.

We want to change that. We are working on taking all of this information, which is scattered across the universe, and creating a series of document repositories that include items such as development charge rates, background studies, treasurer’s statements, bylaws, and other information, back as far in the past as possible.

This would be challenging enough if those documents were spread across multiple municipal websites. However, many municipalities have scrubbed past documents, failed to post important information, or have not made those documents easily accessible. To obtain those, we will be undergoing a time-intensive process of emailing municipalities, filing access to information requests, and undergoing 'digital archeology,' utilizing tools such as archive.org to access information that has been erased from the internet.

This project is not just about the destination but also about the journey. Senior Producer/Journalist Meredith Martin will be providing semi-regular updates, posted on Mondays, about our progress in obtaining this information and what we were, and were not, able to obtain.

Tuesday: Canadian Housing Microresearch Project (CHMP)

Currently, most housing research reports are large and dense. While these reports are exceptionally useful, and we are proud of the ones we’ve done in the past, they are time-consuming and cannot react in real time to a changing environment. And because they are so long, a lot of great content ends up getting buried.

On the flip side, there are the charts and graphs that Mike Moffatt is infamous for posting on Twitter, Bluesky and LinkedIn. However, the nature of social media means that they lack the detail and rigour needed to tell the full story.

There is a real need for something that falls in between these two extremes. What we need in the Canadian housing space for “microresearch " reports that are short, frequent, and accessible to a general audience.

Starting this week, we will launch the Canadian Housing Microresearch Project (CHMP)—a weekly series of short, accessible, graphics-heavy pieces, a maximum of six pages (and often substantially shorter). These will be similar in style to what the Big Banks put out on economic issues but on issues related to housing and population growth.

CHMP microresearch reports will be released on Tuesday morning, almost every Tuesday morning. They will be posted on the MMI Substack, and PDF versions will be available for download to facilitate sharing over email. Mike will author most of these, but you’ll see other members of the MMI team providing content, along with some new faces.

Wednesday: Missing Middle Podcast

The project that launched the whole Missing Middle brand! It’s the podcast you have hopefully come to know and love. And if you haven’t watched or listened before, please subscribe either on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Buzzsprout, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our episode with Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes on why North America Will Never Be the Netherlands is particularly popular, though Mike is particularly fond of the episode Why You Can’t Build Cheap Homes Anymore.

Meredith Martin produces the show, which is released every Wednesday morning. Mike and Cara Stern are your regular co-hosts. Sabrina Maddeaux has graciously agreed to come on board to be our permanent guest host (please excuse the paradoxical nature of that phrase), while Cara is on parental leave.

Thursday: Development Charge Deep Dive Day

If you follow Mike on any form of social media, you know he is obsessed with development charges. But it’s not hard to understand why. Development charges and other municipal fees, such as community benefits charges assessed on new housing construction, are a considerable cost component, adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of building a new home. These charges and other housing development-related municipal fees, particularly in Ontario and British Columbia, have skyrocketed over the past two decades and are one of the leading contributors to the middle-class housing affordability crisis. However, they are also an important tool used by municipalities to pay for infrastructure.

These charges have all kinds of consequences, both intended and unintended. For example, because development charges can differ greatly between municipalities within the same province, they also can impact location choice for families, as they provide cost advantages (or disadvantages) for one community over another. Since these charges tend to be lower in smaller centres, they can cause families to move further away from where they work, causing longer commutes and increasing infrastructure costs.

Policymakers, analysts, and the public often do not understand the role that development charges play in topics from housing affordability and location choice. We want to change that. On most Thursdays, we will post Ontario-focused articles and mini-reports on issues related to development charges. We will examine what’s working, what’s not, and possible reforms to make the system work better for everyone.

This is going to be a daunting task, so we will be adding top-tier talent to our team to make it a reality.

Friday: Bonus Fridays

Occasionally, we will have more to say than we have days in the week. When that happens, we’ll post occasional bonus content on Friday. It could be an extra episode of the podcast, a bonus CHMP report, or simply something the team needs to say that doesn’t fit neatly into the other projects.

It’s an ambitious schedule for a relatively small team, but we are excited to get started.

Here are answers to a few questions folks have asked.

Who is on the Missing Middle Team?

We will add proper bios and photos shortly. But, in the meantime, in alphabetical order by last name:

Jesse Helmer is a researcher, based 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 and 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 PhD Candidate in political science at Western University, where his research focuses on the political participation gap between homeowners and tenants.

He teaches part-time at Western in the local government program and at 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 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.

Mike Moffatt is the guy the Financial Post has tasked with fixing Canada’s housing crisis (no pressure). Mike has held senior roles at several Canadian think tanks, and in 2017, he was the Chief Innovation Fellow for the Government of Canada, advising Deputy Ministers on innovation policy and emerging trends. 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 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 variety of topics with a passion for housing debates. She also produced several political leadership debates.

Cara is the co-host of the Missing Middle podcast, where she has conversations with economist Mike Moffatt and guests related to the disappearing middle class in Canada. While Cara is on parental leave, Sabrina Maddeaux will be guest-hosting the podcast. Sabrina is a National Magazine Award winner and a sought-after political & economic commentator for Canada's top radio & TV programs. She frequently parses topics from a millennial perspective, though her work draws praise from across all age groups. Sabrina was one of the first columnists to bring attention to the housing affordability and inflation crises. This is why, in November 2022, she secured Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre’s first mainstream media interview following his election as Conservative Leader.

How is the Missing Middle Initiative related to the Smart Prosperity Institute?

Both the Smart Prosperity Institute and the Missing Middle Initiative are housed at the University of Ottawa’s Institute for the Environment but are otherwise distinct and separate entities. We are friends and fans of the work that SPI does and look forward to future collaborations. It is bittersweet for Cara, Jesse, Meredith, and Mike to say goodbye to their former institute, though Mike will continue to be involved with SPI in an advisory capacity as an Executive in Residence.

In short, as we like to think of it, SPI and MMI are siblings with the same parent (the University of Ottawa’s Institute for the Environment), but we are not the same person.

What does this mean for the PLACE Centre at the Smart Prosperity Institute?

The launch of the MMI also marks the official retirement of the PLACE Centre, SPI’s place-based brand, which housed our previous work. It was through the PLACE Centre that we learned how much appetite there is for a real appetite for research related to young, urban, middle-class Canadians.

PLACE Centre publications and blog posts will not disappear; they can be found on the PLACE Centre initiatives page.