Missing middle housing

But

we've often talked about the missing middle.

Where does all that fit into this discussion? Yeah.

So the missing middle concept, of course, is if you just picture like you cut through a city.

And you have a look at the ideal city based on urban planning theory.

You have something that looks like New York, skyscrapers in the middle.

That is weird.

But that's just the way historically we grew our city.

We have plenty of very high priced housing.

We really have the missing middle in a big way right now.

It's that $350,000 to $500,000 price point, which is almost nonexistent.

I live life very much vicariously through my children who are millennials and Gen Zers.

But that's where our market is because we have these wonderful communities that people want to be in.

And they're willing to pay the price to be here.

We've put a lot of effort into comp plans in the six cities because that's the start of missing middle housing.

So we're hoping more comp plans will make recommendations to allow more units to be put on a site like duplexes and triplexes and ADUs and those kinds of things.

Our policies that, until recent years, limited neighborhoods to single-family homes, combined with seniors staying longer in their homes than urban planners expected, have led to younger Canadians facing a reality where they are stuck in increasingly small apartments.

At the Missing Middle Initiative, we've found that most people looking to raise a family hope to live somewhere that has at least three bedrooms.

These units are incredibly expensive in condos, and the alternative of single-family homes is simply out of reach for so many.

One good solution is these multiplexes.

Let's look for progress on the housing crisis rather than create further generational divides.

[soft upbeat music] That was a commentary by Kara Stern.

She hosts the Missing Middle podcast with economist Mike Moffatt.

You can read the full text of her article on our website, thehub.ca. That's it for today's edition of Hub Headlines.

If I had a magic wand, I'd streamline permitting, for townhomes and ADUs across Orange County.

Not luxury condos, not McMansions, the missing middle.

Get the first time buyer a $700,000 to $900,000 option and you unclog every rung of that ladder above it.

That makes so much sense.

But it's honestly... very well suited for my channel.

Cherry gets into the topic that I get into constantly, the missing middle, how investors are turning single family lots into four to six unit buildings with the bank covering most of the cost.

On to this week's show.

My guest today is Victoria Swen, a licensed architect and founder of BuildX Design in Toronto.

She and her team work with missing middle investors from the first sketch through permits and financing.

Victoria bought her first investment property back in Mississauga back in 2011 at the age of 19, going with her sisters because she couldn't get her own mortgage.

The property cost $260,000.

And also I forgot with the HST rebates as well, the development opportunity is even better.

Today, as a matter of fact.

All right, so so much good work gets done by this group at the Missing Middle Initiative.

And you can find out a lot more about what they do at missingmiddleinitiative.ca. We had Kara Stern on, who, by the way, did some, it was almost more municipal politics reporting and more of a scoop about who's paying for the free ferry rides that will end, I think, today for seniors and kids.

Going back over to the Toronto Islands and back, Kara Stern did amazing work there.

We often have Sabrina Maddow on the show.

Super smart.

And she's the co-host of the Missing Middle podcast.

But quarterback of the team is the founding director, Mike Moffitt.