Can this man solve Canada’s housing crisis?
MIKE MOFFATT HAS NO SHORTAGE OF SOLUTIONS. IT TURNS OUT THE POWERFUL ARE LISTENING.
Mike Moffatt was 27 when he and his life partner Hannah paid an absolutely “insane amount of money” for their first house. It was a two-storey, three-bedroom, fully detached place in London, Ont., and the insanity of the purchase, in hindsight, was that the home in a thriving university town in southwestern Ontario only cost $168,000 in 2004.
“At the time, I can remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, I am never going to see that money again,’ ” he said.
But the couple has since shelled out $1.5 million for their current home in Ottawa. Were they to try to buy the same house today, it would likely fetch closer to $2 million. It is those kinds of eye-popping dollar figures that convinced Moffatt, an economist by training, to apply his talents to tackling Canada’s affordable housing crisis.
Not, mind you, by grabbing a hammer and banging away on the 3.5 million new units that Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. estimates the country will need by 2030 — on top of what’s already being built — but by pitching potential solutions to the country’s housing mess to a slew of different audiences.
Those audiences include the prime minister and his inner circle, several senior Conservative members of Parliament, assorted policymakers, private industry players, Ontario politicians, big city mayors, media outlets, conference attendees and, depending on the day, neighbours, friends and anyone else who happens to ask for his two cents on housing.
“It is always hard to know how seriously you are being taken,” Moffatt, the senior director of policy and innovation at the Ottawa-based Smart Prosperity Institute think-tank, said of his meetings with power players. “But what I can tell you for certain is that many of our ideas have been adopted, and I don’t know whether or not they would have been without us.”
Becoming the go-to guy on the housing file wasn’t the master plan when he and his partner purchased their starter home. The young Moffatt imagined becoming a full-time university professor and, to be fair, the middle-aged Moffatt still teaches some business courses at Western University’s Ivey Business School, albeit on a part-time basis.
But his true calling appears to be as a housing nerd, a thinker with a bunch of good ideas, whose area of interest is a subject that keeps homeowners, renters and aspirants to either category awake at night, fretting over how they are going to find a place to live and pay for it.
“Part of what motivates me to do the work I am doing now is that had I been born 20 years later, buying a house would have been out of the question,” he said.
Life at the think-tank isn’t all glamour and meetings with important people. A big chunk of the work involves doing research and sifting through history in search of lessons from the past that could prove instructive in the present.
Moffatt collaborates with a team to pump out papers with practical sounding titles, such as the National Housing Accord: A Multi-sector Approach to Ending Canada’s Housing Rental Crisis, and for an Ontario audience, Working Together to Build 1.5 Million Homes.
The challenge for many thinkers is they rely on others — in this case, the government — to get things done. And if the doers aren’t listening to what a thinker has to say, even the brightest ideas will die a lonely death.
But Moffatt and Co.’s ideas are clearly being heard.
“I think Mike is in a unique position right now, where he is influencing both provincial public policy in Ontario and federal public policy, despite the fact they are different levels of governments of different political stripes,” Patrick Brown, the mayor of Brampton, Ont., said. “He is a stakeholder in the industry with significant influence.”
Moffatt first popped up on Brown’s mayoral radar six years ago when he was talking about housing before anyone else was. Prior to last Christmas, the mayor invited Moffatt to Brampton to speak to city council.
The booming suburb perched on Toronto’s northwest edge has a population of 650,000, give or take, and growing, and has a major housing crisis on its hands related to international students. The foreign kids shell out big bucks to go to school, pull into town and, Brown said, are often preyed upon by slumlords, while the institutions they enrolled at cash in $20,000 tuition cheques.
“I have seen situations where 25 students are crammed into a basement apartment,” he said. “I asked Mike to help us work on some advocacy around international student housing, and to present the data on it.”
MIKE (MOFFATT) HAS BEEN TALKING ABOUT HOUSING FOR YEARS. IF ONLY PEOPLE HAD BEEN LISTENING TO HIM EARLIER, WE’D BE IN A MUCH BETTER POSITION THAN WE ARE IN TODAY.
— PATRICK BROWN, MAYOR OF BRAMPTON, ONT.
The takeaway Brown and his team subsequently took to meetings with the federal immigration minister was that before a student gets approved to come to Canada, and before the universities and colleges cash any cheques, a guarantee of adequate housing should be part of the student visa approval process upfront.
No decent housing, no student, no cheque.
“Mike has been talking about housing for years,” Brown said. “If only people had been listening to him earlier, we’d be in a much better position than we are in today.”
On the better-late-thannever front, Moffatt’s team released its National Housing Accord report in mid-august 2023. The report had 10 recommendations to the federal government to “accelerate the completion of purpose-built rental units.”
Recommendation No. 3 was eliminating the GST/ HST to entice builders into building. A month later, presto, the government announced it was doing away with the tax on purpose-built rental units to accelerate construction. Coincidence? Recommendation No. 7 called for the government to create a set of pre-approved building designs to streamline the building approval process. This was not an idea Moffatt pulled from the ether, but something he gleaned from the past.
Canada did not build many houses in the 1930s. But then along came the Second World War, and industry cranked up to service the military — that is, except for housing. But one million Canadian veterans flooded home when the war ended in 1945 and, wouldn’t you know it, there were not enough houses for them. That crisis gave rise to the postwar bungalow, and plenty of those homes are still in evidence as anyone who has ever taken a spin through east-end Toronto can see.
To fast-track the bungalow build, the government of the day created a catalogue of pre-approved design blueprints and made them available to builders. Great idea, so good that Moffatt poached it for his report, and then watched as the federal Liberals announced just before Christmas that they would be doing the same thing.
“After the Second World War, when many thousands of soldiers were returning home to be reunited with their families, Canada faced enormous housing crunches,” Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Sean Fraser told reporters in announcing the program. “One of the tools that was deployed at the time to respond to the challenges they faced at that time, was the development of simple pre-approved designs.”
There can be a chickenand-egg-like quality to policy work, but Moffatt isn’t possessive of his ideas. On the contrary, if people are listening to him, terrific; if not, then his goal is to continue trying to be heard.
“One of the things Canada needs to be doing is simply recognizing that this isn’t our first housing crisis,” he said. “We have had them before, and so what lessons can we learn from the past to deal with the present crisis?”
Fortunately, Moffatt has a voice made for radio, and he also has some delightfully nerdy quirks, including being the former head coach of Canada’s national dodge ball team — yes, there is one. If that sounds goofy, he was not only the coach, but he guided the squad to back-toback world titles.
The game Canadians grow up with in gym class also has some lessons for dealing with the housing crisis, such as keep “looking forward.” In other words, it’s best not to take one’s eye off the ball, or, in this case, the need to build more houses.
Speaking of which, Moffatt has another pluckedfrom-the-past solution he says would be ripe for putting into action today. Once all the bungalows were built for the returning soldiers, they started having kids in big numbers, giving rise to the baby boom generation.
The boomers hit the housing market in the 1960s and early ’70s, sparking another housing crisis. To address it, the government adopted a nifty tax provision that incentivized the building of apartments, although with a catch. If a builder finished a tower and subsequently sold it to take advantage of the tax provision, they were then required to roll the resulting funds into building another apartment.
By the mid-1970s, the crisis was over. The tax provisions were discontinued, partly because they were perceived politically to benefit wealthy developers, which is what they did, but they also got homes built.
That’s why government, industry and, yes, even the policy nerds need to adopt the attitude of doing whatever it takes to solve the housing crisis, particularly since the starter home Moffatt and his partner bought in 2004 for less than $200,000 now costs closer to $700,000.
“There is no one silver bullet that is going to solve things; it is more like there are 100 interlocking problems, and they are all around the fact that it is difficult and expensive to build homes in Canada,” he said. “We need to massively scale up.”