Can this man solve Canada's housing crisis?
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
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