New Missing Middle plan presses Ottawa to rebuild the path from renting to owning
Young Canadians’ homeownership prospects have already been sliding for a decade. Between 2011 and 2021, the ownership rate for 30–34-year-olds fell from almost 60% to just over 52%, with even steeper drops among younger cohorts.
In response, the Missing Middle Initiative released a detailed federal plan, backed by the Canadian Real Estate Association.
The blueprint argued that demand is not the problem – affordability is.
“While 86% of non-homeowners under 30 and 75% of non-homeowners between 30 and 44 still aspire to own a home one day, only 51% and 47%, respectively, are very or somewhat confident they will achieve this goal,” the report said.
Their ambition, it warned, “has turned into uncertainty, and for many, that uncertainty is turning into defeat.”
At the same time, renters have been squeezed from both sides of the balance sheet.
“Despite softening rental market conditions in 2025, affordable units remain high in demand, and the average rent for 2-bedroom units climbed 5.1% year-over-year,” the report said, noting that high monthly rents made it harder to save for ever-larger down payments.
“The more I save, the further behind I fall,” is how many young Canadians described the experience.
Reframing housing as a system
Rather than another round of narrow first-time buyer incentives, the Missing Middle Initiative called for Ottawa to treat housing as an interconnected system.
“Policies that increase rental supply can reduce rents, making it easier for existing renters to save for a down payment,” the authors said, adding that measures to help seniors downsize and growing families upsize could “free up units for the next generation of homebuyers.”
To guide that shift, the report set out four national goals: build homes for real families, rebuild the pathway to home ownership, right-size housing for existing families, and shift the market from portfolios to families by moving investors from buying existing homes into financing new purpose-built rentals.
Ten federal recommendations – from a permanent national housing secretariat and annual housing-start targets by unit size and tenure, to a new CMHC Apartment Construction Loan Program stream for 2–4 unit missing middle projects, indexed HBP and FHSA limits, time-limited GST/HST rebates, and a seniors housing strategy – were positioned as levers to make those goals real.
The blueprint also urged consultations on a Multi-Unit Rental Building tax provision and a time-limited incentive to sell investor-held single-family homes back to owner-occupiers.
Connecting with broker sentiment
Brokers and economists have highlighted the chronic shortfall in family-sized supply, the underbuilt missing middle, and the need to help older owners move so younger buyers could get a foothold.
Youth sentiment showed a similar split between strong desire to own and weakening confidence in actually getting there, with high rents and strict mortgage qualifying rules often cited as the breaking point.
Between 2014 and 2023, a 20% down payment for a typical home rose from the equivalent of 14.1 months of after-tax income to 22 months – a 56% jump – while the share of income needed for a representative mortgage payment climbed from 29.9% to 56.6%.
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