Measuring Ottawa’s Home Affordability Crisis
April 30, 2025
Across Ontario, housing affordability has deteriorated dramatically over the past two decades, and Ottawa is no exception.
In this three-part video series, Jason Burggraaf, Executive Director of the Greater Ottawa Home Builders' Association, sits down with Mike Moffatt, Founding Director of the Missing Middle Initiative, to unpack new research on how far affordability has slipped in Ottawa.
Together, they explore Ottawa’s price-to-income ratios, the challenges of saving for a down payment, and what a new affordability metric reveals about our city's housing market.
Watch all three conversations below.
Episode 1: Ottawa’s housing market: How we got here
Over the past 20 years, housing prices in Ottawa have accelerated dramatically, but the last 10 years have seen the most change. In the first of our three-part series on housing affordability, GOHBA’s Jason Burggraaf speaks with Mike Moffatt, Founding Director of the Missing Middle Initiative, on how Ottawa’s price-to-income ratio for single-family homes compares to the rest of the province, and what a new tool, the Weekly Housing Affordability Metric, tells us about just how unaffordable our market has become.
Episode 2: Saving for a home in Ottawa: A growing challenge
If you're struggling to save for a down payment, you’re not alone. In part two of our housing affordability series, Jason Burggraaf and Mike Moffatt unpack what Ottawa’s Weekly Housing Affordability Metric scores say about how much of your income now goes toward a down payment and the first five years of mortgage payments.
Episode 3: Unaffordable to completely unattainable: Can Ottawa dig itself out?
Ottawa’s housing market has gone from bad to worse in the last decade. In the final part of our housing affordability series, Jason Burggraaf and Mike Moffatt elaborates on why Ottawa’s affordability has deteriorated in the past decade, what that means for buyers today, and where we go from here.