If you live in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area and feel like you're constantly grinding just to stay afloat, you're not alone—and you're not imagining things. A new report by CivicAction just confirmed what many of us have been feeling for years: the working middle class is being priced out of the region we helped build.

I’m talking about the teachers, nurses, tradespeople, care workers—the folks who keep this place running. According to the report, people earning between $40,000 and $125,000 a year are now being called the “invisible poor.” Why? Because even though we have steady jobs, rising housing costs are eating up nearly two-thirds of our income. That's way above the 30% financial experts recommend. And because we earn just enough to disqualify us from housing support, we're left to figure it out on our own.

To put it into perspective, a nurse making $80K a year would need to triple that salary to qualify for an average Toronto mortgage. Meanwhile, the median income in Toronto is $100,400—but the price-to-income ratio has ballooned to 11.8 times that. So even dual-income households are struggling to catch up.

The downstream effects are serious. More than half a million people have already left the GTHA in the past decade, fleeing to places like Simcoe and Niagara for cheaper living. About 31,000 have even packed up for other provinces. And it’s not just about housing—commutes are brutal too. A survey found that 62% of middle-income workers are unhappy with either their housing, their commute, or both. Nearly 40% are considering switching jobs just to get closer to home.

But the consequences don’t stop with individuals and families. Local businesses are struggling to attract and retain talent. Forty-two percent of companies are thinking about relocating because their employees can’t afford to live here. In healthcare alone, $575 million is lost annually due to staff shortages. Add in education and emergency services, and the total economic impact hits over a billion dollars each year.

Then there’s the gridlock. Traffic congestion is costing our region $10.1 billion a year, and it’s killing jobs—88,000 of them over the past decade. If congestion had been reduced, CivicAction says our GDP could be nearly $28 billion higher right now.

So what’s the fix? The report offers a few starting points: employer-led housing assistance, municipal tracking of shelter needs, and upcoming papers that will dig deeper into funding solutions. But the real takeaway? No single group can fix this alone. Governments, businesses, and communities all need to work together before the GTHA becomes a place only the ultra-rich can afford to live in.

Because let’s be real: the people who teach our kids, save our lives, and keep this region moving should be able to live here too.

Article summarized from CTV