What Counts as Affordable Housing?: The Consequences of Definitional Dilemma for Canadian Households


Addison Kornel, University of Guelph; Edith Wilson, University of Guelph

As graduate students studying housing, we have often been told to use “what the literature suggests” as a definition of affordability, only to run into a very troubling problem: there are two definitions of "affordable housing" in Canada. First, the National Housing Strategy’s largest funding program, the Rental Construction Financing Initiative uses 30% of the median income of the area that the project is proposed for as a metric for affordability. However, other programs utilize 80% of the market rate as a benchmark for affordability. Issues that arise from competing definitions of affordability have been raised by sociologists in Australia and the United Kingdom, but there has yet to be scholarly engagement with this discrepancy in the Canadian context. Where commentary does exist, it is within the realm of “grey literature”. Our aim with this research is to bring this concern into the realm of peer-reviewed scholarship to both investigate potential discrepancy in individuals served by affordable housing programs on the basis on competing definitions and begin a conversation about what competing standards of affordability mean for ongoing conversations of housing affordability within housing studies. As sociologists become more interested in housing issues, a fundamental practical question hangs over much of our research: What is “affordable housing”? And, when government programs use, and have used, different metrics of that affordability, which should we choose? Through a systematic review of “grey” policy literature and a quantitative analysis of CMHC and Statistics Canada data, we attempt to provide an answer to these questions for ourselves and other housing researchers in Canada.

This paper will be presented at the following session: