When ‘affordable housing’ still isn’t affordable

Sarnia can officially call a one-bedroom apartment renting for $1,249 a month affordable, even though that price remains out of reach for many minimum-wage workers and people receiving social assistance. This opinion piece looks at how one broad label can hide very different levels of housing need, and why governments should report what affordable units actually cost and who they are meant to serve.

Sarnia currently considers a one-bedroom apartment renting for as much as $1,249 a month to be affordable under its Affordable Housing Community Improvement Plan.

The figure comes from Ontario’s Development Charges Act formula. For rental housing, the maximum is the lower of local average market rent or an amount equal to 30 per cent of the gross income of a renter household at the 60th percentile of the local income distribution. Sarnia’s current limits are $988 for a bachelor, $1,249 for a one-bedroom, $1,527 for a two-bedroom and $1,700 for three or more bedrooms.

There is nothing mathematically wrong with that definition. A $1,249 apartment is meaningfully cheaper than much of the rental market and could provide genuinely affordable housing for a moderate-income household. But the word “affordable” covers a much wider range of housing need than that one threshold suggests.

A household needs about $49,960 in gross annual income for $1,249 in monthly rent alone to equal the conventional 30 per cent affordability benchmark. A single person working full-time at Ontario’s current $17.60 minimum wage earns about $36,600 a year, putting 30 per cent of gross income at roughly $915 a month. The province will raise the minimum wage to $17.95 in October, but even then the same calculation comes to only about $933 a month.

For a single person relying on social assistance, the gap is much larger. Ontario Works provides a maximum of $390 a month for shelter within a total maximum payment of $733. A single ODSP recipient with eligible shelter costs can receive up to $611 for shelter within maximum monthly income support of $1,436. Both shelter allowances can cover costs beyond rent, including utilities, while remaining subject to those maximums.

Sarnia’s own Housing Needs Assessment reaches essentially the same conclusion without relying on those calculations. It says people receiving Ontario Works and ODSP cannot find housing they can afford on their shelter allowances and identifies a significant need for housing affordable to people earning minimum and just above minimum wage. The assessment also found 24.7 per cent of tenant households were in core housing need in 2021 and 37.8 per cent spent at least 30 per cent of their income on shelter.

None of this means Sarnia should stop calling a $1,249 apartment affordable, or that every municipally supported project must be cheap enough for someone receiving Ontario Works. Lambton County, not the City, is the local service manager responsible for social housing and broader affordable-housing programs, while the City’s principal tools include planning rules and development incentives. Different programs are supposed to serve different parts of the housing market.

The problem is that public discussion tends to collapse those very different kinds of housing into the same category.

Lambton County’s 2025 Additional Dwelling Unit Incentive Program provides a useful local example. Under that program, a one-bedroom considered affordable was capped at $881 a month, or 80 per cent of average market rent, and had to remain affordable for at least 15 years. Tenants were also subject to an income limit. Sarnia’s current AHCIP can classify a one-bedroom at $1,249 as affordable under a different program and formula.

Those figures come from different years and different programs, so the $368 difference is not evidence that one government got affordability right and another got it wrong. It demonstrates that the word itself tells the public surprisingly little about what kind of housing has actually been created.

Rent-geared-to-income housing is different again because the amount a household pays is directly connected to its income rather than simply discounted from prevailing market rent. That distinction matters enough that Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office can see it in the provincial results.

Of 315,908 households receiving support through Ontario subsidized-housing programs in 2024-25, the FAO estimated that 85,938 still faced housing costs exceeding 30 per cent of their income. Those households were primarily served through below-market programs where assistance was linked to average market rents rather than explicitly to what a household earned. Rent-geared-to-income assistance and the Canada-Ontario Housing Benefit generally performed better by that measure because they are designed around household income.

In other words, housing can be subsidized, below market and legitimately described as affordable while still being unaffordable to the household receiving it.

That distinction follows directly from Sarnia’s broader housing problem. The City’s Housing Needs Assessment found a net loss of 65 affordable rental units serving low- and very-low-income households between 2016 and 2021. More recent CMHC data, examined in my previous column, show the same pressure from another direction: vacancy is concentrated at the expensive end of Sarnia’s rental market while inexpensive units remain much harder to find.

Sarnia therefore needs more than one kind of affordable housing. A household earning $50,000 may genuinely need a $1,249 apartment. A worker earning minimum wage needs something cheaper. Someone relying on Ontario Works or ODSP will generally require much deeper assistance, rent geared to income or another housing benefit. Supportive housing serves another population again.

Treating all of those outcomes simply as “affordable housing” makes it difficult to tell which part of the crisis is actually being addressed.

That becomes particularly important because Sarnia’s Official Plan sets a target for 30 per cent of all new dwelling units built over the life of the plan to be affordable. The City also publicly tracks residential development in considerable detail, including units proposed and approved through planning applications and projects moving through its development pipeline.

I have not found an equivalent public scorecard showing progress against the 30 per cent affordability target: how many completed units have counted toward it, what those homes cost, or what income ranges they serve. That does not mean staff do not track the information internally, and the Official Plan target should not automatically be assumed to use the same definition as the AHCIP. It does mean the public reporting makes overall housing production considerably easier to follow than affordable-housing production.

Those details matter more than the label. Reporting that a project produced 50 affordable homes is much less informative than saying what those homes rent or sell for, what income levels they are designed to serve, whether rents are tied to household income, and how long any affordability requirement lasts.

Sarnia needs moderate-income affordable housing, deeply affordable housing, rent-geared-to-income housing and supportive housing. Progress in any of those categories is worthwhile, but progress in one should not be mistaken for progress in all of them.

Standardized definitions are useful for administering grants, incentives and development rules. They become much less useful when they are treated as a complete description of whether housing is affordable to the people facing the greatest need.

When governments announce affordable housing, the public should know more than how many units earned the designation. We should know what they cost and who can actually afford to live in them.