When I started working in housing, we called it social housing, and everyone knew what that meant: not-for-profit homes for low- and moderate-incomes, built for social good. Simple. Clear. Purposeful.

Fast forward a few decades, and the language has splintered. “Affordable housing,” “community housing,” “non-market housing”: each term signals something slightly different, depending on who’s using it and when. Sometimes the distinctions are subtle. Sometimes they’re downright confusing.

When governments began funding new non-profit housing after a long pause in the mid-1990s, we started drawing a distinction between “social housing” and “affordable housing.” We started using a different term because the new “affordable housing” developments didn’t include rent-geared-to-income (RGI) units or homes accessible to very low-income households, the hallmark of older social housing.

In many parts of the country, “social housing” came to mean non-profit housing built before 1995, while “affordable housing” referred to non-profit housing built after 2000.

It gets even more confusing when you consider that much of the affordable housing built under federal programs from 2006 to 2015 was actually developed and operated by for-profit companies. Yes, it was more affordable than the private market, but it was increasingly removed from what we traditionally meant by “social housing.”

In the past five years, I’ve started hearing private developers use “affordable housing” to describe entry-level market rentals or homeownership, outside of any government subsidy or program.

Some celebrate “affordable housing” as if building tiny market-rate condos counts toward solving the housing crisis. But social housing isn’t a marketing exercise: it’s a lifeline for people who cannot compete in the speculative market.

Clearly, we needed a way to distinguish for-profit affordable housing from non-profit affordable housing.

The 2017 National Housing Strategy gave us that umbrella: “community housing.”

CMHC and the National Housing Strategy use it as the all-encompassing term to describe housing “owned and operated by non-profit housing societies and housing co-operatives, or housing owned by provincial, territorial or municipal governments.”

Community housing includes everything from deeply affordable RGI housing—the bedrock of social housing—to low-end-of-market rents from mixed-income programs in the 1970s and 1980s, to Average Market Rent and Below-Market Rent units from more recent decades. Even full-market rents count, so long as the housing is operated by non-profits.

Despite this convenient umbrella, some scholars still draw distinctions between “community housing” and “public housing.” So here we are again, searching for the right term to describe what we do.

Enter “non-market housing.”

Over the past few months, I noticed that when writing for CHRA, I naturally started writing “non-market community housing.” The term “non-market” had quietly crept into my vocabulary. But where did it come from?

The earliest reference I could find was in 2004, from the venerable David Hulchanski, who used “non-market social housing” to describe public housing, non-profit housing, and non-profit co-operatives.

Last March, the National Housing Council published a paper titled Scaling-up the Non-Market Housing Sector in Canada. They defined Canada’s non-market housing sector as “characterized by units owned and managed by a non-profit organization or government agency, where rents are below the standard market rate.”

Today, Build Canada Homes and the federal government are talking about “increasing the share of housing that is non-market, mission-driven, and affordable for low- and middle-income households”.

Interestingly, the term “non-market” shifts the emphasis: rather than focusing on affordability as an outcome, or social good as the purpose, it highlights how housing operates outside the for-profit, speculative market—the process itself. It’s not wrong, but I hope we aren’t losing the mission focus: affordability, community, and social good

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what we call it; social, affordable, community, or non-market housing. But let’s be honest: the language risks being hijacked. When private developers call market rentals “affordable” and governments tout market-rate units as solutions, we risk erasing the very idea of social housing. Words matter, so does defending the mission of housing for social good.

We talk about “community housing” and “non-market housing,” but here’s an uncomfortable truth: if our sector doesn’t fight to preserve and expand social housing, to play a bigger role in the broader world of housing, these labels will become inconsequential, picky distinctions within a fringe sector. National Housing Day is a reminder that mission-driven housing is only as strong as our willingness to expand it and defend it.

What matters most is the work we do and the homes we provide. Housing that is safe, stable, and genuinely affordable for people of all incomes.

That’s the job, so let’s get it done.