Planning for affordable housing, its engagement with mixed use planning, and revising how affordability is defined

Affordable housing has become synonymous with mixed-use planning within affordable housing strategies across Canada and the United States. This paper first looks to understand why planning for affordable housing has widely engaged with mixed-use planning, then looks to understand the resulting impacts by summarizing recent empirical research within the intersection of affordable housing and mixed-use planning, and outlining emerging themes. This paper finds that affordable housing that engages with mixed-use planning is often associated with gentrification efforts, displacement, and inequitable development. Specifically analyzing the role that definitions of affordability and applications of these definitions have in relation to gentrification efforts, displacement, and inequitable development, this paper finds that mixed-use, affordable housing developments that insist on using market-level measures of affordability will continue to demonstrate the potential to cater to market trends instead of the needs of low-income residents if intervening measures are not in place.