> ... it also set strict requirements for younger people who lived there: if your income exceeded a certain threshold, you would be evicted. If you refused, you were charged rent – at potentially up to twice the market rate, depending on your income.
The goal was to make public housing a safety net for elderly, low-income and socially vulnerable people. The effect, however, has been to make social housing off-limits for most people: eligibility fell from 80% of households in 1951 to 25% after 1996.
And it has turned public housing into a kind of ghetto for poor and elderly people who rely on pensions and can’t afford private rents.
In Canada it is often controversial when upper middle class people are found to be living in affordable coops and anti-poverty activists, in an understandable effort to create as much low income housing as possible, often call for wholly low income housing projects instead of having buildings with mixed incomes. This article suggests at the flawed outcome from overly means testing benefits.