Most families and individuals living with income that is below the poverty line manage to retain housing and avoid the use of homeless shelters. They do so by living in lower quality and more crowded housing, by forgoing non-necessities and by relying on charities to minimize out-of-pocket expenses. The Homelessness Income Cut Off, or HICO, is a measure of the income threshold required by individuals and families to minimize their risk of losing housing after they have exhausted all efforts to minimize expenditures. The HICO provides a useful gauge against which to measure the effectiveness of public policies intended to enable people to retain housing. We provide estimates of the HICO for 50 Canadian communities varying in size from 9,000 to five million people. Finally, we show that in recent years, the HICO has, for some family compositions, increased relative to median incomes, meaning that more Canadians are facing challenges holding onto their housing.
Kneebone et al. (Sun,) studied this question.