Canada

As someone who works in public housing, one of the issues I see is that it's a place for people we want to forget about. There's a lot of mental health/social issues with our tenants because we're basically the last step before homelessness. We get their welfare/disability penion/social support direct deposited in our account to cover rent, stick them in an apartment, and forget about them.

Its hard for your average joe to want to live in subsidized housing, even with the cheaper rent, when he has to worry about an untreated schizophrenic running down the halls at 3 am banging on doors, or horders causing cockroach, bed bug, anf rodent issues, or finding needles and crack pipes in the stairwell.

In most living situations, this would result in eviction, but since our mandate is to keep people housed, we tend to accept that it comes with the territory.

What we really REALLY need is a robust social services network to not only house people, but treat them so that they can self actualize and actively participate in society.

But we're not too interested in doing that, because if we dont have these dregs of society, what else to we have to threaten the middle class to keep them in line?

If the government does not want to get into public housing for some stupid reason, they could at least be funding and facilitating housing co-ops.

Here in Waterloo Region, the closest thing we've had to new public housing in decades AFAIK are a bunch of insulated garden sheds they erected across the street from an actual dump, outside of town and away from all services. And yet such a grim offering is the only thing we have to be optimistic and hopeful about. The poor have been entirely abandoned.