Honestly, in 90% of cases it's purely a choice. Most people in North America can't pay rent because they need to live downtown and work a min wage job. Let me tell you that there are plenty of starbucks in places with lower rent. If you can't pay rent in North America have 2 arms 2 legs and an IQ of 100 it's because you're spending your money stupidly and/or lazy.
My ex wife (IQ of 140-150) phoned me the other day complaining about how she can't pay rent. Note that she lives in social housing despite making in excess of 68K per year. She works for the gov't and could go to any number of places with cheap rent, yet she insists on living in some of the most expensive areas of Canada.
Two weeks ago she was raving about how much fun the new Green Day edition of Rock Band was and next week she is going on vacation.
Think there might be a connection as to why she can't pay subsidized rent let alone market rent?
When I was with her, I bought my own place at 22 while working a crap tech support job.
There's plenty of problems with the system, including people who are able to get far more than they should out of it, and people who don't get enough from it. That doesn't mean we should scrap it entirely.
A counterpoint example (although this is from the UK, but similar thing). When my sister was unemployed a couple of years ago, she signed up for unemployment benefits ("job seekers allowance"). That was something pretty low like maybe USD$100/week, but it was OK as she was living with parents and not paying rent. The purpose of job seekers allowance is, as the name suggests, to support people looking for work, and you stay on it you are meant to regularly prove that you are doing your best to find a job.
What she found was that, while she genuinely wanted a job, and wasn't picky (she wasn't thinking "I need to get a job suited to my skill set in a really specific industry", she would have been happy in a supermarket), the government staff that she had to see twice a month clearly didn't care about helping her find a job, and didn't even care about checking whether she was trying to find a job herself. To them it was all about ticking her off on a list and paying her the money.
That's really terrible, because it means that if you want to get benefits instead of working it's incredibly easy, and because, if they had bothered to help her find work sooner, she would have spent less time getting benefits, therefore taking less money out of the system.
So, was the system good in this example? No, it was terrible. But, at the same time, because she couldn't find a job, she did need the system, and she would have been much worse off if it didn't exist.
My ex wife (IQ of 140-150) phoned me the other day complaining about how she can't pay rent. Note that she lives in social housing despite making in excess of 68K per year. She works for the gov't and could go to any number of places with cheap rent, yet she insists on living in some of the most expensive areas of Canada.
Two weeks ago she was raving about how much fun the new Green Day edition of Rock Band was and next week she is going on vacation.
Think there might be a connection as to why she can't pay subsidized rent let alone market rent?
When I was with her, I bought my own place at 22 while working a crap tech support job.