The Homelessness Income Cut Off: A Further Exploration

This paper develops the Homelessness Income Cut Off, or HICO, as a practical benchmark for the income people need to avoid homelessness after they have already exhausted the usual coping strategies. Those strategies include moving into lower-quality or crowded housing, sharing accommodations, cutting back on non-essential spending, and relying on charities such as food banks. The authors argue that the HICO is more useful than a general poverty line when the policy question is specifically whether households have enough income to remain housed.

The paper extends earlier work by estimating HICO levels across 50 Canadian communities and across different household types, showing that the threshold varies sharply by local housing conditions and family composition. It argues that the ratio between the HICO and median income is a useful indicator of housing stress, because it reveals when ordinary earnings and public supports are falling behind the cost of keeping a home. The paper’s policy message is that governments should use the HICO to monitor homelessness risk more precisely and to judge whether income supports and housing policies are actually sufficient to prevent people from losing housing.