Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think our track record has proven that we do try to assist people in getting into their own home, and I think it’s one of the reasons that we’re in a situation now where our focus has to be on more multi-unit type configurations for a lot of younger people. A lot of the families that are able to get into homeownership, I think in the last… Since homeownership started way back in the SHAG and HAP house days, I think we’ve got about 2,700 units that we help families get into through our homeownership program. We’ve raised our income threshold. On the access to homeownership we’ve raised our income threshold to give more people an opportunity to get in.
There’s always going to be a need for social housing. Ideally, we’d like to see someone that goes through the social housing situation because they don’t have a job or they can’t get a house and then if their financial situation improves or their prospects improve, then ideally we’d like to see
them graduate into our homeownership program. We’ve seen that a number of times in the past.
At the same time, I have to caution that we need to ensure that people we put into homeownership are able to maintain it. We’ve run into a number of cases where folks have gotten into homeownership, it was a little bit more than they had anticipated, and they’ve quit claimed the house and actually turned them back over to the corporation and moved back into public housing. We want to make sure that our clients are set up for success and we don’t set them up for failure. That’s one of the reasons we’re so concerned about the income threshold, because we want to make sure that they’re able to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of the house. That’s why we ran the Homeownership Entry Level Program, the HELP program. That gives them a window of about two years to determine whether they think that homeownership is for them, and if it’s not, then after two years they can turn it back over to the corporation and go back into public housing. Or if they determine they want to be a homeowner, then I believe there’s a $10,000 incentive that we give them. So we’re trying to set them up to take advantage of the programs that we offer.