This is what my comments were focused on. This is the most dire part of the system, where people are literally on the edge. As inflation moves up, we can expect people to fall into arrears, and then that becomes a very difficult precipice to be on. You end up at motels that are effectively shelter motels. The one that was referenced in The Beaches is, I think, closing down shortly.
It is connected to the whole system. Part of the commentary around what we are doing.... The option around an acquisition fund is really critical, because we have parts of the private market that have been serving a very low-income area—things like rooming houses—that are moving into gentrified ownership. There is an opportunity for social housing providers, whether they be co-ops or non-profits, to move into that space. Why that's important for their ownership is that it protects that affordability into perpetuity. When it's privately owned, there isn't that protection, and that's where we are seeing the vulnerability for significant numbers of units that are being lost in the market.
There's an opportunity within the NHS to put something like that in place. It has been called for by a number of different players. We've seen a very small demonstration project of this in the Toronto market, where the City of Toronto put forward a multi-unit resident acquisition fund and tested it out in Parkdale. That's on a very small scale, but we need to look at larger opportunities around that. What's important is that putting that into social housing frameworks and ownership models protects it into perpetuity, and I think that's the most important part because, when it goes into the market, you may protect it for five or 10 years, but then we find ourselves back in the same place.
Rent geared to income is about the demand side of the equation. We have things like the housing benefit, which started out with the national housing strategy. It could be wider; it could be deeper. We could do more there. Right now it is affecting only a very small number of people who need supports in their housing. Rent geared to income allows people to have a more balanced budget in their households, so that it's at 30% as opposed to, in some cases, up to 50%, 60% or 70% of the household income, which, as you rightly say, then moves people into using food banks and other ways of filling in the rest of the household's essential needs.
That is also something to be worked out with the provinces. Provinces are the ones that are administering some of the RGI. This ties up with social assistance, which is also the purview of the province. It could also be an opportunity for us to have a more enhanced Canada social transfer, which would be an important thing for the federal government to consider at some point.