Targeted? That’s a matter of interpretation. They were given an opportunity. Those who abused it paid the price; those who used it wisely became and remained homeowners when they otherwise might have not been able to do so.
The problem is that many of them, even with the best of intentions, couldn’t have kept their homes if there was even a slight blip in the economy. They were heavily in debt for other things, had no savings and only marginal jobs, and normally they wouldn’t have qualified for a mortgage unless they could have done something to overcome this (such as save up a large down payment). So the government set these people up to fail.
One of the things a family member who was in charge of a Habitat group told me is that many of the people who took on a mortgage seemed to have no idea that it actually had to be paid regularly (they had been tenants in government housing or government subsidized housing all of their lives) and they also didn’t know that they were responsible for repairs, either doing the repairs themselves - and these were people who didn’t even know how to use a screwdriver to reattach a door knob - or paying for someone else to do them. So they had no idea of the underlying costs of home ownership, and as soon as there was any problem, they weren’t able to deal with it.