As Housing Costs Rise and Fixed Incomes Fall, Older Adults Are Pushed into Homelessness for the First Time
In June, Invisible People interviewed Kim, a homeless senior woman in Grants Pass. She and her cat Sylvester had to pack up their tent every Saturday due to local enforcement rules, moving from park to park. Since the Grants Pass ruling, Kim and many others must do this to avoid fines or worse, an arrest.
Kim became homeless after falling behind on property taxes that she could no longer afford on a fixed income. She lived outside through the winter, spending most of it sick, contracting bronchitis twice. She struggled just to find water, food, or toilet paper.
“I’m not here by choice,” she said. “Life shouldn’t be like this.”
Senior Homelessness Expected to Triple by 2030
Senior homelessness is a rapidly growing crisis. Without significant intervention, experts warn that the number of unhoused adults over 65 is projected to triple by 2030.
According to the Aging Homeless Study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the New York University School of Medicine found that the number of homeless adults age 65 and older increased by more than 300% between 2004 and 2017. During the same period, the number of people aged 55 and older staying in shelters rose by approximately 250%.
According to the 2024 Point-in-Time Count, more than 146,000 people age 55 and older experienced homelessness in the United States. Nearly half of that population was unsheltered, living outside rather than in a shelter. Within that group, more than 42,000 people age 65 and older were counted as homeless, representing an increase of more than 6 percent in just one year.
Seniors now make up a rapidly growing share of the overall homeless population, not because they are aging into stability, but because they are aging into housing insecurity.
As housing costs rise and fixed incomes fall further behind the cost of living, older adults are increasingly pushed into homelessness — often for the first time late in life. Advocates and researchers warn that these numbers likely understate the true scale of senior homelessness, particularly among those living unsheltered or cycling in and out of temporary situations.
Preliminary indicators suggest that the 2025 Point-in-Time Count, expected to be released in the coming days, may show this trend continuing. If confirmed, it would further underscore what service providers and unhoused seniors have long been saying: senior homelessness is not a temporary spike, but a rapidly accelerating crisis driven by systemic failures — not personal choice.
Financial Pressures for Senior Citizens
Seniors living in poverty face obstacles ranging from not being able to afford life-saving prescription medications to facing ageism in the workplace, while having to work far past retirement age to avoid losing their homes.
What drives senior homelessness is essentially what drives all homelessness: lack of affordable housing. While rising rents are certainly at the forefront of this crisis, so are rising property taxes and the cost of assisted living facilities, which are enormous financial burdens for many seniors. More age-specific reasons include a lack of affordable, adequate, and accessible health care, especially in rural areas.
In addition to a lack of a healthcare system, social security payments do not keep up with the cost of living. Experts worry that the Trump Administration will only make the situation worse by cutting $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade.
“It’s a national scandal, really, that the richest country in the world would have destitute elderly and disabled people,” Dennis Culhane, who studies homelessness at the University of Pennsylvania, recently told NPR.
A Lifetime of Poverty Leads to Homelessness at the End of Life
Homeless seniors today may have spent a lifetime in poverty. Imagine working your entire life, low-wage jobs, maybe even multiple jobs, to only arrive at a point where you’re too old to work but too poor to retire. At that moment, you can no longer afford growing housing costs, and find yourself sleeping outside at 65.
Seniors experiencing homelessness today likely struggled through two recessions and rapid technological changes, only to find that their pension doesn’t even cover their basic needs.
Like so many others who fall into homelessness, it only takes a single event, such as the loss of a spouse or a sudden medical emergency, to suddenly not be able to afford the roof over your head.
Care vs Housing: An Impossible Choice Seniors Are Forced to Make
A study by the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living found that America has lost more than 62,000 nursing home beds since 2020. Another 20% of nursing homes have cut staff or closed wings and units because of staff shortages, the study found. Where do seniors go when beds disappear?
As we age, aches and pains become part of daily life. As our bodies begin the natural process of deterioration, we can experience increased forgetfulness, an increased risk of slip-and-falls, frail bones, back and neck pain, arthritis, cognitive decline, hearing loss, vision problems, and limited mobility. Imagine trying to traverse homelessness under these conditions.
Our bodies are not meant to endure homelessness at any age, but it’s undoubtedly not meant to endure it at the end of our lives.
“As the US population ages, more older adults will struggle to afford either the home of their choice or the care they need,” said Jennifer Molinsky, who directs Harvard’s Housing and Aging Society Program. “The parallel also illustrates the stark choice between paying for health services or housing that many seniors contemplate.”
Molinsky also points out that, while the number of seniors who qualify for housing assistance has increased by 50% since 2011, the bigger issue is helping seniors access these services. Assistance programs like this are designed to ensure seniors don’t have to choose between healthcare and housing; however, seniors often struggle to learn about or access these programs.
“More funding would be a start, but there is a tremendous need for creative alternatives to existing models of care and housing to better support the country’s rapidly aging population,” Molinsky said.
The Biggest Risk Is Death
Studies show that seniors who experience homelessness age roughly 20 years faster than their housed counterparts, both physically and cognitively. Chronic exposure to stress, untreated illness, malnutrition, and life outdoors accelerates decline — yet the systems meant to intervene routinely fail them.
When unhoused seniors do receive medical care, it is often through emergency rooms or crisis centers, not sustained, preventive care. After treatment, many are discharged with nowhere safe to recover. They are often sent back to the streets without housing, follow-up care, or support.
This cycle is not inevitable; it is the result of policies that treat medical emergencies in isolation while ignoring housing as healthcare.
Because older adults experiencing homelessness are more likely to be unsheltered, they face a dramatically heightened risk of premature death. Limited access to consistent medical care, compounded by physical frailty and chronic conditions, means many never receive the specialized care they need. Instead, they cycle through emergency rooms — stabilized temporarily, then released back into the conditions that made them sick in the first place.
Each discharge without housing is another failure point, another missed opportunity to intervene before the consequences become fatal. For far too many unhoused seniors, the most significant risk they face is not aging — it is being abandoned by systems that allow housing to come only after irreversible harm has already occurred.
Housing Before Exposure to Harm
For Kim, there is hope. After a year living on the streets, she’s finally moved into a retirement complex. She is now in a safe one-bedroom apartment with a balcony. But it shouldn’t have taken a whole year. Kim should never have had to spend a winter out in the cold, or even a single night.
Senior homelessness, and stories like Kim’s, are firm evidence that the best and only real solution to end homelessness is housing. Kim survived — but survival is not success. Housing should come before harm, not after it.