Seniors Face Unfair Rents and Homelessness. They Need Rent Control

From mobile home parks in Maine to modest apartments in California, seniors desperately need rent control to protect themselves against skyrocketing rents charged by predatory landlords. Our grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles, many of whom live on fixed incomes, face serious, life-altering consequences if politicians don’t protect them. They need rent control now.

One of the most alarming housing stories over the years is that more and more seniors in the United States have been pushed into homelessness due to unfair, excessive rents. In fact, the U.S. Government Accountability Office noted in 2025 that “about 20 percent of those experiencing homelessness (or one in five) were older adults, ages 55 and up.”

In California, CalMatters reported that seniors had become the fastest-growing population of the homeless. Not only that, the number of seniors who sought homelessness services increased by a whopping 84 percent – more than any other age group. In 2024, Capitol Weekly described that trend as a “silent crisis,” noting that 25 percent of California’s homeless population is aged 55 or older.

It’s totally unacceptable, especially if our politicians don’t help our seniors.

In 2025, LAist reported that Los Angeles, the largest city in California, saw a shocking spike in homelessness among seniors of 36 percent between 2022 and 2024. And The Guardian found that more than 3,000 of the 11,500 people who died while unhoused in L.A. County between 2014 and 2023 were 60 and older.

It’s outrageous, but not surprising: Eviction Lab, the prestigious think tank at Princeton University, found that unaffordable rents are linked to higher mortality rates. Seniors on fixed incomes are especially vulnerable.

There have also been numerous reports over the years about the plight of seniors who live in mobile home parks in Maine and other states. Once an affordable way to live for fixed-income seniors, corporate landlords have bought up mobile home parks and suddenly charged outrageous rent hikes – or what Manufactured Housing Action, a nationwide advocacy group, termed as “rent-gouging grandma.”

Over and over again, the real estate industry sees our grandparents and parents not as human beings, but merely as vehicles for their outsized profits.

But, with all this bad news, there is an urgent solution: rent control. It is the only tool that will quickly rein in predatory landlords and stabilize rents for our older loved ones.

In fact, rent control, going back to World War I, has been widely used in America to protect our most vulnerable residents. With seniors facing life-threatening homelessness, politicians should quickly establish rent regulations again.

At the same time, elected leaders must go further and implement a sensible, multi-pronged strategy for the housing affordability and homelessness crises called the “3 Ps”: protect tenants through rent control and other protections; preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it to make way for expensive luxury housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing using such concepts as adaptive reuse and prefabricated housing.

It’s an approach that emphasizes helping the people who need it most: the poor, middle, and working-class, which includes millions of seniors.

Seniors need help now, not later. Their lives are literally on the line. They can’t wait any longer for politicians to do the right thing. And if the politicians don’t act, that will speak volumes about their lack of concern for older Americans. Our grandparents and parents deserve much more respect.

Patrick Range McDonald is the award-winning advocacy journalist for Housing Is A Human Right, the housing advocacy division of AIDS Healthcare Foundation.