Seniors facing life on the street as rents soar

One-quarter of the homeless in Metro Vancouver are elderly, say Kelli Stajduhar and Ashley Mollison

B.C. Seniors’ Advocate Isobel Mackenzie has put the seniors’ homelessness crisis on the map in recent weeks, highlighting how soaring rents are forcing seniors out of their homes to live in vehicles, couch surf with friends and family, or even into shelters or the streets.

We know these stories all too well. In our B.C. research examining the end-of-life experiences of homeless and vulnerably housed people, we saw firsthand how poverty impacts people’s final months, weeks and days of life. We walked alongside adults and seniors who were having to choose between paying rent or buying food and medicine — people displaced from their homes when the cost of living or their medical needs became too high for them to manage.

Housing instability was the norm for our participants living with advancing diseases like cancer, lung disease and organ failure. Benny, a 75-year-old Indigenous man with cancer, wound up in the hospital for four months after he could no longer support himself, and then in a transitional care unit for an additional three months before being discharged to a sparsely furnished motel room found for him to live out his final days.

But when the motel owners raised the rent, even that sub-par housing option was lost. Benny ended up in a homeless shelter, where we lost contact. We later learned he had moved one final time into supported housing, where he died. In his final two and a half years, he’d been uprooted five times and spent seven months in hospital.

Homelessness makes people sick, and significantly worsens existing illness. Our study found that those working in health care don’t see it as their role to address the everyday requirements that people living in poverty need to survive — food, shelter, income — or how the lack of such basic needs influence a person’s ability to access vital palliative care services.

We applaud the provincial government for increasing the Shelter Aid for Elderly Renters (SAFER) supplement. Unfortunately, SAFER isn’t an option for people who don’t have housing in the first place, and there are other significant hurdles as well.

Older adults on income assistance or disability who aren’t yet 65 don’t qualify for SAFER. Neither do seniors who can’t meet citizenship requirements. If you’ve got no way to get to appointments, no phone or computer to access services, or perhaps no knowledge that SAFER exists, those are massive barriers.

Even for the 20,000 B.C. seniors who currently qualify, the increase in the supplement can’t compete with soaring rents and demand in Vancouver and Victoria. Average B.C. rents have increased 45 per cent in 10 years, while the SAFER supplement has risen a mere nine per cent.

As Mackenzie has identified, more than a third of seniors who rent have household incomes below $20,000.

Average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Victoria is currently $1,150. Using B.C. Housing ’s SAFER calculator, single seniors paying that amount and receiving the maximum monthly $1,512.19 available through old-age security and supplements would qualify for a monthly SAFER supplement of up to $266. They’ll still be spending 58 per cent of their income on rent.

In Vancouver, that same scenario — using average monthly rent of $2,020 and an adjusted SAFER supplement of $354.84 — leaves single seniors still falling almost $400 short every month even after spending their total income on rent. Low-income seniors have been priced out of Vancouver entirely.

A quarter of people living homeless in Metro Vancouver are elderly. A quarter of shelter users across the country are 50 and older. Strategies to address the impact of poverty and homelessness as people age must be at the forefront of any housing or poverty-reduction efforts. With a life expectancy of 40 to 49 years in B.C. for people living homeless, most won’t even get the chance to become seniors.

We are way past excusing homelessness as a moral failing or individual fault. Homeless people have always been somebody’s mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers.

How truly tragic that we can now add grandparents to that list.