For Rae Vermeal, the experience of one Pima County senior illustrates the complexity of the housing struggle for older people in the region.
The woman owns her home and gets $967 through Social Security.
But she has an $863 mortgage, and had racked up months of late fees when she reached out to the Pima Council on Aging, where Vermeal helps seniors access social benefits.
“She needed help from us, and that got her caught up,” Vermeal said. “She’s getting SNAP benefits, she’s got medical care, vital services that are enabling her to maintain the home in which she lives. She’s making it, but just barely.”
For the past 58 years, the Pima Council on Aging has been the local nonprofit tasked with supporting local seniors in everything from fitness to financial planning. One thing it has never been, however, is a crisis agency or a funded homelessness organization.
In the last five years, that has slowly begun to change as housing insecurity among the elderly in Pima County has become a starker and more urgent issue.
That comes from a confluence of issues: rising housing costs make it harder to rent or make property taxes more expensive; increased development means people may be pushed out of their longtime homes; and inflation has made basic food items more expensive, squeezing budgets.
At the same time, the number of people who are 65 and over grew exponentially over the last decade, meaning there are simply more people who are dealing with aging. In Tucson, 85% of seniors can’t afford in-home care or assisted living facilities, according to a 2023 study from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.
In sum, say two staff members of the council, housing insecurity has become a crisis for seniors in Pima County.
“We cover a gamut between helping those who are struggling and those who want to live healthfully as they age and thrive as well,” Vermeal said. “This is a new issue: older adult homelessness.”
Arizona Luminaria spoke to two staff members of the council about what has caused this spike in need and what can be done to help: Vermeal, whose work includes helping with housing issues when seniors are in crisis; and Lisa Reams, who oversees direct services provided to community members.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
When did you start seeing a jump in need, and what makes it a crisis?
Lisa Reams: We started to notice a change in what older adults were experiencing around 2019. Prior to 2019 we would get occasional calls from older adults in the community where they were having some emergency assistance for needs related to their housing. We would get a smattering of those calls, no more than about 20 a month.
In 2019, the numbers [of calls] rose by at least 40% and we found that we were averaging about 30 calls a month for older adults needing emergency financial assistance related to housing.
We began to have a series of community meetings, starting to address some emerging trend of older adult housing insecurity. Then — bam. COVID happened.
What role did COVID-related housing supports like the moratorium on evictions play, and what happened when that expired?
Reams: Even though it was so dire for older adults — from a health standpoint and from an isolation standpoint — COVID actually gave them a bit of housing security for a few months because there was a moratorium on evictions and utility shut-offs and there were emergency stimulus checks.
As soon as that started to wear off, the call numbers skyrocketed again. They’ve continued to go up every year. January of 2025 we had 75 older adults calling us with emergency housing and security issues. That’s an enormous increase.
Rae Vermeal: These are individuals who have worked hard their entire lives and while they were working, they were able to get by. But they now have a chronic health condition or a disability, they’re no longer able to work, they’re technically retired, perhaps living only on Social Security. And at the same time, rents have gone up. Everything is more expensive, food, housing, utilities, health care, medications.
Reams: They call PCOA in a panic because they trust us and don’t know where else to go.
What is helping you meet that need right now?
Vermeal: In 2023, the [state-level] Division of Aging and Adult Services gave us funding. We have been using that money to help pay for rent, a mortgage payment or property taxes that [seniors] got behind.
Reams: The state has enabled us to have a greater impact with more assistance than we have historically. We’ve spent about 70% of our portion toward emergency housing ($450,000) so far, and it’s one-time assistance. We’d love to be able to get more. We’re very concerned with the need that we’re seeing still increasing.
When do you expect to run out of state-funded emergency housing assistance?
Reams: Within the next six months. If we don’t receive any more influx of funding, the preventative measures that we’ve been able to provide will be significantly reduced. We basically wanted to make the homelessness system aware that they weren’t seeing the spike in older adult homelessness we were seeing because [seniors] were calling nonprofits that serve older adults. Nobody wants to see a bunch of 80 year olds on the street.
Is it just a matter of funding, or are there more structural issues that you see?
Reams: I’ve heard from folks that are housing advocates in the community, talk about people being housing insecure if their housing cost is more than 33% of their income. Rae and I, when hearing that, our eyes kind of bugged out. We’re seeing older adults every day whose housing cost is 85% of their income. That’s just the reality. And they’re the lucky ones.
Vermeal: They need affordable housing and there is not enough affordable housing. Even if we have money, it’s not going to help, because they actually need a place to live. We would be happy to pay that deposit and that first month’s rent if they could find that place that they could sustain going forward. But there just aren’t enough.
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