(The Center Square) The number of homeless seniors has risen during recent years in California, and state officials are trying to find ways to fix this growing – and increasingly challenging – problem.
The number rose despite taxpayer-funded programs and services designed to prevent homelessness.
In 2026, 37,460 seniors were homeless, down from 49,471 in 2025 but remains up from 34,833 in 2021, according to California Open Data portal. The portal is managed by the California Department of Technology.
For many adults 65 and older, the main cause of homelessness is similar to that plaguing other adults, which is a lack of income, officials with the California Commission on Aging told The Center Square on Friday.
“The number of affordable housing units has gone down significantly,” said Patrick Smith, legislative director for the commission.
“California is short 1 million affordable units to house all extremely low-income renters,” Smith told The Center Square. “As [baby] boomers age, right now, we’re starting to see the effects of scattered employment, lack of retirement savings, lack of pension and more older adults who rented for longer periods of their life.”
These older adults, Smith said, don’t have a great deal of savings and often don’t have the investment of having owned a home.
“All it takes is one medical emergency, and suddenly you don’t have the ability to make money through work,” Smith said. “And you don’t have any savings or investment in a home, and you’re homeless.”
The commission plans to release a report in December identifying the gaps in the state’s housing and homelessness services system, as well as what state officials can do to prevent senior homelessness in the first place.
The report due next month isn’t the only one to address issues facing the state’s growing aging population.
According to the state’s Master Plan for Aging, California’s taxpayers spent $128 million in general fund money in 2025-26 for the Home Safe Program, which helps keep older adults housed statewide, as well as the Housing and Disability Advocacy Program. That program provides housing benefits to disabled adults.
That master plan on aging also aims to implement more housing programs for all adults, “at all ages and stages,” Christina Mills, executive director of California Association of Area Agencies on Aging, told The Center Square on Friday.
“For us at C4A specifically, that’s about ensuring that older adults 60 and over are prioritized for housing resources and opportunities,” Mills said. “In California, we have what we call a coordinated entry system, and at this point in time, older adults are not prioritized through that system. We are hoping to pursue some legislation to change that during the next year.”
Those programs, among others, help keep seniors off the streets. But according to research from the California Budget & Policy Center, nearly 40% of homeless adults were at least 50 years old in 2022-23. It is not clear how many older adults were homeless in 2026.
Lawmakers told The Center Square that the state’s homelessness crisis is affecting older adults disproportionately.
“That’s something that is really troubling because that changes the percentage of people who are experiencing homelessness for the first time,” Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins, D-San Diego and a member of the Assembly Aging and Long-Term Care Committee, told The Center Square on Friday. “These are people that are experiencing it after the age of 50.”
The rising cost of living, limited retirement income and unaffordable rent are just a few of the reasons older adults find themselves unhoused, Sharp-Collins added.
“A lot of folks find it very difficult to live off of Social Security, meaning that retirement income is not really sufficient to be sustainable,” Sharp-Collins said. “Not everybody has a pension, not everybody has a retirement account or savings available. That’s something we need to start looking into as we think about the retirement system.”
Republican members of aging and long-term care committees in the Legislature, as well as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who authored homelessness legislation in 2026, did not respond to The Center Square before publication time on Friday.
