Seniors grappling with homelessness in costly San Luis Obispo County struggle to stay alive

In 2011, San Luis Obispo was named the happiest city in America by Oprah Winfrey — a haven of fair weather, thriving local businesses and easy access to nature, nestled in valleys just a few miles from scenic California coastline. Since then, it’s been no stranger to lists of the top 10 places to retire, along with the most expensive places to live in the United States.

Although the region is just as beautiful as it was when it was named the happiest city in America, fewer and fewer people are capable of meeting the area’s skyrocketing cost of living — particularly the county’s senior population. Within the past year, a key measure of housing affordability in San Luis Obispo County has plunged below 10% and shown few signs of improvement according to the California Association of Realtors, with a critical lack of inventory and homes at low through moderate-income housing keeping many of the county’s residents perpetual renters.

Like so many residents of San Luis Obispo County, I’m a transplant to the region, arriving in 2022 to join The San Luis Obispo Tribune as a housing and homelessness reporter. From the start, I was struck by the generational wealth and rising cost of living that defines San Luis Obispo County’s population and has placed seniors at the center of the county’s homelessness crisis — something I first became aware in my first few months on the job.

I first covered what homeless shelter managers often called a “silver tsunami” in the summer of 2022, and since then the issue has worsened. In the 2024 point-in-time count, homeless seniors over the age of 55 made up around a third of the county’s homeless population, with a total of 339 seniors experiencing homelessness during the most recent count. While the 2024 count’s total of 1,175 people experiencing homelessness showed a reduction of around 300 individuals from the 2022 count, shelter and housing capacity has proved to be a consistent bottleneck to getting people into stable housing. The issue of capacity extends to the county’s health care system, which suffers from a limited availability of primary care physicians due to the high cost of living.

Having seen limited progress in slowing the rise of senior homelessness over my two years of reporting, I sought to contextualize the reasons why seniors are likely to fall into homelessness, the health effects of homelessness on seniors, and how the holes in San Luis Obispo County’s social services makes climbing out of homelessness difficult for seniors. When I had the opportunity to deepen my reporting through the USC Center for Health Journalism’s California Health Equity Fellowship and the Lori Yearwood Fund for Reporting on Homelessness, I used the funding and training to conduct focus groups with homeless seniors to get a better understanding of how seniors become homeless, and how their housing status affects their health.

More than 20 homeless seniors participated in the focus groups, which I assembled by collaborating with local points of service such as a local shower and hygiene program, the organizers of a transitional housing program, and a North County homeless shelter. These groups were not conducted to aggregate data that I could use in the story, but rather to inform the direction of my reporting.

The results were not surprising but still disheartening. Loss of employment, eviction, a poor rental history and high cost of living all were listed as the primary reasons for homelessness, while many seniors said they don’t trust the shelter system or homeless services.

From there, I used the focus groups’ responses to ask questions of local officials, senior housing providers and medical professionals, while searching for seniors experiencing homelessness who could provide a more in-depth look at their health experiences. One such source was Deborah Marino, a woman who was living with several mental and physical health conditions, including terminal cancer, that impeded her ability to find housing. Deborah’s story ended up being one of the more uplifting parts of the reporting process: In the eight months between my first interview with her in 2023 and speaking with her for the series, Deborah was able to get housing assistance and the right care for her health complications, extending and improving her quality of life.

Dr. Matthew Scales, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Dignity Health French Hospital Medical Center, told me that seniors like Deborah experiencing homelessness tend to utilize health care resources such as the emergency room at a higher rate. Their age can exacerbate new and existing health conditions — particularly without a place to properly rest or recover. Scales added that homeless seniors are likely to present with the same chronic health conditions that most seniors encounter, including diabetes, blood pressure regulation, cardiac issues, heart failure, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, but suffer worse outcomes down the line.

“These individuals tend to have higher acuity of illness because they’re not being treated on a long-term basis,” Scales said. “There’s quite a bit of ending up in the ER for some medical complaint, but really the issue is that they need social services. They need some kind of short-term assistance with housing, if that’s even available.”

While researching fatalities among senior homeless residents, I stumbled across the story of lifelong San Luis Obispo resident Brett Cross, who discovered one of his high school classmates dead while living in a park Cross frequented. Sheryl Glidden, 63, was one of 15 people over the age of 55 who died while homeless in San Luis Obispo County between Jan. 1 and Aug. 29, 2024. Hearing her story prompted me to look closer at how the county’s social safety net is already at capacity, and what that means for seniors enduring homelessness.

I spoke with shelters and senior housing providers to better understand the crisis and was surprised by the lack of beds specifically for seniors. With a larger share of seniors in its population than the rest of California — 33.7% of the population over 55 compared to around 28.3% statewide — San Luis Obispo County lacks the resources and housing to adequately shelter its most vulnerable seniors. 

According to a senior placement specialist who specializes in finding housing for seniors at all income levels, San Luis Obispo County only has around 900 beds specifically for the over-55 population, and only a handful are available at any given time, meaning seniors looking to get into independent and assisted living communities, nursing homes, memory care facilities and affordable housing have a very narrow window of opportunity. Gibson added that senior living facilities can hardly keep up with demand from older, wealthier retirees downsizing, leading her to advise most lower-income seniors to move out of the county.

The picture painted by local experts and the best data available suggest that San Luis Obispo County’s shelters and homelessness continuum of care is not capable of handling the volume of homelessness in the county, and poorly equipped to provide care to the most vulnerable seniors who lose their homes.

During this project, I found tremendous value in sourcing my questions and concerns from the homeless seniors whose health has most directly affected the area’s cost of living. The use of focus groups helped me orient my reporting toward where it was needed most, helping me identify the successes and shortcomings of our local homelessness services. It reminded me of the value of understanding and empathizing with the systemic causes for an individual’s housing and health status — and taking them at their word when they say that system isn’t working as it should.