Why many B.C. seniors struggle with poverty and homelessness

Why many seniors struggle

Photo: Rob Kruyt, BIV.

Alison Silgardo, CEO of the Seniors Services Society of B.C., said financial abuse by adult children is a major cause of senior homelessness. “The adult child is happy to take care of the asset, and literally kicks the parent to the curb,” she said.

Senior poverty and homelessness are at crisis levels in B.C., experts say, leaving shelters and non-profits struggling with how to serve seniors with complex care needs.

For the first time last fall, one Vancouver shelter started working with a health authority to bring in home-care aides to help some senior users with taking medication, bathing and other tasks its outreach workers are not trained to do.

Union Gospel Mission (UGM) started working with Vancouver Coastal Health’s Flexible Adaptable Home Support Team to get support for the seniors who had the most complex care needs that were beyond what the shelter could provide, said UGM spokeswoman Nicole Mucci.

The informal partnership is on a case-by-case basis to support those seniors while phone calls and efforts are made to find medical shelter beds for them, she said.

“It’s been a new world for us really in many respects with the number of seniors with complex care coming to stay with us,” Mucci said.

The prevalence of senior homelessness may be a consequence of wider poverty among elders. Nearly 170,000 B.C. seniors live in poverty, according to a November 2025 report by BC Policy Solutions.

Many more have incomes just above the poverty line, with half of B.C. seniors living on after-tax income of less than $35,000 per year and 28 per cent living on income less than $25,000, said the think tank.

The poverty rate among B.C. seniors, 15.5 per cent, now exceeds the poverty rates of every other age group, said the report.

Housing insecurity often follows.

Seniors are more likely to own their home than working-age families, but about 20 per cent of B.C. seniors rent. Of those renters, 43.7 per cent live in unaffordable housing costing more than 30 per cent of their income, said BC Policy Solutions.

Some seniors are finding themselves homeless, forced to use shelters with floor mats or bunk beds in environments where they could potentially be targeted.

The most recent data point shows that 21 per cent of B.C.’s homeless population were seniors 55 and older, according to the government-funded 2023 Report on Homeless Counts in B.C.

Of them, 42 per cent were experiencing homelessness for the first time as a senior, said the report.

Another homeless count was conducted in 2025, but a spokesperson for BC Housing said the results won’t be aggregated until this spring.

Alison Silgardo, CEO of the Seniors Services Society of B.C. (SSSBC), said the numbers underrepresent the reality because many seniors couch-surf or live in their cars.

She said the senior homeless rate has likely gone up since 2023, and that in some B.C. cities, closer to 30 per cent of the homeless population are seniors.

Plethora of causes

The reasons why a senior can become homeless temporarily or for an extended period include loss of a partner by death or divorce and financial abuse by adult children, said SSSBC’s Silgardo.

Taxes are another trigger. Not filing taxes by the deadline, even if no tax is owed, can result in a loss or delay of benefits, while a failure to declare income annually can cause seniors to lose their subsidized units or have to pay market rates, she said.

Special assessments can also lead to housing insecurity. These can be tens of thousands of dollars per owner, and if a senior’s income does not allow them to get a bank loan to cover the levy, they may be forced to sell their home.

“That money from a fire sale is not going to carry them long in the rental market today,” Silgardo said.

Sponsorship breakdowns are another cause. When immigrant parents are sponsored by their adult children, the children are financially responsible for them for 10 years for applications received before 2014, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

After that period elapses, some adult children are asking their senior parents to leave because of family conflict or because the parents are no longer needed to babysit children who have grown up, Silgardo said.

“We see adult children literally evicting and giving an eviction notice to their parents to leave the home,” she said.

The length of the undertaking has now been extended to 20 years, said the IRCC website.

Exit from health is perhaps the “most tragic” reason for senior homelessness, she said. If a senior visits the hospital for a minor problem and ends up staying for a prolonged period, the landlord could assume they’re dead, get rid of their belongings and find another tenant.

“Three years ago, one November, we ended up with four calls in one week. At noon, the person was discharged, and at 4 o’clock they called us. They were sitting at the entrance of the hospital, homeless, and they had no idea they were going to be made homeless until that afternoon,” Silgardo said.

Regional boundaries are another concern. Moving from one health authority region to another requires a senior to look for new health-care supports. But with long waitlists, a senior’s physical or mental health could decline, making them vulnerable to homelessness—even suicide, she said.

Reforms urged

The provincial and federal governments no longer have a dedicated ministry for seniors like they did until last year for the federal government and 10 years ago for the provincial government.

SSSBC’s Silgardo called for an inter-agency organization made up of multiple ministries with the mandate and the budget to make and sustain changes “in a way that’s really accountable and demonstrated.”

She said another issue is that the province provides only single-year grants to some programs, which hurts staffing, budgeting and planning when funding can’t be guaranteed. Applying every year consumes a charity’s time and resources.

Iglika Ivanova, co-executive director with BC Policy Solutions, said provincial and federal income supports need to be improved because while they are adjusted for inflation, the costs of food and rent have risen significantly higher than general inflation.

She also called for a much more ambitious expansion of non-market housing, including housing accessible to seniors with mobility challenges and disabilities.

The country has had past success. Reducing senior poverty was one of Canada’s greatest social policy success stories of the 20th century, said her Nov. 27 report.

The “extraordinary” decline in senior poverty in B.C. from over 30 per cent to just two per cent between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s was driven by an expansion of government programs including the Canadian Pension Plan, Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, said the report.

But senior poverty rates have risen significantly since the mid-1990s.

“As we have a housing crisis and we’re seeing in the last few years food prices growing at much higher rates than general inflation, then that inflation indexing is just not enough to get people out of poverty,” she said.

Ivanova said she was shocked when she saw recent reports about the home-care aides coming to the UGM shelter in Vancouver.

“I was like, that’s crazy,” she said.

“We’re talking about seniors who are needing assistance in their daily life, assistance to take a shower, and they are in the shelter.”