LOS ANGELES \u2014 Studies show the number of homeless seniors has increased dramatically in the last year, and a Los Angeles County nonprofit is working to reverse that.<\/p>\n
David Lugo earned a modest living as a mechanic throughout his life, supporting his mother and disabled sister, but three years ago, the 60-year-old’s kidneys failed.<\/p>\n
His health kept deteriorating, and after losing his income from being a caretaker for his disabled sister, he found himself homeless for the first time in his life.<\/p>\n
“I never thought I’d be homeless like that, not in a million years,” Lugo said.<\/p>\n
After sleeping on a bus bench and a few trips to the hospital, Lugo landed at Holliday’s Helping Hands, or HHH, a network of interim housing facilities started by nurse practitioner Katina Holliday. “All the sites are full to capacity,” Holliday said.<\/p>\n
The 2026 LA County homeless count revealed a nearly 14% increase in the number of adults over 55 compared to last year.<\/p>\n
That’s a quarter of the 73,000 total homeless population. Holliday says it’s often caused by the death of a spouse, health crisis, fixed incomes and inflation.<\/p>\n
“Our senior population, they get $1,100 a month. You can’t afford $3,000 with $1,100. The math ain’t mathing,” she said.<\/p>\n
Lugo is now staying at HHH recuperative care, a 100-bed interim housing program with on-duty medical staff. Nearly all the beds are occupied by older clients, many of whom worked all of their lives.<\/p>\n
“They’re right. I don’t belong here, but I’m here for a reason,” Lugo said.<\/p>\n
A University of Pennsylvania study estimates the number of homeless seniors in the U.S. will triple by 2030.<\/p>\n
Holliday is brainstorming ways to hopefully reverse the trend. At the Downey facility, there are peer groups, therapies, workshops and they are developing a unique pathway to housing specifically for seniors.<\/p>\n
“We really need to get creative on our housing model for them. They don’t necessarily need to be in a nursing home environment or assisted living,” Holliday said.<\/p>\n
“Maybe shared living is a way for them where they cannot have to pay as much, it creates a community and I think it’ll increase their lives.”<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Lugo hopes to improve his health, practice his faith and one day, return to his modest life. “See if I can get ahead and buy that home that I want,” he said.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES \u2014 Studies show the number of homeless seniors has increased dramatically in the last year, and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1031138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,419,418,246,210,421,420,2961,1165,425,224,5337,50,422,423,62,399,314,424,313],"class_list":["post-1031137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-family","tag-health","tag-homes","tag-jobs","tag-la","tag-lifestyle","tag-local","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles","tag-news","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117179363788842556","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1031137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1031138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1031137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1031137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1031137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}