A 'hopeless' feeling: Struggling seniors face sky-high rents and few, if any, options

Ron Sept is getting desperate.

He can't afford a car, his prescription medications, eyeglasses or new clothes, he said. He's stopped eating meat to save on groceries, which he can only buy with the money his son living overseas sometimes sends him. If you visit him in his one-bedroom apartment in Nanaimo, B.C., you'd have to sit on the floor, because he has one chair and no table.

Sept, 70, said he's depressed, especially since giving up the antidepressant he can't afford without insurance coverage. He's also anxious, lonely and said his health is suffering.

Why? Because 95 per cent of his pension goes to his $1,650 rent, leaving him with about $100 in his bank account each month for all other expenses. The amount, he said, is "ridiculously inadequate."

"Having to go crawling to family members on my hands and knees ... it puts people in such a difficult situation. And I think people who have lots of money don't really have any clue of what it's like to live without," Sept told CBC News.

"I don't have anywhere to go, I don't have anything to do, I don't know anybody here, so most of the time I just sit around in an apartment I can't really afford and worry."

Sept, who was a self-employed business consultant until recently, reached out to CBC News because he wanted his story shared. He is one of the many seniors who struggle to pay rent amid the rental housing crisis gripping the country.

With surging prices and decreased availability, finding housing has become daunting. Less than one per cent of rentals are both vacant and affordable for the majority of the country's renters, a recent CBC News analysis of more than 1,000 neighbourhoods across Canada's largest cities found.

That situation becomes more dire for Canada's growing population of seniors, many of whom say they hope to age at home but face soaring housing costs on a fixed income, often leaving them financially vulnerable.

Slightly more than one-fifth of Canada's seniors who live in private dwellings, 21.5 per cent, are renters, according to Statistics Canada data.

Senior renters deal with unaffordable housing at a higher rate than the total renter population, the agency notes, with 38.8 per cent of renters age 65 and over spending more than 30 per cent of their income on shelter costs — the benchmark for affordability set by the CMHC in 1986.

In comparison, 27.2 per cent of the total renter population lived in unaffordable housing. While that proportion decreased since 2016 for all populations, seniors still live unaffordably in higher rates — as the average price of rent continues to climb.

"Financially vulnerable seniors in particular are facing a real crisis when it comes to rental rates because their ability to respond to the increase is in many cases limited," Alyssa Brierley, executive director of the National Institute on Ageing, a public policy institute at Toronto Metropolitan University, said in an interview.

"And the impact of not being able to do that is devastating."