Lifestyle

Cheryl, 73, Spent Her Career in HR and Always Had a Place of Her Own. Then Her Rent Jumped Past Her Social Security Check: “Why Am I Still Fighting?”

By Mike Harper · November 11, 2026

In 2018, NBC News met Cheryl, a 73-year-old woman in the Los Angeles area who had always had a place of her own. She had retired from a career in human resources at the defense contractor Northrop Grumman. She told the network she had worked all her life since she was a teenager and had, in her words, “paid my dues as a lot of people have.”

That spring, her landlord raised the rent from 850 dollars a month to 1,395 dollars, an increase of more than 500 dollars, and more than her monthly Social Security check. She could not afford it.

By the time NBC News interviewed her, she had been sleeping on her sister’s couch since May. Her belongings were in a storage locker. She had given away the furniture that would not fit.

“I had a bed. I had to give that away. I had a couch. I gave that away,” she said. Tables, chairs, clothes and shoes went too. “I just had to be okay with letting them go.”

What she kept included a box of her daughter’s awards, among them a Rookie of the Year trophy from when her daughter started playing volleyball.

She told the network the situation weighed on her. “I’m older now, and I’m like, why am I still fighting for some place to live that I can afford?” she said. “And it’s just hurtful.”

The station said most of her neighbors had moved out because they could not afford the new rent. Some left the state. Others took in roommates. NBC News said it reached out to the landlord multiple times and never heard back.

Cheryl said she had been at her sister’s for more than six months and still could not find housing in her community that fit her budget. You can watch her tell the story in NBC News’s 2018 report on YouTube.

The squeeze she described has not gone away. In an August 2025 analysis of the State of the Nation’s Housing 2025 report, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that 58 percent of older renter households, meaning those led by someone 65 or older, were cost burdened in 2023. That is 4.5 million households paying more than 30 percent of their income for housing, up by more than 570,000 since 2019. The center said most of those renters were severely burdened, paying more than half their income.

If a rent increase is more than you can pay, it helps to ask for help early, before a notice turns into a move.

A HUD-approved housing counselor can walk you through local rental assistance, eviction prevention programs and the renter protections that apply where you live. Those rules have changed in many places since 2018, so current local advice matters more than an older news report.

You can also contact your Area Agency on Aging, which the Eldercare Locator can help you find, and ask whether any senior housing waiting lists or short-term aid are open in your area.

Keep records of every rent notice and every call or letter to the landlord, and do not ignore a deadline while you look for a new place.

This article is for general information and is not legal or financial advice. Details of Cheryl’s rent, Social Security and living situation are her account as reported by NBC News in 2018. This article was produced with the assistance of AI and fact-checked against the sources cited by LightWave Reports.