March 26, 2026
Author: Nicole Newhouse (Executive Director, AZHC)
My mother was accepted to St. John’s University to study French. She is sharp. Sharp-witted, sharp-tongued. She had every reason to follow that path all the way through.
But she did what so many women of her generation did. She married. She left school. She raised her children and built a home, quietly setting her own ambitions aside because that’s what the world expected of her then. And it was also what she wanted to do.
When she and my father divorced, she had to go back to work for the first time in decades. She had no recent resume. No network to call on. No degree. Just her enduring intelligence and a fierce determination to figure it out.
And she did! She spent 30 years working for the state of North Carolina in accounts payable at the Department of Revenue—not chasing titles or promotions, just showing up every day and building stability from scratch.
Today she lives on Social Security and a state pension. She has friends that she’s known for decades, a grocery store she could navigate blindfolded, and a fiercely loving community in Cary, North Carolina that she built over 40 years.
By every rule we were ever given, she did it right. Twice. And yet, my sister and I spend more time than you’d expect talking about where she can afford to live. Not where she wants to live. Where she can realistically rent something that fits her needs.
It’s Not Apartment Hunting. It’s Waiting For a Door That May Never Open.
If you’ve never searched for housing on a fixed income, it’s hard to explain what it actually feels like.
There’s no Zillow filter for this. No clean search where you set a price range and pick a move-in date. Affordable apartments—real ones—often have waitlists that stretch months or years. Some lists open briefly and close again without warning. Many don’t advertise at all. Families piece together information from scattered websites, phone calls, and word of mouth, hoping they hear about something early enough to matter.
My mother’s income puts her between 30% and 40% of the area’s median income—a completely typical range for retirees who had jobs like she did. She isn’t an outlier. She’s the norm. And the system has no clear path for her.
In Arizona, rents have risen roughly 70% over the past decade while wages grew about 27%. The state is short tens of thousands of homes today—and more than 120,000 when accounting for years of underbuilding. Nearly one in four renters now spends more than half of their income on housing.
Those numbers don’t feel abstract when you’re the one refreshing the waitlists.
She Doesn’t Want More Space. She Wants Her Life Back.
A few years ago, my husband and I bought a home in a rural town near my sister so Mom would have somewhere stable to land. It seemed like the responsible thing to do. The house is lovely. And she hates living there.
Not the house itself—the life around it. The long drives. The unfamiliar roads. The feeling that everything she built is an hour away. She told me once that it feels like she’s watching her life from far away.
Housing conversations reduce everything to price per square foot and commute times. But people aren’t just looking for shelter. They’re trying to hold onto their routines, their neighbors, their independence, and their sense of place.
My mother doesn’t need a bigger apartment. She needs to be home.
“Just Move in with Your Kids” is Not a Housing Plan
My sister and I both have room for her. We’re lucky in that way. But let me say this plainly: that option existing does not make it a solution.
My mother is, as she proudly describes herself, a salty Irish señorita from Queens. She values her independence fiercely. And honestly? So do we. We love each other too much to pretend that long-term cohabitation wouldn’t eventually strain something.
“Move in with your kids” has quietly become one of this country’s unofficial housing strategies for older adults. It gets treated like a normal solution. But it isn’t. It’s a pressure valve. And millions of families don’t even have that.
We Got Lucky. That Shouldn’t Be How This Works.
Because of my work in housing, I knew how to track new affordable developments before they opened to the public. I knew to get my mother on an interest list early. I knew the questions to ask and who to call.
That knowledge is the only reason she has a real shot at an apartment in the community she loves. Most families don’t have that advantage. They’re searching blind, navigating a system that doesn’t explain itself, missing opportunities they never knew existed.
Housing shouldn’t depend on insider knowledge. Full stop.
This Isn’t Just My Mom’s Story. It’s Arizona’s Story Too.
My mother’s search is happening in North Carolina. But the math is identical here. Arizona has been underbuilding for more than a decade, and the pressure doesn’t stay contained. It climbs.
The nurse competes with the teacher. The teacher competes with the retiree. The retiree competes with the college student graduate just starting out.
Eventually, everyone is competing for the same shrinking pool of homes. That’s how housing shortages spread—slowly, then everywhere.
My mother isn’t the image most people picture when they hear “housing crisis.” She isn’t unhoused. She has a pension. She isn’t in any obvious, visible distress.
But if someone who gave up her own ambitions to raise a family, rebuilt her life after divorce, worked for 30 years, and retired with benefits still can’t easily find a place to live in the community she’s called home for four decades—that isn’t a personal failure.
That’s a signal. A loud, startling signal.
The Question More Families Are Starting to Ask
My mother’s story is emblematic of what happens when a country underbuilds for a generation and hopes the market will fix itself.
She’s still waiting for the right apartment to open. Across the country, thousands of families are running the same math, refreshing the same waitlists, hoping something comes through before their options run out. Most of them don’t have a backup plan. Most don’t have a housing professional in the family. Most are just waiting.
The housing crisis doesn’t arrive all at once. It arrives family by family, conversation by conversation—at kitchen tables, in cars on the way home from apartments that were already gone, as another day passes—until one day everyone realizes they’re asking the same question: Where are we supposed to live?
If that question lives in your family too, share this. Talk about housing where you live. Pay attention to what gets built, and who gets to decide.
Because the more of us who see this as a policy problem instead of a personal one, the sooner we can start treating it like one.