AARP Pushing to Help Ease California’s Soaring Housing Costs

Eduardo Rubalcava, 74, is a retired chemical engineer in Sacramento. He’s watched prices of everything climb and the cost of living in California get “higher and higher, faster and faster.”

Of his four adult children, two have bought homes in the state, although one had to move to do so; two others “just have not been able to afford to buy a home,” he says. And he watched two of his siblings move out of California and into other states “because it’s much cheaper there,” he adds.

That’s the on-the-ground reality in a state where the median price of a home is projected to exceed $900,000 in 2026 — and where only 18 percent of households will be able to afford to purchase a median-priced home, according to the California Association of Realtors.

The ongoing struggle of residents to secure a slice of the American Dream is motivating AARP California to focus on housing as a top priority in the state legislature this year.

“Housing is such a critical issue, particularly for older adults,” says AARP California State Director Michael Murray, who points to a handful of bills recently passed in the state Legislature, or that are in the pipeline, that offer “solutions that start to make a dent” in the affordable housing crisis.

California has long been an expensive market, but costs have continued their upward trek. For California residents, “It’s remarkable how quickly house prices have gone up across the state, and how hard it is to enter homeownership,” says Carolina Reid, the faculty research advisor at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The rents are no picnic, either,” adds Jordan Levine, the senior vice president and chief economist of the California Association of Realtors, which monitors the rapidly rising prices. The high cost of finding a place to call home “largely explains the out-migration from California to other states,” Levine says.

With support from AARP, the Legislature in 2025 passed several housing-related bills. One bill streamlines the building of multi-family units in already developed urban areas. A second makes it easier to build high-density housing near heavy transit areas, where residents can save considerable money by using high-speed rail systems — like San Francisco’s BART — instead of driving their own vehicles.

And a third bill makes it easier to build or rebuild accessory dwelling units in declared disaster zones. ADUs are smaller — and more affordable — houses built on existing single-family lots that often offer as much living space as apartments and can be sources of rental income. They give older residents options for close-by living quarters for caregivers or their own adult children who can no longer “afford to live [where] they grew up,” says David Azevedo, AARP California’s associate director for advocacy and community engagement.

COSTS HIT OLDER RESIDENTS HARD

In the coming year, AARP will continue to focus on legislation that increases the state’s housing supply and reforms laws that make it difficult to build housing where it is needed the most.

The ever-rising costs of any kind of housing hit older residents — who are often on fixed incomes — especially hard. Outside of the cost of housing itself, they also must contend with the ballooning expenses of property taxes, groceries, transportation and the home maintenance required for them to age in place, says Murray.

“California’s older adults are our fastest growing demographic — and also the fastest growing demographic of housing insecure and homeless people in California,” he says.

But AARP is working hard to keep the dream of living in California alive — by focusing on the reality of the state’s affordable-housing crisis, says Murray.

Azevedo adds that California is “a big, big, beautiful state.... There’s plenty of slices of the California dream that are available for people. But we just have to build the dream.”

For more information, visit aarp.org/cahousing. ■

Neil Pond is a journalist who’s written for publications including Parade and Variety. This is his first story for the Bulletin.

MORE ON HOUSING

• AARP Future of Housing
• Housing: Livable Communities
• Affordable Housing: AARP Foundation