Looking for a place to live

Well I am in Bakersfield today looking for a room to rent that I can call home. I left the San Francisco Bay Area because it was too cold for my old painful body. Bakersfield is plenty warmer by about 40 degrees. The temps have been over 100 most days lately but this week it is predicted to go just under the century mark for about a week. The heat has done what I needed it to do for me ie lower my pain. My pain is almost tolerable finally.

When I first arrived I found a room to rent for $300 a month including utilities and everything was going well until the landlord got evicted for failing to pay his bills. Since he got evicted so did I. I lost my security deposit and my last month's rent that I had paid in advance. The landlord had no money to return it to me. That is illegal and I could have filed a complaint and maybe gotten at least some of my money back but the stress involved in all that is just not worth it to me. So now I am homeless and looking for a new room to rent.

While I still had a room I was perusing the listings on Craigslist for rooms to rent and there were typically about six good new listings a day that were suitable for me. Now that I am out of my old room and homeless there are suddenly no rooms listed on Craigslist or any of the other room share listing services either. I guess it is just Murphy's Law kicking in and screwing it up for me. It has been five days now without a single place being listed that I could afford on my income of $900 a month. I do have a place to stay but the arrangement was for a few days. Now that it looks like it will be longer before I find a place to rent the nice woman that put me up so that I wasn't sleeping outside under a bridge is wondering if she made a mistake letting me stay at her place. I may yet end up under a bridge if I don't find a place soon.

I don't worry about the situation because I am honestly trying to do the best job I am able to at looking for a place. What bothers me though is that there is basically no help from the government to provide low income housing for seniors and disabled poor people like me. With the baby boomers rapidly getting into this group now there is going to be a very serious shortage of available housing for them. I see nothing being done to improve the situation. Renting right now costs more than owning. I am not able to own because I am too poor and that makes my credit rating to low for getting a loan. Houses around here are selling for as low as $40,000 now with the recession. The mortgage on a house like that including insurance and taxes is about $350 a month. Yet to rent a room in the same house is more like $450. So why aren't more investors stepping up and making more rentals available at a lower price? Greed I guess is the only thing. That is why the government should step up and either help people like me get into a home like that or help investors or maybe just buy them and rent them at their cost so that we could have a roof over our heads. It is only going to get worse as far as I can see.

I just hope I find a place to live soon. Sleeping under a bridge might make my life just not worth living anymore.