Communities need to handle this sort of thing better.
My Dad owned three old "mill houses" (small frame houses built in the 1930's) that he rented out cheap, just down the road a bit. There was a little old lady I called "Aunt Ola" all my life (though she wasn't actually kin) who rented one from him. She was a widow lady with basically no family who lived on Social Security... she was probably pushing seventy when she rented the place, somewhere around 1969.
As the 1970's went by, he raised the rents on the two houses on either side of her. He kept her rent the same as the day she'd moved in, and really it had been little more than "token rent" even then.
If I remember rightly, he charged her $30 a month. It wasn't much of a house, but he was getting more like $120 a month from the other two houses when she passed away in 1982. (They'd probably cost you $400 a month now.) We'd go and visit her sometimes just to keep her company; take her some food on Thanksgiving and things like that. They used to send me up the road to collect her rent from when I was probably 10, because she liked children and enjoyed seeing me. When I was 15, I asked my parents how she was related to us and they told me "she isn't, we just told you to call her Aunt Ola when you were little, because she likes to think we're like family." I asked my Dad "why do we take care of her and barely even charge her rent, if she isn't a relative?"
He said "Because she's a widow woman with no family, and it's the right thing to do."
Being an inquisitive child, I asked another question: "Why charge her rent at all then? We don't need her thirty dollars a month, do we?"
My Dad, a wise man, said "Because she likes to feel that she is paying her own way, it helps her to keep her dignity." He went on to explain that he'd told her once that if she was short of money she didn't need to pay him, but she'd insisted on it and said "I pay my bills!"
It's a pity things can't be more like that these days.