One San Luis Obispo woman is struggling to find a place to live following an accident last year. The accident left her disabled and now she is unable to find accessible, affordable housing.
“It's tough to keep my head up,” Sabina Quezada said.
Quezada is now living out of her car.
“I have shattered bones, my back, my pelvis floor, displaced broken bones and helicopter to UC Davis,” Quezada said.
Four months ago Quezada was hit while biking in San Luis Obispo.
“I felt my hips and remembered flying and bouncing off the windshield,” she explained.
She says she can no longer do many of the activities she once enjoyed.
“It changed everything,” Quezada said, adding that she is barely able to move on her own. “It hurts so bad. I have shooting pains and I don't have the same income I did.”
The man who hit her did not have insurance.
According to the California Housing Partnership, people in San Luis Obispo County need to earn $39.77 per hour to afford the average rent of just over $2,000 a month.
“The lack of housing and the requirements for housing are pretty strenuous and I've seen the unhoused population grow tremendously in this county,” said Jamie Moothart with Access Central Coast.
Moothart works with people transitioning out of institutionalized settings. She says there are only 48 ADA wheelchair-accessible units on the affordable housing list in the county.
She says the waitlist for affordable housing is already long, but the waitlist for ADA-accessible units that are also affordable is even longer.
“If you have a disability that you didn't have before, physically injured from cancer or some kind of mental health disability that makes it so you can't work, your income drops a lot, you're applying for Social Security more than likely and then it's a waiting game to receive the Social Security and then there's a cap for Social Security anywhere from $900 to $1,800 a month,” Moothart said.
Although Quezada has some savings and applied for Social Security, she's struggling to find ADA-accessible housing but is still hopeful.
“I hope I can function on a somewhat normal level again,” Quezada said.
There are nearly 7,801 low-income renter households in San Luis Obispo County that did not have access to affordable housing, according to a 2024 SLO County Affordable Housing Needs Report.
