She was too scared to complain in case the owner of the flat she'd rented for 15 years put the price up.

But suddenly he did just that, leaving Ms Lansbury, then retired after 25 years as a nursing aide, just $70 a fortnight to live on. She didn't know where to turn.

"I must admit things were so bad at some stages I didn't care whether I was alive or dead," she says.

Ms Lansbury is one of a soaring number of ordinary middle-class women who find themselves on the verge of homelessness in older age.

According to a new report, it is a number that has risen dramatically in the past year as an ageing population, rising housing unaffordability, higher rental prices and lower levels of superannuation combine to leave older women unable to house themselves.

Commissioned by the Mercy Foundation, the report found that in 2012-13, 4880 women aged over 55 sought access to homelessness services in Victoria, a 30 per cent rise on the previous year.

Many had previously lived conventional lives working or staying at home to look after children. They either owned their own home or lived in long-term rental accommodation.

Maree Petersen, a gerontologist and researcher at the University of Queensland's Institute of Social Science Research, co-authored the report with researcher Cameron Parsell. She said: "Older people don't identify as homeless. They see themselves as having a housing issue … being people who have worked and raised a family and rented for 20 or 30 years.''

The report found that older women were less likely than men to stay in boarding houses or sleep rough because of a fear of violence; they tend to couch-surf or sleep in a caravan or car.

The Productivity Commission has found that nearly 40 per cent of people experiencing income poverty are older women; women over 55 typically have less than half the superannuation of men.

Meanwhile, in the five years to 2011 the number of older Australian women renting privately jumped by 70 per cent to 135,000 but fewer than 1 per cent of rental properties are affordable for lower-income earners.

Jenny Smith, chief executive of the Council to Homeless Persons, Victoria's peak body for homelessness, said: "We're concerned that without the appropriate responses now, we are allowing a perfectly able group of people to fall into a merry-go-round of homelessness and crisis accommodation."

Housing for the Aged Action Group co-manager Jeff Fiedler said more government funding for social housing was needed.