Our city is now the nation’s worst provider of affordable housing with only 12 affordable living units available per 100 seeking households. Fixed-income seniors comprise well over ¼ of these households and senior communities are at capacity with waiting lists up to two years. Their rents are elevating well beyond thresholds of fixed income affordability. They’re stuck where they live, paying higher and higher rents first at the expense of food, then medicine, then utilities, and having neither the physical nor monetary means to absorb the effort or costs of moving to lower rent residences even if they were available. Priced out of apartments beyond their capacity to pay, they are soon evicted with a credit black mark making it virtually impossible to rent anywhere again. Housing programs which exist to provide rent subsidies to the lowest income seniors are backed up 2 years for applications and another 2 years for placement. With few remaining possessions and fewer options, they move into high-priced weeklies until the money runs out, sending them to capacity homeless shelters, cars and city streets. The fortunate few may rent rooms from strangers, becoming easy marks for cons, theft and crime. And for all of them, options dissipate eventually cycling them back to those same shelters and streets they fought to avoid. Most are 70-95 with progressive health conditions, few if any basic computer skills to navigate sparse online resources and no available surviving family to intervene. An entirety lost, neglected and unemployable generation with no remaining resources, transportation or connections, their final days are spent on the streets, some in abusive nursing homes, and others in the silence of mortuaries.
This is the actual real life progression of old age for so many elderly you will never ever meet.
If this makes you sad, don’t miss the more important opportunity to be angry.
If you want to be part of the change, help #TeamHopeLink stop this now.