The Home They Can Afford Is Ever More Elusive for Older New Yorkers
90 and Facing Eviction
Last month, 90-year-old Bella Hornung received an eviction notice from her assisted-living home in Brooklyn. She is determined to stay as long as possible, though aware that her options are dwindling.
Credit By Kassie Bracken on Publish Date April 29, 2014
Credit Kassie Bracken/The New York Times
Nubia Chavez and Manuel Acuña have been bouncing from rental to rental around New York City like millennials. They recently decamped to a $700-a-month room in an apartment in Queens, with a shared bathroom and no access to the kitchen except to make coffee. That means eating out most days and little privacy at home.
But Ms. Chavez, a housekeeper, and Mr. Acuña, a retired building porter, are no millennials. They are 65 and 72, and they say they are tired — of the moving, of the lack of permanency and of a lifestyle hardly suited to their age.
“I want to live in my own place,” Ms. Chavez said. “No more rooms.”
Norma and Rodolfo de la Rosa have their own place, in Astoria, Queens, but they recently put their names on a waiting list for an affordable residence for older adults because, they say, their Social Security checks cannot keep up with rent increases. The list has nearly 4,000 names.
And in Brooklyn, Jennifer Stock, 33, has been looking for a place for her ailing 89-year-old father after his assisted living residence in Park Slope announced it would shut down by this summer. The places she has considered charged too much or would not allow her father to keep his Medicaid-provided health care aides, she said, so she is now considering renting a private apartment for him.
Finding adequate housing has become an all-consuming preoccupation for many older New Yorkers, a group whose explosive growth and changing housing needs pose new challenges for the city. As serious as New York’s affordable housing shortage has become, the squeeze has been perhaps harshest on older adults. At a certain age, substandard living conditions become less tolerable, walk-ups are no longer viable, even stabilized rents become too high, and the need for housing with special services grows.
The intensifying demand for housing for aging adults already overwhelms the existing offerings, especially for the poor, senior services providers say. And the city, they say, has no comprehensive housing plan to accommodate an aging population.
“When you put all this together, it begs the question: What are we going to do?” said Bobbie Sackman, director of public policy with the Council of Senior Centers and Services of New York City. “How are we going to age as a city?”
The city’s older population is now its fastest-growing. In about 15 years, by 2030, New York for the first time will have as many residents 65 and older as those of school age — 15.5 percent of city residents, compared with 12 percent now, city planners say. By then, the city will have 300,000 more older people than the one million it has today. By 2040, it will have over 400,000 more than it does today.
The older population is largely white, reflecting the aging of early immigrant groups like the Italians and Irish, demographers say. But it will become increasingly diverse, they note.
“The increase in the older population is a major demographic change that’s upon us and will continue to be upon us going forward,” said Joseph J. Salvo, chief demographer at the Department of City Planning.
The aging trend is nationwide as more baby boomers reach retirement age, but New York’s older population has disproportionately high numbers of renters, people who live alone and who are poor. Almost a quarter of older adults in the city live in poverty.
The widening gap between rents and incomes in the city is hitting those people hard, even those in rent-stabilized apartments. About 51 percent of households led by an older New Yorker pay 35 percent or more of their income in rent, or above what the federal government considers affordable, making residents 65 and older among the most rent-burdened in the city, census figures show.
But housing for the aging has yet to become a priority.
Of the 165,000 affordable housing units created or preserved under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, fewer than 10,000 were set aside for older residents, the Council of Senior Centers and Services said in a recent report urging Mr. Bloomberg’s successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, to increase those numbers.
The city comptroller’s office found the city to be “woefully behind other areas of the country in providing viable subsidized and market-rate options suitable for and affordable to seniors” in its own report on housing affordability released last week.
“Absent a concerted effort, we’ll see an explosion of elderly people in shelters,” the comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, said in an interview.
Not Enough Options
With their access to public transportation and health care, their wide entertainment offerings and community services, cities like New York can be an ideal place to grow old. But with aging comes the need for not just adequate housing but also services that support waning abilities.
Today, even older New Yorkers of means can have difficulty finding the right place to live.
When the Prospect Park Residence, an assisted-living facility in Park Slope where monthly rates are about $4,500 a month and up, announced in March that it would close, residents and their families were sent into a panicked race to secure a spot in similar places across the city. They soon found out that those spots were scarce and, even when available, too expensive or inadequate.
“There’s this sort of hysteria about, there’s only so many places for people to move,” said Ms. Stock, whose father, a retired vice president at a telephone cable company, has Alzheimer’s.
New York has fewer market-rate housing options for older people, like assisted-living and retirement communities, than other major metropolitan areas, largely because it is an expensive place to put up or rehabilitate older buildings, senior housing industry experts said. At lower incomes, the options narrow even for the healthy and able-bodied.
With Social Security and pension checks of $28,000 a year, a 71-year-old retired warehouse worker in Brooklyn has tried applying for subsidized housing for low-income older adults, he said, but he has been put on a years-long waiting list. One mixed-income building had 10,000 applicants for 100 units; he did not make the lottery.
So the man shuttles between two public housing projects. One is in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where he lived before he broke up with his partner, who now sometimes lets him stay a night or two on the couch. The other is his niece’s apartment in Downtown Brooklyn, home to seven other people, where his bed is a brown sofa ottoman.
Sometimes, when it gets too crowded, he camps out in his Toyota van.
“You ever see the hogs in a farm?” said the man, whose name is being withheld because revealing his identity could jeopardize his hosts’ public housing leases.
But doubling up is not uncommon. Increasingly, older residents share living quarters with other family members — 31.2 percent live with two to four relatives, census data show, an increase from 21.3 percent in 1980. As one’s years advance, though, sleeping on a couch becomes less feasible, and some living quarters become less tolerable.
Maria Peralta, 61, a retired sewing machine operator and office custodian who has lived in an illegally subdivided basement in Queens since her divorce 20 years ago, said her asthma was getting worse in the stuffiness of her windowless room.
“Sometimes I can’t breathe,” Ms. Peralta said.
Parvati Devi, 67, struggles to navigate three flights of stairs after 43 years in her two-room apartment in a brownstone on West 90th Street. She has a torn meniscus in an arthritic left knee that requires her to use a walking stick.
As New York City Grows Old, a Housing Squeeze
With a wealth of services and public transporation,
the city is a good place to age, if you can afford an apartment.
the city is a good place to age, if you can afford an apartment.
Change in over-65 population,
2000-2010
Proportion of income paid in rent
by the average person over 65
35%
Increase
Decrease
New York City
100
30
500
1,500
25
New York
City suburbs
20
15
U.S.
10
5
1980
2007-11
1990
Ms. Devi is applying to a senior residence in her neighborhood, gathering doctors’ notes in hopes of gaining preferential status.
“I just want to get out of there,” she said.
Burden of Rising Rents
Even some older people in apartments suited to their needs are being forced to look for new housing. With rents rising steadily even in stabilized apartments, which have undergone increases of 2 percent to 4.5 percent each year in recent decades, the cost of housing is taking a bigger chunk of Social Security checks, pensions and savings.
The de la Rosas now pay $1,176 for their stabilized two-bedroom in Astoria, which they first rented 23 years ago for $560. The rent was not a problem until Mr. de la Rosa lost his office clerk job two years ago, after he became ill with an ear problem that gave him vertigo and his unemployment payments ran out.
The couple’s combined monthly income from Social Security is $1,580, and they are now tapping their savings.
Last February, the de la Rosas applied to Hanac-Pca, a residence for aging New Yorkers that opened in their neighborhood in 2012 under a federal program that once financed new construction of senior homes but no longer has funding. There are 66 apartments, and the waiting list has 3,700 names. “I wasn’t prepared,” said Mr. de la Rosa, 82. “I thought I’d work for another five years.”
Mayor de Blasio took office on a platform of creating more affordable housing. Advocates for older New Yorkers are urging him to incorporate senior units into his housing targets — for instance, setting aside for older residents 20 percent of the 50,000 new units the mayor wants to create through new requirements on developers in exchange for density.
City Councilwoman Margaret S. Chin, who heads the Committee on Aging, said the needs of aging residents should be incorporated into new residential building construction going forward, including wider doorways to accommodate wheelchairs.
“There should be ways that affordable apartments are adaptable so people can age in place,” Ms. Chin said.
Advocates are calling for funding programs like service coordinators — to help older adults with scheduling doctor’s appointments and managing paperwork to keep them at home as long as possible.
“It’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s a start,” said Rachel Fee, former director of federal policy and programs with the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development who is now a consultant on affordable housing.
But in a growing city, competition for affordable units is intensifying among all age groups. Mr. Salvo, the city demographer, said New York’s ability to draw young working-age residents would give it an edge over the rest of the country as Americans age: a favorable ratio of retired people to those still working, who provide the economic activity that helps pay for services.
“That will help determine what the impact of aging is,” Mr. Salvo said.
Providing affordable housing for older people presents special financial challenges, especially the need for additional rental assistance, housing officials said.
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“When you have a group on a fixed income, that’s a great housing need because we know rents are going to go up and the income will not,” said Jessica Katz, the assistant commissioner of special needs at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
Mr. de Blasio is expected to address the subject of older city residents in his coming housing plan.
Packing Up
Some older New Yorkers say they are now considering what was once unthinkable: leaving the city.
Anna Santorinios moved to Astoria from Greece in the 1980s and was so attached to her ethnic enclave that she has not learned English. She said she did not have the luxury of time to look for cheaper housing.
Ms. Santorinios, 75, lives with her husband, George, 73, who has Alzheimer’s. Their $1,220 monthly rent has grown almost as high as their income of $1,234. A son, a taxi driver, lives with them and helps out financially, she said, but for the first time she is seriously considering her other son’s offer to move into the garage of his home in Pennsylvania.
Just the thought of leaving her Greek markets, her church and neighbors makes her burst into tears.
“I have everything here,” she said through a translator, crying.
Many others have nowhere else to go, and no dream other than to live in decent housing in the city where they have built lives.
Ms. Chavez, the housekeeper who has been moving from room to room with her partner, said she would love a one-bedroom in Brooklyn or Queens with its own kitchen.
Ms. Peralta, the retired seamstress living in a basement, said she would like a studio or a one-bedroom in a quiet place in Queens or Manhattan.
Ms. Devi, on the Upper West Side, aspires to a quiet one-bedroom in an elevator building that will allow her to keep her cat.
Some, however, sound defeated, their expectations low.
“I’m close to the grave,” said the 71-year-old man who alternates between public housing and his car. “So I guess that’s my next apartment: the grave.”
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