Lack of Support Services Forces Elderly Onto Streets

For Jim Walsh, retirement means waiting--on the streets--for a subsidized apartment.

Laid off by the shutdown of the shoe factory where he worked for 21 years, Walsh became homeless when his $12-a-week rooming house was renovated into pricey condominiums.

“Sometimes you can tell by the way people look at you, they think you’re a bum,” he said with a shrug. “But the older you get, the less they want to hire you, maybe for the insurance.”

Walsh, 70, is one of an already large and growing number of elderly people who are homeless.

“It’s appalling to think that anyone is homeless, never mind someone who is 70 years old,” said John Montgomery, director of Senior Homecare Services in Boston.

“In their eyes, they’ve been successful,” he said. “And to have to come to somebody for help and get bounced from shelter to shelter, that’s not only dangerous, it’s a human dignity issue.”

Pension and retirement plans are losing the race with the cost of living, and more and more people are no longer medically insured. When hospitalized, they often are evicted by impatient landlords and released to cope with fractured lives before they are fully recovered.

“The psychological trauma of homelessness is severe at any age, but I would think that for people who spent all of their lives working hard to accomplish something it’s just devastating,” said Beverly Ovrebo, a professor of health education at San Francisco State University who has studied homelessness among the elderly.

“What has happened is they have outlived their whole social world,” Ovrebo said. “Their friends have died, their families have died, their factories have closed. These are people who have in a sense become unassimilated.”

Gerontologist and psychologist James Dowd has called homeless over 60 “immigrants in time” because the jobs and housing to which they were accustomed have been left behind for a new world that disorients them.

Inexpensive rooming houses are endangered. In Boston, the number has fallen from 25,000 to 3,000 in three decades.

“Many of the people who lived in these units were elderly people on fixed incomes,” said Ann Maguire, the city’s emergency shelter commissioner. “Every day, the choices become harder: Do I eat, or do I pay the rent?”

Families, struggling themselves, often will no longer care for older relatives.

Maguire said she once received a call from a woman who wanted the address of a large city homeless shelter so she could drop her 85-year-old father off, apparently because he had Alzheimer’s disease.

Homeless advocates and experts on aging agree that the number of people over 60 living on the streets will escalate dramatically with the decline of social services, all in an era when Americans are living longer.

The Urban Institute estimates that 1 in 5 homeless people, about 114,000, were older than 50 in 1987, the last year for which figures are available. Three percent are over 65.

The number would be higher except that homeless people rarely survive to reach 65, according to the American Assn. of Retired Persons.

AARP says that, when compared to the general population, older homeless people are twice as likely to have high blood pressure, chest pains or memory loss and are 2 1/2 times more likely to suffer from depression.

Studies in Boston and New York homeless shelters have found a noticeable increase in tuberculosis cases, particularly dangerous to older people. Elderly homeless people studied also suffer from swollen legs and feet caused by standing up or walking most of the time.

“These are the diseases of homelessness,” said Philip Brickner, chairman of the department of community medicine at St. Vincent’s Hospital and Medical Center in New York.

Brickner said there is another illness common to the elderly homeless people who show up at hospital emergency rooms: They have been beaten, stabbed or shot by muggers and injured in run-ins with moving traffic.

Criminals know that government benefit checks arrive around the first of the month, and “the elderly are very frail and very easy prey on the streets,” said Joseph McPherson, director of a Boston daytime shelter for older homeless people.

“We all want to believe that thinking them away is enough,” said Brickner. “But it isn’t, unless we’re prepared to have corpses in the gutters.”