Golden Years Are Anything But for Needy Seniors

They were lovely affairs, extravagant ceremonies to honor Pauline Jenkins for some praiseworthy deed or another. In her younger years Jenkins ran two businesses of her own, headed the Pacoima Historical Society and worked in more charitable and civic organizations than she can remember.

Now that she is 85, those affairs have long ceased--the gilded plaques sit in a pile in her living room. But in the solitude of her Pacoima apartment, Jenkins is still at work. Now the task is figuring out how to make her $614 Social Security check cover rent, utilities and food and financing the extras, like stamps and cigarettes.

“I just go without,” Jenkins said, sitting on her bed.

There are times, lonely moments, when she marvels at her fate.

“I was once a very important person,” she said. “They had big parties to give me these things--champagne and all. What happened? I guess I just got old.”

Since the 1960s, the poverty rate among older people has improved significantly, primarily thanks to programs like Social Security and Medicare, researchers say. But this success masks the significant numbers of older people who, like Jenkins, have not been lifted up with this rising tide.

The very old, widowed, single women and minorities suffer comparatively higher rates of poverty than the overall numbers suggest, and their lives bear little relation to the “greedy geezer” image perpetuated in national discussions about entitlement programs for older people.

“Some of them don’t get SSI,” or Supplemental Security Income, said the Rev. Alicia Broadous-Duncan, executive director of the Northeast Valley Multipurpose Senior Center in Pacoima.

“Others only did [housecleaning] and they have minimal Social Security. Some are living with their children, and the children are receiving AFDC or general relief. It’s rough.”

In the San Fernando Valley, about 11,000 seniors, or 4.4% of residents age 60 and over, live at or below poverty. In Glendale, about 10% of people 65 and older live in poverty, while the rate in Burbank is about 8% for people in that age group.

Although the poverty rate for older people in the Valley and throughout the city declined slightly between 1980 and 1990, there are troubling signs that the rate is on the way up, said Dan Gerski, a planner with the city’s Department of Aging.

In the northwest Valley, the population of older people increased by more than 12,000 during the decade, more than any other area in the city. The second-largest increase was registered in the southwest Valley.

As the population of older people increases, so will the need for services that help keep them out of poverty, a need that is already evident.

In the city of Burbank, about one-third of the people on the waiting list for federally subsidized Section 8 housing are 62 or older. In Glendale, about one-third are 60 and older. And in Los Angeles, about 20% of Section 8 participants are 62-plus.

Even people who own their own homes may find that maintaining the property and property taxes is far too expensive on a fixed income. “Sometimes, seniors have to make choices, whether they will eat or pay their rent,” said Ann D. Smith, general manager of the city’s Department of Aging.

Social Security Debate

Nationally, the increasing population of older people has helped fuel a debate over Social Security and other entitlement programs.

Some predict that the elderly will overwhelm resources, creating a future of indebtedness for younger generations of Americans. Others argue that older people are being scapegoated and that the discussion has been too narrowly framed.

Martha Phillips of the Washington-based Concord Coalition, an anti-deficit group, argues that America is “becoming a nation of Floridas.”

“There are 3.3 working-age people to support every retiree. About when the baby boom generation is fully retired, we will be down to about half that,” Phillips said at a national conference on aging.

“Older people consume more resources than younger people, even when you count the cost of elementary, secondary and higher education.”

But some experts believe that such dire data serve to alarm rather than enlighten.

“Increasingly, the retirement of the baby boomers is being defined solely in financial terms, as an impending demographic disaster,” said Eric Kingson, an associate professor at Boston College’s Graduate School of Social Work.

“In doing so, it distracts attention from important ethical and moral concerns. . . . Overlooked is the moral obligation that each of us--old and young--have to one another,” Kingson said.

Kingson argues that there are solutions to the projected shortfalls in Social Security that do not require massive structural changes and cutbacks that would harm millions of older people.

For example, about 30% of the projected shortfall can be countered by investing trust-fund assets in private market funds, he believes. Further, the expanding senior population might be offset by a relative decline in the number of children being born, longer work lives and general economic growth, Kingson said.

Almelia F. Peak, a 71-year-old former probation officer, looked forward to this time of her life, when she would “not have to get up in the morning unless I wanted to.”

But there were things the Pacoima resident did not count on: that she would be forced to live with her daughter because housing costs are so high and senior housing has no openings; that she would have to return to work, not just because she likes being active, but because she needs the money; that her life would still be a struggle.

“It’s hard making ends meet,” said Peak, who works at the senior center in Pacoima. “That’s why I work here 20 hours a week and it’s still not enough.”

Recently, she got a letter from Medi-Cal saying she could no longer receive assistance because she earns too much on her job.

“I had no idea they treated seniors this way,” Peak said. “When you have done all you can do, and you can no longer be of service, they don’t think about you. . . . Politicians don’t care nothing about old people and children, we’re the first to get cut.”

Status Changes Quickly

Even those who are not poor during their youth may find themselves becoming poor as they become old.

“It’s the working class, the middle class that are in greatest risk of joining the ranks of the poor in older years,” said Marianne Fahs, director of the division of health economics at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York.

All it takes is for a woman to lose her husband or suffer through a long-term illness and the middle-class status she enjoyed during her younger years slips away, Fahs said. To be eligible for Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program, the well spouse must “spend down” the couple’s assets before receiving any assistance.

“It’s almost a built-in provision that you have to be poor to get services,” Fahs said. “So you become poor to get the support, which is otherwise astronomical.”

Older women may never have been in the work force or they may have worked only for a few years, leaving them dependent on their husband’s pension. Until 1974, men were allowed to sign away their wives’ rights to survivor benefits without the consent of their wives or any notification.

“It was his pension, so he got to decide,” said Amanda S. Barusch, director of the Social Research Institute at the University of Utah. “A number of women woke up the day after he died to find themselves with nothing, no survivor benefits.”

In the case of low-income couples, money that could be used by a wife after her husband’s death is sometimes spent to see the couple through rough times while he is alive.

Carmen Amper’s husband worked at Lockheed but suffered a long-term illness before he died. “When he passed away they just stopped everything,” said Amper, a Sylmar resident. “They said he had used up his pension.”

The kind of lives older people live today is a consequence of policies practiced during their younger years.

“We’re living now with the legacy of yesterday’s racism,” said Barusch, who interviewed women across the nation for her book “Older Women in Poverty--Private Lives and Public Policies.”

While the risk of poverty for white women fell 51% between 1970 and 1991, the risk dropped 26% for African American women. In 1991, the poverty rate for older African American women was 39%, three times the rate for white women of the same age. Black women without diplomas suffer the highest rate of poverty among the elderly.

“Women of color have higher rates of poverty than white women in all stages of the life cycle,” Barusch said.

Amper, the daughter of Latino farm workers, grew up during the Valley’s agricultural era. With 14 children to feed, her father couldn’t make ends meet working the fields alone, so the children attended school half a day and then joined him, picking and bunching onions, potatoes, alfalfa, asparagus and walnuts.

At 14, Amper began work as a “mother’s aide,” cleaning houses and taking care of children. She attended school one morning a week, until a bout with pleurisy hospitalized her for two years.

“I didn’t have much school,” Amper said. “The little I know I learned in the sanitarium. They had schooling there.”

There were no birthday and Christmas gifts as she was growing up. They had no shoes. A meal that included meat was rare, and treasured. “Sometimes I look back at what we went through and I wonder how we survived,” she said.

Today Amper is 71 and retired from a job as a clerk in a dart shop. She survives by budgeting, shopping with coupons and with help from her daughter. “The only way that I can keep my house is that my daughter sends me money for property taxes,” she said. “I couldn’t save enough for property taxes.”

Race Isn’t Factor

Whatever a woman’s race, her past does much to shape her life in old age.

Laurette Bineau, who is white, grew up in Maine, leaving school at 13 to care for her ill mother and work in a shoe factory. “We had no money to pay for a nurse,” she said. “Those were the Depression years. It was tough sledding.”

Later, she worked in factories and then for A T & T.

Now 74, Bineau lives frugally in a Pacoima trailer park. Recently, her husband died and she learned that she will begin receiving his Social Security check, which is larger than hers.

“I’ll be able to buy food and make small repairs on the mobile home,” she said. “But they have to be small repairs.”

Without Social Security, it’s clear that more older people would be in poverty. The drop in the poverty rate for seniors demonstrates the potential benefits of a similar program aimed at children, which Barusch characterizes as “a universal income support for families.”

“What we don’t need,” she said, “is to pit the children against the old people so we can have an excuse to dismantle the one thing that’s working well.”

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