When Life’s Possessions Must Fit in a Single Room
It’s a perfectly nice room, as hotel rooms go. Clean, bright, with a wallpaper border of pretty pink flowers and a breeze blowing in through the sliding door that leads to a balcony.
Mildred Kaplan has filled it with comforts from the apartment that had been her home for 45 years--her bed, television and microwave; pictures of her sons and their families. Her answering machine sits next to the phone. There’s a cereal box on her bedside table, milk in her tiny refrigerator, a bunch of bananas ripening on a hook nearby.
“I can get by like this, I suppose,” Kaplan says, surveying her small, tidy room at the Shalom Retirement Hotel. “But when I think about everything I had. . . .” She stops, her sentence choked off by a sob.
Three weeks ago, the 80-year-old woman was forced to move from her two-bedroom apartment near Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. The owners plan to renovate the building, so all six tenants had to leave.
Most of her neighbors were able to find new places, but Kaplan--whose only income is $800 a month in Social Security payments--found herself priced out of the neighborhood, where $1,500 a month is now the going rate for an apartment like hers. She’d been paying only $400, thanks to the city’s rent control law and her longtime tenure.
The eviction notice--giving her 30 days to leave--sent her into shock, then panic, then depression. After weeks of searching, she settled on the Shalom Retirement Hotel. She could see its marquee from Fairfax Avenue and knew a few of its residents from among the coterie of women she kibitzed with at the beauty salon.
Her small room costs $1,300 a month, which includes meals, maid service and a daily roster of activities. She’s paying for it with the $5,000 relocation grant her landlord was required to provide. She plans to stay, she says, “only until I can find a real place. Or until my money runs out.”
It’s a short walk, but a world away, from the home she knew for more than half her life. And the loss she feels is not something that maid service, bingo games and exercise classes can replace.
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I heard from dozens of readers after I wrote last month about Kaplan’s search for housing. Some offered to donate money, others supplied leads on affordable apartments in such far-flung places as Panorama City, Huntington Beach, Riverside. Many complained that they or others they knew were facing the same plight--part of an exodus of seniors being pushed into the city’s expensive and ever-tightening rental market.
“I have worked as a geriatric social worker . . . for three years, and in the last six months, I don’t think a week has gone by that we have not been contacted by a senior who has either already been evicted or is facing eviction,” wrote Wendy Stegall. “And the housing options for seniors continue to shrink.”
Most seniors are on fixed incomes, she said, “and many have no families or their families are not in a position to help them,” Stegall said. Only a lucky few can afford the rent at retirement hotels. And even those who can find the idea wrenching. “Many cannot face the prospect of giving up their belongings, as well as their privacy, to move into a single small room.”
Kaplan knows that pain firsthand. Her sons came over on New Year’s Eve to help her pack and haul her things--a lifetime of accumulation--away. “My clothes, my furniture, my shoes, my dishes--all gone,” she says bitterly. “I work all my life . . . then I have to give it all away.”
The retirement home is nice enough, she says. But she resents the structure of her days, the rigid schedule that dictates breakfast at 8, lunch--”soup every day,” she complains--at noon, dinner at 10 minutes to 5, “when I’m not hungry. Who wants to eat that early?” she says.
Shalom admissions director Lisa Kahn said such frustration is not uncommon. “It’s a major adjustment for them to give up their apartments, to part with their things. They feel like they’re giving up their freedom.”
But Kaplan, she says, “seems to be adjusting well. She’s not withdrawn, she’s downstairs all the time, she still gets out--to the beauty shop, lunch with the ladies a few times.
“We have plenty of residents like her. They say they’re going to try it for a few months, they’re not going to stay, they’ll find someplace else. They usually end up staying for three to five years.”
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I see what I imagine must be horror in her eyes when I meet Kaplan in Shalom’s lobby. Her gaze passes over the elderly women, sitting silently in the rows of chairs in the hotel lobby. She walks quickly past the darkened auditorium, where a dozen old people sit watching TV.
She has yet to go to an exercise class or sign up for a bingo game. She tries to get out every day, to shop, get her nails done, visit former neighbors. But what had been a two-block walk to the beauty shop is now an exhausting six-block trek, and it takes her past her former building, reminding her of a life that she can’t bear to remember, or to forget.
As I ride up with her on the elevator, she is greeted by a new neighbor, who ignores Mildred’s scowl and asks her name. “Mildred, huh. Well, I’ll have to tell my friend. She thinks she’s the only Mildred in the place. How long have you been here?”
Mildred ignores the question, if she even hears it. She studies the elevator panel. “What floor do you want?” is all she’ll say.
“She just moved in,” I answer for her. “And I’m not staying,” Mildred announces. “Just until I find an apartment nearby.”
The woman chuckles. “ ‘Just a month.’ That’s what I said, too. ‘Just a month, until I find something better.’ That was three years ago.” The elevator doors open, and the woman bounds off, headed for a bingo game. She turns to wave. “I’ll see you around, Mildred.”
Mildred sighs and looks away.
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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.
