Yves here. This story gives a window into what is coming en masse in the US in the not-too-distant future: a deluge of older Americans turfed out of housing due to rising rents versus limited assets and pension payments. And as this article illustrates, these seniors can suffer permanent health damage when they try to live in their vehicles. Even if they eventually are able to get housed again, almost certainly will have shortened their life.
Keep in mind, as the article suggests, that this collision between housing costs and inflation was already destined to turn many American into literal road kill, albeit with the process taking a wee bit of time. But Trump cuts to social services and grand bargains to gut Social Security and Medicare look likely to make this bad trajectory worse.
As Lambert is wont to say, “Everything’s going according to plan!”
By Aaron Bolton of MTPR. Originally published at KFF Health News
Over two years ago, Kim Hilton and his partner walked out of their home for the final time. The house had sold, and the new landlord raised the rent.
They couldn’t afford it. Their Social Security payments couldn’t cover the cost of any apartments in northwestern Montana’s Flathead Valley.
Hilton’s partner was able to move into her daughter’s studio apartment. There wasn’t enough space for Hilton, so they reluctantly split up.
At 68 years old, he moved into his truck — a forest-green Chevy Avalanche.
Hilton quickly found out how hard it would be to survive. Hilton has diabetes. That first night, his insulin froze, rendering it useless.
Things didn’t get any easier that winter. On the coldest nights, temperatures dropped to about minus 20 degrees. Hilton kept the truck running, but eventually his fuel pump failed. He was on his own in the cold.
Hilton is incredibly optimistic, but in that moment, he said, his spirit broke.
“I just said I want to go to sleep and not wake up and I won’t have to worry about anything. I’ll just sit here and be a little popsicle in the truck,” Hilton recalled.
Hilton was one of tens of thousands of seniors in the U.S. who became homeless for the first time in 2022. A dramatic increase in the number of homeless seniors nationwide is overwhelming services for unhoused people.
Older Montanans especially are struggling because housing costs have skyrocketed since 2021, in part because of the rise of remote work. The state has one of the nation’s fastest-growing homeless populations, according to federal data.
University of Pennsylvania researcher Dennis Culhane estimated that the number of homeless people age 65 and up in the U.S. would triple between 2019 and 2030. He recently updated that estimate using federal data for a recently published paper.
“We are on track to meet that prediction. In fact, the growth has been slightly higher than we predicted,” he said.
According to Culhane’s research, the number of people 65 and older jumped by a little over a third between 2019 and 2022 alone. By 2022, there were about 250,000 people over 55 who were unhoused. About half of this population are homeless for the first time.
What researchers and advocates call the “gray wave” of homeless seniors is overwhelming service providers trying to help.
Wendy Wilson is seeing the gray wave coming firsthand. She’s a case manager at Assist, a nonprofit that helps Flathead residents struggling to meet their medical needs. In the past, that meant helping them get free meals or finding a ride to the doctor’s office.
Increasingly, Wilson helps older people like Hilton find housing.
“They have medical issues. It’s not easy for them to be living in a truck or at the homeless shelter when you have medical issues going on,” she said.
Wilson found Hilton a spot in early 2023 at the Samaritan House in Kalispell, which has private rooms. But after five months of living in his truck, Hilton’s health had gone downhill fast. He had several fainting episodes at the shelter, then-manager Sona Blue said.
“It scared us because we have no medical care in this facility,” she said.
That’s not usual for shelters. Finally, Hilton took a bad fall, and shelter staff sent him to an emergency room.
The doctor who treated Hilton discovered he had developed pressure wounds from sitting for months in the same position in his truck. Because of the neuropathy in his limbs from his diabetes, Hilton couldn’t feel the pain. Those wounds never healed and became infected, another common complication of diabetes.
Hilton had one leg amputated. Later, his other leg was amputated as well. Returning to the shelter in a wheelchair wasn’t an option: There were no shelter staffers or medical personnel available to help with his basic needs.
A handful of homeless service providers, including shelter staffers and other medical case workers, tried to help Hilton find another place to go. They put him on waiting lists for the limited supply of subsidized housing in the area.
Wilson secured one of the few slots in a Medicaid program that helps pay for assisted living for Hilton. But it can take a year or more for units to open. So Wilson crossed her fingers that Hilton would get lucky before he was released from the hospital after his second amputation.
Many seniors across the country are stuck playing the same dangerous waiting game, said Caitlyn Synovec with the National Health Care for the Homeless Council.
“Sometimes they can’t be safely served in a shelter because they have issues with incontinence or cognition. Then they’re more likely to be on the streets, and their conditions will worsen quite a bit,” she said.
Communities are looking for solutions.
To serve aging people with complex medical needs, homeless shelters for seniors are cropping up in such cities as Salt Lake City and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Montana recently got approval from federal health officials to use Medicaid funding to temporarily help people with medical conditions make rent.
But that’s not enough, according to Synovec. She said the real solution is building more affordable housing so older Americans don’t become homeless in the first place.
That housing will need to be accessible, too. Older homeless people like Hilton need homes they can safely navigate. Because of his new wheelchair, he needed a ground-floor apartment.
In the fall, Hilton finally got a spot in a facility that would take his Medicaid waiver. He also got an electric wheelchair to make it easier to get to doctor appointments in town.
Hilton said he hasn’t pushed his new wheelchair to its top speed yet. “It goes fast for a wheelchair. I’m going to find out when I go down to dinner. I’ll stretch it out, break it in,” he said with a laugh.
Hilton is grateful to finally have stable housing. Wilson is grateful too. She said it was one of the few times she’s been able to help a senior regain housing.
“It was a woo-hoo moment,” she said.
As long as the facility stays open and the Medicaid waiver program isn’t cut, she’s confident Hilton will have made it through homelessness.
This article is part of a partnership with NPR and Montana Public Radio.
18 comments
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I live on a less than average income from S.S. Thank God, I live in China, otherwise I’d be living in a snowbank in Anchorage Alaska, my old home, Mike Liston
A very sad story with a bittersweet ending. But apparently no systemic resolution in sight. For each “success” story, there are likely thousands who have not gotten anywhere close.
Inequality, inflation and housing are all serious problems but life is full of choices. Hilton and others in his position could try searching “us places affordable rent social security” for cities where median social security benefits are sufficient to cover the median cost of living including median rent. Most have high unemployment but that wouldn’t ordinarily be an issue for a retiree. Rents are probably low in those places because the number of units for rent exceeds the number of qualified renters so landlords may be flexible on minimum income to rent ratio, particularly for a tenant with a stable source of income.
Are you kidding? You have no idea what poverty amounts to.
If Hilton can’t afford to keep his car warm, how can he possibly afford to move? Being on Medicaid = having less than $2000 in assets, IIRC.
Life is not “full of choices” for poor people. I get so sick and tired of trying to explain that to people who obviously don’t understand poverty. Poverty robs people of options. If people are also chronically ill and elderly, their life choices become even more limited. Why is that so difficult to comprehend?
I have been told by people who are financially comfortable that I just need to think more positively. Perhaps create a vision board to manifest a better life for myself! Talk about the ignorance that comes with privilege. I can understand why the man in this article thought “Why not just freeze to death in my vehicle?” It seems preferable to living through the hell of poverty.
What we need is help, real concrete material benefits help. We are not getting it. No one is coming to save us. I am tired and sick. Every night, my prayer is that I will not wake up the next day. I look forward to the time “when my morning comes around” as Iris Dement sings so beautifully.
You suppose this has anything to do with rising homelessness? Including for seniors?
‘It was humiliating.’ Evictions in these cities are worse than before Covid
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/24/business/evictions-rent-housing-inflation/index.html
Hilton is a victim of choices made in DC.
I meant no disrespect to Hilton or others in his position. But I think relocation would be a far better option for him than freezing to death in his car.
Unless we are going to go to a hukuo type system, the wealthy will always have first choice of where to live. An unfortunate byproduct of current inequality is that the upper classes have far more resources to devote to those choices. The less well off (not just the very poor) need to adjust to that reality.
Kalispell has become a magnet for upper income people particularly due to physical beauty, four season recreational activities, proximity to Glacier NP, an airport with frequent flights, etc so the cost of housing there has increased. The same could be said of many resort areas, other Intermountain cities such as Boise and Bozeman and even the big coastal cities.
There’s not so much a housing shortage in this country as a shortage of housing in places where the professional classes prefer to live. Rather than condemning older individuals like Hilton to misery and even early death while they struggle against market forces it would make more sense to provide them with resources for relocation to a lower cost area.
With all due respect, well not, you are doubling down on stupid.
What about” he’s too broke to go anywhere” do you not understand???
And now he is permanently disabled and needs assisted living/nursing home level care. Pray tell how he finds that anywhere in the US other than where he is now.
And the poverty rate in Columbia Falls is way above the US average, at >14%. It is not a wealthy area.
It also has no sales tax v. an average of 7.3% across the US, a major boon to a poor person.
This chart shows that Columbia Falls is MUCH poorer that Kalispell, disproving your thesis about rentals.
https://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/montana/columbia_falls
Columbia Falls is also markedly lower income than the US overall:
What effect would mass deportations of 8 to 15 million undocumented,
number is in dispute,
have on availability of rentals and prices?
And being a troublemaker, how much housing could be rented for America’s seniors with the money flushed down the Ukranian toilet?
First, Trump is going to have trouble deporting the ~1.3 million who have final deportation orders + the estimated 400,000 who have committed crimes. Even those number will be massively costly to push out of the US.
Second, the distribution of illegal immigrants does not necessarily map well on to where seniors are having trouble finding affordable rentals, which is everywhere. This story focuses on a man in Columbus Falls, Montana, population 5,300. Think “mass deportations” will have any effect on rental prices there>
Third, mass deportations may increase food costs, since a lot of illegal workers are employed at establishments that massively violate labor safety regulations, staring with meatpackers. That used to be highly-paid work precisely because it was nasty and risky. We’ll go back to expensive meat packing and we ought to have other labor-intensive food like berries become very pricey.
Fourth, while I very much want to see an end to US spending on Ukraine, if you think any of that money would go to affordable housing, particularly under the Trump Administration, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
Good points. Sometimes impolite and even ridiculous questions need to be asked.
However, few live in Montana compared to our big cities.
I’d be willing to pay a quarter more for lettuce. Little of food costs are field labor, they are packaging, shipping, advertising, profits.
Christopher Ranch in California raised it’s pay and attracted thousands of new employees after ICE raids.
https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2017/07/30/how-gilroys-christopher-ranch-fixed-its-labor-shortage-a-pay-increase/
San Francisco, for example, has 40,000 undocumented, living in what were once the most affordable working class neighborhoods. Los Angeles, millions of undocumented.
Avoiding nuclear war has a high cost benefit threshold.
You are shifting grounds, which is bad faith argumentation and a violation of our written site Policies.
You were trying to claim that Trump policy changes will help the elderly poor. They won’t. You being willing to pay more for food does not change the fact that the poor will pay more for food and thus be worse off.
Little of food costs are field labor,….
Now.
If you lose 40% of your field labour and processing labour, how much are you going to need to pay to replace that labour with legal US residents? Those people are regarded as unskilled labour but they, in most cases, are highly skilled but just not with credentials. And most of those jobs are not fun.
I remember listening to CBC interview with a farmer from outside of Windsor Ontario during the pandemic. He was frantic to get his seasonal workers in from Trinidad, IIRC. Most of them had worked for him for a decade or more.
When the CBC reporter asked him about hiring Canadians he explained that it took real skill to handle soft fruits and that he was not happy about the thought of a newbie operating a half-million dollar piece of equipment where if something went wrong, not only the equipment might be badly damaged but people could be killed.
This is happening all over the county. I’m in Wisconsin, the fastest growing homeless population is seniors. At a public meeting recently on housing, our homeless shelter person related his intake that day, a 60 yr old with health issues that stopped his working, consumed all his savings and personal retirement and took his house.
And the tech bros don’t have enough power or money. Make yourself sick and listen to this Mark Andriesseen interview.
https://youtu.be/TEGVM6y6lwM?si=84w0ERezA2wQ4l-3
We are a shi**y country. I’m filled with despair.
Lots of Americans are probably going to have to end up retiring abroad or face poverty, in my opinion. The costs of healthcare and living costs in general in the US are unaffordable.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anything barring a political revolution that is going to change the current situation. The Medicaid system is incomplete at best and the US seems to be seeing costs for healthcare, housing, food, etc, grow very rapidly. There are also the costs to senior care.
The only alternative is a lot of people ending up in poverty in their senior years. I don’t see any other options. The American elite are just too greedy and there are also “local elites” (think certain landlords, and other people who are powerful locally in the US).
Retiring abroad is not a miracle solution and has many pitfalls as well, but it seems like the lesser evil right now.
Yes, I’m moving to Costa Rica next week. I’ll be taking Hilton with me. Our bags are packed and we’re ready to go…
“I’m moving to Costa Rica next week.”
There is reason to think you will be quite comfortable there. I am pleased.