Miami seniors are increasingly falling into homelessness

Max Klaver, Tribune News Service

On a recent Thursday evening, Maria Morales pulled her car into a parking lot in downtown Miami. The 75-year-old, along with dozens of others experiencing homelessness, queued for a hot meal provided by the nonprofit One World One Heart. Shuffling through the line, Morales filled a deep plastic bowl with sausage and white bean stew. It was her first meal of the day. She carried it carefully in one hand, her cane in the other, as she limped back to her car, an SUV from the late-aughts that has been her home since July. Like many older homeless people, Morales is new to the experience. Miami-Dade’s homeless population is getting older, fast. Across South Florida — and across America — more and more adults aged 65 and up are finding themselves without housing.

Nationwide, the number of people older than 64 accessing homelessness services, like emergency shelters, ballooned by 20,000 — a 36% spike — between 2019 and 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Older adults are one of the fastest-growing homeless demographics. People 65 and older constitute 14% of Miami-Dade’s 3,800-person homeless population, according to the Homeless Trust, the county’s homeless services agency — nearly double the 8% represented in 2019. The Trust expects that number to grow to 22% by 2030. To blame are rising costs, particularly for housing, that outpace many older people’s fixed incomes. Natural disasters, a lack of affordable housing and long-term economic dynamics that have disadvantaged those born between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s also factor. All of those issues are particularly acute in an increasingly costly, hurricane-prone, disproportionately senior Florida, where public camping is now illegal and violators could face arrest. Florida has the third-oldest population of any American state, slightly younger than Maine and Vermont’s. The US Census Bureau estimates that 22% of the Sunshine State’s roughly 23 million residents are at least 64.

Dr. Margot Kushel, a practicing physician who leads a homelessness research initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, said it’s quite common for older people experiencing homelessness to have fallen into it for the first time after the age of 50. That demographic is less likely to have severe substance or mental health problems, Kushel said. Instead, they’re often able to point to a discreet event that led to them experiencing homelessness. For Morales, it was her husband’s death. The two lived together in a condo in Little Havana until he died of a heart attack in 2006. Her household income halved, Morales, then 56, struggled to pay the mortgage on her home. She blew through her savings. Her debts piled up. She lost her job. Formerly a nutritional educator for seniors, Morales was unable to find employment. “I wanted to keep working,” she said, “but, when you’re old, it’s almost impossible to find new work.”

As costs rose during and after the pandemic, Morales could no longer make ends meet. She then lost her home. Morales spent a year bouncing around friends’ couches and spare bedrooms as she looked for alternative housing. She quickly found that the $967 she receives in Social Security wouldn’t get her far in Miami’s increasingly pricey housing market. Eventually, she found herself sleeping upright in her car, crammed in alongside her 10-year-old Chihuahua, Besito, and all her worldly possessions. “Life got too expensive,” she said.

That story tracks with Kushel’s findings. “Every bit of reliable research,” said the physician and researcher, “shows that what determines the rate of homelessness in a community is its availability or lack of availability of housing for low-income people.” And in Miami-Dade, affordable housing can be hard to come by. That scarcity is putting an ever-greater strain on the county’s residents, who are among the most financially stressed urbanites in the country. Six in 10 Miamians are “cost-burdened,” a term HUD uses to describe people who spend at least 30% of their monthly income on housing. A third of Miami metro residents are “severely cost-burdened,” meaning half of their monthly earnings go toward lodging.

The county would need to add at least 90,000 new affordable units to offset the pressures that push households making less $75,000 toward homelessness, according to an estimate by Miami Homes for All, a housing nonprofit. Roxana Solano, director of Mia Casa, a senior homeless shelter in North Miami, agreed that a lack of affordable housing plays a major role in senior homelessness. Asked what brought most of Mia Casa’s 120 residents to the shelter, Solano replied succinctly: high rents. Ballparking, she estimated that two-thirds of her clients ended up homeless because of rent increases or, in cases like Morales’, a partner died and the surviving spouse was left priced out of the local housing market. “Many of them couch-surfed from one place to another until there was nowhere left to go,” Solano said. And as you get old, she added dolefully, your circle of support shrinks — people start dying. Beyond the dynamics of the current housing market, Thomas Byrne, a professor at Boston University who researches homelessness, noted that longer-term socioeconomic factors influence the rising number of older homeless people. According to Byrne’s research, those born between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s — people who are now between 60 and 70 years old — disproportionately experience homelessness.

As they came of age, the younger Baby Boomers faced a storm of economic challenges. They weathered multiple recessions in their 20s and 30s — critical earning years. Wages didn’t keep pace with housing costs, which rose as post-World War II government subsidies for affordable housing faded. In the labor market, they were crowded out by both older and younger generations. That demographic — 13% of Florida’s population — has been disproportionately represented in homeless counts, said Byrne, and is disproportionately vulnerable to falling into homelessness. Many in that age bracket have been stably housed their entire lives, Byrne noted. But rising costs combined with the threat of major health or economic shocks put them at “a really high risk of homelessness.”

Such was the case for Morales. As she spooned stew into her mouth, with Besito the chihuahua eyeing her expectantly, she thanked God for the meal. “Here,” she said, gesturing to the breadline that had grown so long it was starting to wind around the parking lot, “we’re not all addicts.”