Letters to the Editor: Elder Housing and Section 8

The Quiet Crisis: The U.S. Elder Housing Problem Gets Short Shrift

Only a handful of dedicated academics and advocates noticed the final report of the Commission on Affordable Housing and Health Facility Needs for Seniors in the 21st Century published last year. The 18-month study, “A Quiet Crisis in America,” was mandated by Congress and resulted in the most comprehensive examination of the unmet housing and long-term care needs of this country’s elderly population through 2020. It proposed a wide-ranging set of solutions to address these problems.

By analyzing the best available data and listening to the testimony of countless older consumers, professionals and policy makers, the report identified more than seven million older households that are having difficulty paying for housing or living in physically substandard dwellings. That number will rise to 11.3 million by 2020.

Even as this need is increasing, federal funding for affordable housing programs has been flat for two decades and the supply of low-rent, government-subsidized housing is dwindling as owners convert units to private-pay.

The commission concluded that current community-based care, supportive service programs and affordable assisted-living options inadequately address the needs of the almost 20 percent of today’s seniors with physical or cognitive impairments. Even as tomorrow’s seniors are less likely to experience these disabilities, it predicted that this country’s housing and health policies would be ill-prepared to confront the future age wave. Federal and state long-term care policies lack synchronization, the departments of Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services fail to coordinate their related programs, older people still prematurely enter nursing homes and state governments incur excessive long-term care expenditures.

More than 35 million Americans are age 65 and over, and most younger people have parents, grandparents or other relatives who are elderly. One might expect that a large share of the public would be very interested in the report, yet the media have only anemically covered the commission’s findings. Why do they ignore a story so relevant to most Americans? The easy answer is that housing for seniors is simply not a very sexy topic. It fares poorly as dinner party conversion next to the war in Iraq or tax cuts. But there are other reasons.

Older people do indeed suffer silently. Perhaps it is the stoicism born of living through depressions and fighting world wars. They don’t loudly broadcast their financial anguish when the interest on their passbook saving accounts drops to one percent, when they pay burdensome rents or property taxes, or drain their savings to replace that 30-year-old roof. The poverty of old age is not manifested by mothers on welfare, broken families, unemployment, drug problems, crime and other highly visible social problems. Adult children with care-giving responsibilities infrequently appear on talk shows airing their worries about where “to put” an aging mother, and their embarrassment about actually considering a nursing home. These emotions are felt daily by millions with impaired loved ones, but they are not the fare of newspaper stories. The problems of older Americans simply do not cry out for public attention.

Other reasons are only whispered: We should hold the adult children of older people accountable, and they – not the government – should assume financial and care responsibilities. We should also not sympathize with older homeowners who are having difficulty paying their bills. After all, they are living in highly valued properties. Let them refinance, get reverse mortgages or sell. Then, their problems will presumably disappear.

No doubt about it. The magnitude of the unmet housing and long-term care needs of older Americans depends on many such considerations. Nonetheless, however one dices, slices and chops the numerical estimates of older persons living in inadequate housing and denied affordable long-term care solutions, the gap between need and availability is alarming and becoming more so. The “quiet crisis” should not be quiet. Our society should not tolerate the unacceptable shelter and care arrangements endured by millions of older people, especially when there are solutions.

– Stephen M. Golant, Ph.D. Former consultant to the Seniors Commission, Professor of Geography and Institute on Aging,
University of Florida
A Quiet Crisis in America: A Report to Congress by the Commission on Affordable Housing and Health Facility Needs for Seniors in the 21st Century, 2002, is available from the U.S. Government Printing Office (stock number 052-003-01492-1). $48. Sections of the report are available at www.seniorscommission.gov.

Fixing Section 8

I have known Ed Rutkowski for many years and greatly admire his work. But we all need to be reminded that correlation is not necessarily causation before we start advocating against the Section 8 program (“Section 8 is Broken,” Shelterforce #127).

First, as the article points out, Section 8 seeks soft housing markets. This is because although the federal government repealed the “take one, take all rule,” most landlords take none. If federal law (or more state laws) required property owners to accept Section 8 vouchers, low-income tenants would have more choices and could be more widely dispersed in communities offering greater opportunities.

Second, it is not at all clear that if Section 8 tenants were not in these buildings anyone else would be. That it is better to have a long-term abandoned building than one occupied by a tenant who just might prove to be good for the community is not obvious to me.

Third, cities can manage this program better. In Philadelphia, where Section 8 became a proxy for expressing prejudice in several political campaigns, the city has frequently used the program as an emergency housing strategy. Placing families with little or no track record of stability in Section 8 can be a recipe for problems. Rather than putting a time limit on public housing as some have suggested, one could institute a program in which stable families with proven records of success within public housing “graduate” to Section 8, opening up units for families in greater crisis who need higher levels of service. This would be better for communities and better for the families in crisis.

Finally, let’s not forget that when substandard Section 8 housing is allowed in the program, regardless of how or when it became that way, the residents and not just the neighborhood are in trouble.

– Daniel Hoffman
Philadelphia