On a recent morning in the Ridgeview/Webster neighborhood of Eastern San Diego, Chuck Scott stopped by to check on his truck.
He was with a healthcare worker from a local rehabilitation center where he was staying. But the stay at the center was only temporary. The 69-year-old has been living out of his truck for the past two years.
“It's inconvenient because you have to go and take showers at people's houses and inconvenience them,” said Scott. “And it's not always easy to find places to eat. And it's not very comfortable to sleep in.”
Scott hardly stands out from the many people living in their cars in the same parking lot.
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Frank, who preferred to only go by his first name, and his partner Irene Rendon have called their truck home for six months.
“As far as the sleeping arrangement, I'll sleep right here and try to move my seat as far back as I can so my legs will stretch up,” said Frank. “A lot of times it doesn't work that way.”
“It's been hard, to get help,” said Rendon. “I thought I was on a waiting list for six months, and I'm not even on a list. I thought I had done the footwork. I just thought the government was going to help homeless people. Why do we have to jump through all these hoops to get housing?”
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The group, all above the age of 55, find themselves in the middle of a growing crisis: Aging without a home.
California accounts for about a third of the nation’s homeless population and among this population, seniors are the fastest growing group.
In San Diego, people 55 and older living on the streets make up at least 29% of the unsheltered population, with 80% of them becoming homeless in their hometowns.
“These are people that have lived and worked here in San Diego their entire lives who have just been priced out of the system and unable to finish, in essence, in their homes that they had,” said Teresa Smith, CEO of Dreams for Change.
Dreams for Change is a nonprofit running San Diego’s safe sleeping sites. The two designated lots offer safe, legal camping space for people experiencing homelessness. Hundreds of individuals are currently housed and Smith says at least 45% of them are 55 and older.
“I think it's happening more rapidly now because of the cost inflation and the cost of living,” said Smith. “It is pushing them out of those housing situations and there's nothing to jump back into. And we have such a shortage of literally senior housing. So even as they start to approach those senior ages where they may need a little bit more of that support, as any other senior would, there is nowhere that it's affordable for them to even go.”
That’s exactly what happened to Scott, who at one point was living inside his very own one-bedroom apartment.
“My rent went from $800 to $1600 and I couldn't afford to move back in after they remodeled,” said Scott. “They said they would give me the first choice to move back in, but I only get $1,000 a month in social security. How can I afford to pay $1,600 a month? I can't.”
Stories like Scott’s are common, especially among the older populations living on the streets.
“For being an older, [an] older gentleman out here on the streets, it's kind of hard,” said Daniel Loffredo, an unhoused man living in a city shelter. “Some people are stuck in their old ways of not trying to get help for themselves, like being stubborn, that's how I am. I won't call an ambulance to come and help me. I'll lay there and die. I don't care. That's just me.”
Loffredo is currently living at one of San Diego’s safe sleeping sites.
Strong and mostly healthy, he managed to be on the streets for the past 20 years until life started catching up to him. Now at 51 years old, Loffredo suffers from a wide range of illnesses.
“I'm dealing with sciatic nerve damage in my right leg, I got cellulitis, [and] other issues I don't want to get into,” said Loffredo.
Research shows that living on the streets prematurely ages and sickens people.
“When talking about homelessness, 50 is the new 75,” said Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.
Kushel has been studying senior homelessness for the past decade.
“Whether it be measures of cognitive decline, mobility, problems with function falling, all of the things that we usually think of happening to people in late life just happen to people 20 or 30 years earlier,” said Kushel. “And tragically, people also die.”
Kushel said their situation can also trigger anxiety, depression, and substance abuse.
“We heard from so many people who experience homelessness who told us that they use substances as a coping mechanism,” said Kushel. “Using things like methamphetamines to stay awake, using things like alcohol to help them cope with the anxiety, the fear, the difficulty falling asleep, those things.”
We took a ride with Heather Newhart, a homeless advocate who spends her days helping the unhoused. Driving down the streets of Downtown San Diego, the amount of unhoused seniors stands out.
“It's a variety of everything,” said Newhart. “It's not just addicts on the street. We've got a lot of seniors that are out on these streets because of the economy, their social security doesn't pay them enough, and there's no affordable housing for them. They become ill, and they have a choice between their medication or food or their homes.”
“Most of the seniors I know that are on the streets are definitely handicapped one way or another and are still waiting for their affordable housing, for their section eight or whatever, or senior living housing,” said Michael Anderson, an unhoused senior living in a city shelter. “They don't have enough spots for them.”
Anderson spent years on the streets after losing his job.
“Waking up at 4:30 in the morning every day to make sure you're packed up and ready to go before the cops get there is not fun, especially when I started living with other people and we would have to pack up our tents and everything,” said Anderson. “And being slightly physically disabled, it sucked for me, but it was really hard on the older people that are around us.”
At just 48 years old, Anderson now also deals with a variety of health issues.
“This becomes even more tragic when people have these aging-related health problems; cancer, heart disease, diabetes, things that we really can't treat effectively when people are homeless and we have no place for them to go,” said Kushel.
The health needs of seniors can require extra care and most shelters are not prepared to serve this growing population.
“What we do know is that seniors do require some different services and different levels of services to meet their needs, specific needs, as they are in the aging population, be it higher medical needs, higher, maybe mental. health type care,” said Smith.
“We need to, first of all, solve our housing crisis,” said Kushel. “We need to make every effort to create more housing, lowering the cost of housing, increasing housing subsidies, so that being an older adult living on a fixed income doesn't mean that you have to be homeless. We need to readjust our homeless services sector so that it is responsive to the needs of older adults.”
With a quarter of the state residents expected to be 60 or older by 2030, Kushel says the time to act is now.
“We think this is going to get worse before it gets better, and the time is now for us to start addressing it unless we're ready as a society to have huge numbers of seniors living and dying on our streets,” said Kushel.
Frank feels the urgency, expressing determination in his attempts to find a place to call his own.
“[I plan to] Get on the list with them so I can get on the housing list, and hopefully that moves quickly,” said Frank. "And that's all I can do, is just keep my head up and keep going, trudging along.”
Highlighting the ongoing struggles and hopes of those living on the streets.
“I'm hoping to get housing,” said Scott. “I've called PACE and they're supposed to get back to me.”
“I wish I could win the lottery, build a building downtown, or buy a building downtown,” said Anderson.
