Younger baby boomers are facing a homelessness crisis as rents skyrocket and outpace Social Security
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- Baby boomers, especially younger members, comprise a growing percentage of homeless people.
- Many are struggling to keep up with skyrocketing rents while pandemic aid dwindles.
- A shortage of subsidized housing is compounding the problem.
While housing costs in the US continue to skyrocket and homelessness has become a crisis, no group appears to be getting hit harder than young baby boomers.
Data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development obtained by The Wall Street Journal showed that adults 65 and older comprised the fastest-growing portion of homeless Americans.
From 2007 through 2017, the percentage of people 51 and older in homeless shelters rose from 16.5% to 23%, a rate greater than what would be expected just from the increase in people of that age group. In 2018, the department started tracking people 55 and older in homeless shelters, and the figure rose from 16.3% to 19.8% in 2021.
The National Health Care for the Homeless Council reported that the proportion of patients 50 or older who it serviced in 2022 was 36%, up from 25% 15 years earlier.
"This is a level of a problem that we have not seen before," Barbara DiPietro, the group's senior director of policy, told the Journal. "We are seeing older people in shelters and encampments or who are living in their cars at a rate that we never had before."
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This trend seems to be exasperated by "trailing edge" boomers, the second half of the group, born between 1956 and 1964. The Wall Street Journal said this group entered the workforce and immediately felt the economic impact of the recessions in the mid-1970s and early '80s, which made the group's overall financial health more precarious as they entered their retirement age.
Many of the "trailing edge" boomers experienced homelessness for the first time later in life. A 2017 University of California, San Francisco, study found that 43.6% of the homeless adults ages 50 or older that it interviewed became homeless for the first time after turning 50.
Living costs are skyrocketing, and pandemic aid is disappearing
All older people who are retired or heading into retirement are doing so at a time when two economic forces are working against them: housing costs and an end to pandemic-era aid programs.
According to the Social Security Administration, the average Social Security benefit is now $1,706 per month, more than $300 below the nearly record-high national median rent price of $2,052.
Rent increases have hit Florida — which has the second-highest rate of US citizens 65 or older and the largest total number of people that age and above — especially hard. Half of the 20 metro cities with the steepest rent increases since the onset of the pandemic are in Florida, the Journal reported.
Additionally, of all retirees who moved to a new state in 2022, 11.8% went to Florida. North Carolina, at 9.6%, was the only other state close to that.
Meanwhile, as the number of Americans 65 or older is expected to grow 45% between 2020 and 2040, from 56 million to 81 million, the volume of available affordable housing is shrinking.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data found the US had at least 600 fewer nursing homes than it did in 2017. In Florida, there are long waiting lists for low-cost senior housing and long-term care facilities paid for by Medicaid, the Journal reported. A Florida Housing Coalition study found the state had only 25 affordable and available rental units for every 100 extremely low-income renters.
Government data obtained by the Journal showed homelessness was up 11% from 2022, which would crush the previous record of 2.7% in 2019, and the end of COVID-19 relief is not helping.
"The COVID-relief funds provided a buffer," Donald Whitehead Jr., the executive director at the National Coalition for the Homeless, told the Journal. "We're seeing what happens when those resources aren't available."
One example is the expansion of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to help feed low-income families during the earlier days of the pandemic, which came to a halt in March. At one point in 2021, the program was believed to have kept 4.2 million out of poverty.
Without COVID-19-relief resources, many older people are relying even more on their Social Security benefits. According to the AARP, 45% of people 65 or older rely on Social Security for at least half of their income, and the payments keep 16 million older Americans out of poverty each year.
If housing continues to become harder to find and costs continue to skyrocket, older Americans will increasingly need to find other forms of income, or the homelessness crisis will almost certainly get worse.
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