How a generation’s struggle led to a record surge in homelessness
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
By Jason DeParle
When his mother moved to a nursing home in 2009, Anthony Forrest was a struggle-laden man of willed cheer with rising health problems, declining job prospects, and no place to go. She paid the rent on the Washington, D.C., apartment they shared. He slept on the couch.
Only a niece’s warning that she was turning in the keys forced him hurriedly to pack. He stuffed his clothes into two trash bags, caught a ride to the gentrifying neighborhood of his youth, and slept in a parking lot.
Forrest’s displacement in late middle age began a homelessness spell that has lasted more than 15 years, and it epitomizes an overlooked force that has helped push homelessness among elderly Americans to a record high: the loss of parental aid. Without it, “I hit the skids,” said Forrest, now 70. “That’s when I became homeless.”
Throughout their lives, late baby boomers like Forrest — people born from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s — have suffered homelessness at uniquely high rates, for reasons many and varied. Their sheer numbers ensured they came of age facing fierce competition for housing and jobs. They entered the workforce amid bruising recessions and a shift to a postindustrial economy that pummeled low-skilled workers.
Rents soared. Housing aid faltered. Crack, especially in poor neighborhoods, left many in their prime grappling with addiction and criminal records.
Now the death of parents in their 80s or beyond is extending the tale of generational woe, leaving thousands of people newly homeless as they reach old age themselves. In four years, the number of homeless people 65 or older has grown by half to more than 70,000.
“You have a generation of adult children who depend on their parents because they can’t afford housing on their own,” said Dennis Culhane, a social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “When their parents die, they have no place to live. We’re seeing more and more of them on the streets and in the shelters.”
While homelessness is brutal at any age, Culhane called its surge among the elderly especially troubling. “If you go back to the creation of the American safety net, public destitution among old people is the very condition it was meant to prevent,” he said.
A worn figure whose life has been sculpted by twin forces — economic inequality and inner-city distress — Forrest personifies his generation’s struggle.
He has been a dishwasher, a janitor and what his mother called a “prodigal son,” whose drinking and drug use have been hard to overcome. A drunken driver nearly killed him two decades ago and left him too weak for steady work. Through a lifetime of rising rents, he has never had his own housing.
But in health or hardship, one safety net caught him: his mother’s apartment.
Since losing her, he has returned to his childhood neighborhood to sleep in shelters and abandoned buildings, rustle odd jobs and commandeer friends’ couches. Most days he sits on a stoop, drinking beer with an affable presence so enduring he calls himself “the mayor of Ninth Street.”
Forrest sees himself less a victim of the outsize forces that left his generation prone to homelessness than a man with the strength to survive them. “I been through hell and high water,” he said. “But I’m still here. Good Lord willing, I always make a way.”
Graduating from high school in 1974, Forrest joined the workforce during the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Recessions have scarring effects on young workers, reducing their long-term earnings and employment on average and elevating problems such as disease, divorce and increased mortality well into middle age, with disadvantaged groups harmed the most.
Forrest found work but not advancement. He buffed the floors of federal buildings for cleaning contractors. He washed dishes in a museum and a nursing home. He worked long enough to qualify for Social Security.
But the jobs were low paid, nonunion and often less than full time. While his parents had unionized government jobs in an age of rising blue-collar pay, Forrest’s generation faced union retreat and falling wages. He made do, in part, by living with his parents.
As his earnings prospects declined, so did the neighborhood, Shaw. Once a showcase of Black achievement a mile or so from the White House, Shaw had already gone through decades of decline when crack arrived in the 1980s and hit it with special force. Forrest pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor drug charges in his 30s. Another misdemeanor cocaine conviction in his 50s suggests addiction was hard to escape.
Misfortune mounted when a drunken driver sped through a Shaw intersection as Forrest crossed the street. The blow broke his ribs, an arm and an ankle. He spent months in a wheelchair.
One safeguard remained. His mother was a source not just of shelter but also emotional ballast.
Though her life was as straight as his was wayward, she made sure her son, however prodigal, had a key to the apartment.
She worked until 79 and had a heart attack two years later. Forrest was 55 when she moved to a nursing home.
While Forrest’s story is unique in detail, the elevated risk of homelessness stalks millions of people his age. They have consistently been homeless at rates much higher than people born before or after.
The existence of a generation uniquely vulnerable to homelessness was first identified in 2013 in a study led by Culhane. A co-author, Thomas Byrne of Boston University, working with others, recently updated the findings. Analyzing census data at 10-year intervals, he found that throughout their lives late baby boomers had been at least 1.5 times as likely to become homeless as people born roughly a decade later.
That was true in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. It was true whether the economy was weak or strong. It was true in every geographic region.
With Social Security meant as a safety net, it was not clear if the trend would persist in old age. But in an analysis for The New York Times, Byrne found that late baby boomers in their early 60s were 1.4 times as likely to be homeless as people who had reached that age a decade earlier and twice as likely as those two decades ahead.
As with Forrest, many aging people say they became homeless after the loss of a parent. In a survey of people age 50 or older when they first became homeless, more than 1 in 8 cited the death of a friend or relative as a reason.
In seeking places to sleep, Forrest proved inventive.
One story he likes to tell sounds like a caper in a buddy movie — and produced a buddy. A street acquaintance had the keys to an empty building awaiting conversion to condominiums. The two men moved in and rented out rooms. The scheme got them through the winter and established a contentious friendship.
Though younger than Forrest, Jason Vass was another late baby boomer rendered homeless in part by the death of a parent, his father, with whom he often had stayed.
The District of Columbia has an extensive network of outreach workers to serve the homeless. Last year, two of them introduced themselves to Forrest and Vass.
Forrest said he did not need help. Overcoming his wariness, they helped him replace his lost ID and claim a range of benefits he said he had not known he could receive. With Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, disability aid and food stamps, he now has health insurance and $1,300 a month in cash and food assistance.
Housing aid is in shorter supply, and neither man proved an easy client. After the caseworkers secured Vass a rare spot in assisted living through Medicaid, he showed up drunk and berated the staff, who rescinded the offer.
For a few weeks no one saw him. Then on the coldest night in February, the fire department responded to a report of flames in an abandoned camper. When they extinguished the fire, they found Vass inside, dead.
Forrest was stunned.
Last year, the caseworkers put Forrest on the list for permanent supportive housing. The program provides chronically homeless people with subsidized apartments and offers voluntary treatment for problems such as substance abuse and mental illness. But the aid is limited, and waits are often lengthy.
After a year’s wait, Forrest was tentatively offered an apart
ment. It is a mile and a half from Ninth Street, outside his comfort zone. At first he said no. Then Voss died, and he agreed to the move.
Final approval is pending. But seven decades after being born into the most homelessness-prone generation in modern history, Forrest may soon have a home.