CHICO — The width and breadth of homeless services for senior citizens in Butte County can be defined by its most prominent characteristic: The lack thereof.
“In this weird way, this population is underserved,” said Angela McLaughlin, president of the board for Chico’s Safe Space Winter Shelter. “They’re not the ones that the community sees as much. They don’t move around as much, and I think they fall through the cracks.
According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, studies across the U.S. have shown a clear upward trend in the population of homeless aged 50-64 in the past 15 to 20 years.
Subsidized housing is available for seniors at age 62, while Medicare and Social Security benefits are available after 65, but those age limits make the 50-64 population some of the most housing-vulnerable in the nation.
“This is a group which frequently falls between the cracks of governmental safety nets,” the group wrote on its website at nationalhomeless.org. “They are not old enough to qualify for Medicare, however, when their physical health is assaulted by poor nutrition and severe living conditions they may eventually resemble someone much older.”
Even when they reach 65, it may not be enough. As of 2020, the monthly SSI payment for an individual was just $783 — well below the poverty line. California may add up to $160.
McLaughlin said homeless senior citizens tend to have a lot more disabilities and health problems than the general population.
“We see a lot of folks that use walkers and wheelchairs; a lot of people with grave disabilities,” she said. “Couple that with more compromised immune systems — because they are older and more prone to get infections — and mixed in with general population? We see those people getting sick over and over again.”
McLaughlin recalled the story of an elderly homeless woman who was well-known to the shelters in Chico. She became sick with the flu and was extremely dehydrated last winter, but couldn’t find a place to stay during the day — only at night. So McLaughlin said the woman would leave the shelter in the day, go to Enloe Medical Center’s emergency room, and be turned out again after she was given care.
But without a safe, warm place to rest during the day, the elderly woman just got sicker and sicker, McLaughlin said.
“It felt really touch-and-go. She had no body fat, no reserves,” McLaughlin said. “For an average, or a healthy, younger person — it would have been miserable, but it would have passed. For her, she had no reserves and no place to go lay down for the day out of the cold.”
McLaughlin said they didn’t know if the woman would even make it through the winter. McLaughlin said even the county’s Adult Protective Services said there was no funding or program that the woman fit into, and threw up their hands at a solution. But, McLaughlin said, the woman lived and she is living at the Torres Shelter now, where they’re working on a permanent housing solution for her.
Despite the difficulties, there is one example of services for senior homeless in Butte County, but its future is far from certain.
“Simplicity Village is a great example,” McLaughlin said. “That project was specifically to house 56 elderly people. It would be permanent support.”
The tiny home village, proposed by Chico Housing Action Team, would include 33 emergency sleeping cabins and portable units, with a central kitchen and dining area, as well as related support facilities like showers and community-use washers and dryers. The cabins are designed to be temporary homes only, with a proposed location on Notre Dame Boulevard, south of Morrow Lane, in southern Chico.
“There is funding and there are people who can do this and (they) have a good plan,” McLaughlin said. “It’s just obstructionism that prevents us from moving forward.”
She’s referring to the lawsuit brought against the city of Chico and city planning and community director, Brendan Vieg, by a local business owner whose property is near the proposed site.
Frank Solinsky, of Payless Lumber, has appealed the city multiple times to overturn the planning commission’s decision.
“Our business hours start at 5:30 in the morning in the summer, and go as late as midnight. We have a lot of noise and a lot of bright lights for those dark hours; we also create dust. These are all issues that are not conducive to residential living,” Payless Lumber’s manager, Michele Cooper, told the Chico City Council in September 2019. “No one is going to complain about them now. But it will only be a matter of time.”
CHAT Executive Director Leslie Johnson said the project is “on hold” while attorneys are in negotiation.
“We’re hoping to get something resolved soon,” she said. “We wanted to help a vulnerable population, and we see a lot of older people without housing.”
Johnson said CHAT settled on inviting seniors into the program because tiny home villages are not well-suited for families with children.
“Those (seniors who) do have an income, they can only afford to pay a very modest rate,” she said.
Those small incomes usually come from MediCal or Social Security, but would need to go fully toward the cost of a regularly-priced apartment or studio. Research from the National Coalition for the Homeless showed that a person receiving Social Security support would typically have to pay more than 100% of that income to rent a one-bedroom apartment, and more than 90% of it for a typical studio apartment.
“We felt everyone in that situation should have an option available to them,” she said, “and (seniors) tend to be more stable and self-sufficient if they are given an opportunity to have housing.”
Other answers may lie in single-room occupancy — like old hotels or offices than can be turned into a place for each resident to have their own bed, closet and desk, but they’d share a bathroom, laundry room and kitchen communally.
“That may be something that’s useful for this population, as well as other homeless folks who are just getting back on their feet,” McLaughlin said. “(Single-room occupancies) are super helpful for bridging the gap.”
Another answer may be a local program that can provide bridge loans, which helps prevent homelessness before it begins by providing loans to stabilize threatened households.
“(We need) some program where we can ensure that if they are forced to move, there’s something out there that helps them bridge the gap between first, last and security,” McLaughlin said. If the city can keep people off the streets in the first place, she added, “that would be so much more preferable than dealing with it after it’s happened.”
“We just feel incredibly inadequate to deal with the challenges of this population,” McLaughlin said. “Folks on a fixed income are going to continue to fall through the cracks.”
