On the afternoon of Jan. 17, when the
temperature dipped below freezing, a family from Kingman drove to
Wichita, dumped a 78-year-old relative at the Inter-Faith Inn homeless
shelter and quickly drove away.
They left her on the sidewalk with her wheelchair and a few suitcases.
“She
wasn’t crying,” case manager Amanda Merritt recalled. “But she was
upset about the situation. She said they were kicking her out.”
They
left so quickly that no one from the shelter was able to talk to them,
Merritt said. They didn’t even knock on the shelter door to make sure
there was room at the inn.
“That’s unbelievable that someone
would do that,” said Janis Cox, co-chairwoman of Advocates to End
Chronic Homelessness, an area faith-based volunteer group.
Shelter staff took the woman, who was in poor health, inside.
To accommodate her frailties, the staff hustled to set her up with a room on the ground floor.
She
stayed at the shelter more than two weeks until she found an
out-of-state friend who agreed to take her in. She left Wichita a week
ago.
The woman’s story may seem unbelievable, but it’s not that
rare, said Sandy Swank, director of housing and homeless services for
Inter-Faith Ministries.
A 2010 study by the Homeless Research
Institute, an arm of the National Alliance to End Homelessness,
projected that the number of elderly people who are homeless would
increase by 33 percent, from 44,172 in 2010 to 58,772 by 2020, and would
double to 95,000 by 2050.
“It seems like there are two main
things going on,” said Nan Roman, president and chief executive of the
alliance in Washington, D.C.
“One is that there’s a group of
people who are homeless who are becoming older. They were younger
homeless people, so the population is aging that way. The other thing is
that our whole population is aging. Even though older people are less
likely to be homeless than other people because they have more of a
safety net, because there are more and more older people in general, we
are going to have more and more elderly people vulnerable to
homelessness.”
Numbers up locally
Swank sees the numbers increasing locally.
“I’ve
been working at Inter-Faith since October 1990,” she said. “In the
beginning, we’d have an occasional elderly person come in, but if they
came in, they came in with someone else. They always had someone to look
after them. In the last 10 years, we have seen more elderly people, and
each year it seems like the number increases.”
Swank remembers
another woman left at the shelter. She arrived in a hospital gown with
no shoes. There was snow on the ground. The front left wheel of her
wheelchair was off.
“I was just outraged,” Swank said.
The woman eventually was able to move into an apartment of her own.
Inter-Faith’s winter shelter has served 13 people over age 62 this year, more than double last year’s total of five.
Swank points to a few theories about why the numbers are up – including, of course, the economy.
“Years
ago, families did look after families,” Swank said. “Today, because of
the economy, a lot of people are at risk themselves. I think families
can’t afford to take care of each other like they used to.
And we’ve
become more mobile. We move away from our families of origin. We’re
spread out.”
Inter-Faith is seeing mostly elderly people whose
spouses have died, Swank said. Their spouses might have left behind a
pile of medical expenses or credit card debt. She remembers one elderly
woman whose husband died, leaving her with debt she didn’t even know
about.
“They end up losing everything,” she said. “They’re pretty
vulnerable. They don’t have a lot of experience, especially when the
partner that’s deceased was in charge of decisions. So they’re pretty
clueless about what to do.”
Families ‘very stressed’
Public
awareness about the increase in homelessness among the elderly is a
good place to start, said Cox, chairwoman of the area task force.
“Families
are very stressed,” she said. “With social services being cut by the
government and nonprofits not receiving more donations, it just puts
normal families under even more stress.”
The Homeless Research Institute recommended as part of its study that policymakers and leaders:
• Increase the supply of subsidized, affordable housing for seniors.
• Create sufficient permanent supportive housing to end chronic homelessness.
• Conduct research to better understand the specific needs of elderly people who are homeless.
“We’re
millions of units short of low-cost housing,” said Roman, with the
national alliance. “Not attending to it is not very smart because
especially with older people, they’re going to get hospitalized, they’re
going to get put in nursing homes, and those are very expensive things
to happen. It’s much cheaper to keep them in regular housing.”
Roman
also emphasized that people who are homeless age much faster. So a
50-year-old person without a home will have far more medical problems
than a 50-year-old person who does have a place to call home.
The oldest person at Inter-Faith’s winter shelter was 83, Swank said.
She recalled a military veteran who didn’t have any living relatives.
“We
sort of adopted him like a grandpa,” she said. “He had terminal lung
cancer. We tore my office out of here and put a hospital bed in there.
We’ve done extraordinary things. It’d be real easy to just say ‘no,’ but
no can do.”
He stayed at the shelter until his pain became
unbearable. He wanted to die at the shelter, Swank said, where he had
some semblance of family.
“But we couldn’t administer pain meds,” Swank said. “We put him in an ambulance to the hospital.”
Homeless ‘off and on’ for 20 years
Dale
Chilen recently landed in Inter-Faith’s winter shelter after a visit to
the Robert J. Dole Veterans Administration Medical Center’s emergency
room. A cab delivered the 78-year-old to the shelter on a Saturday
night.
Swank just happened to see him arrive.
“He was so
frail, in a wheelchair,” Swank said. “I paid the cab driver to get him
to Safe Haven. He was too vulnerable anywhere else. We’re not a
one-size-fits-all shelter, although sometimes I’d like to be.”
Chilen said he was born and raised in Kansas but most recently had been living in Reno, Nev.
He arrived in Salina at the beginning of the year, he said, “walked about 20 feet and fell and broke my hip.”
He said he went to a hospital in Salina and then to a senior center. He eventually came to Wichita.
Chilen
stayed at Safe Haven, an Inter-Faith shelter for severely and
persistently mentally ill or physically disabled people who are
chronically homeless, for about a month.
The shelter “has been real good to me,” he said.
On
Wednesday, he started moving into a low-income apartment for seniors
with the help of Inter-Faith Ministries and the Veterans Administration.
The VA Center said it could not talk about specific patients because of privacy rules.
“We’re
going to review the process to ensure we’re providing the best care for
our veterans,” said Tyler Kilian, supervisor of ancillary services
there.
Chilen, a Korean War veteran, said he has been homeless “off and on” for 20 years.
“I hate to admit it,” he said from his wheelchair, proudly looking at a brochure about his new apartment complex.
Reach Deb Gruver at 316-268-6400 or dgruver@wichitaeagle.com.
