Aging onto the street Nearly half of older homeless people fell into trouble after age 50, new research shows. Meet three people who worked hard in life but fell through a tattered safety net

Aging onto the street Nearly half of older homeless people fell into trouble after age 50, new research shows. Meet three people who worked hard in life but fell through a tattered safety net

For the past six years, Joe White has been waking up every morning in a parking lot in downtown Oakland. Some days, it’s freezing. Other days, he’s baking, drenched or, sometimes, tolerably comfortable.

One constant is the asphalt: It’s always hard. And food, which White has to protect from the rats that squirm through the hole they’ve chewed through his tent door, always requires a hunt.

But he’s OK, he says. He’s tough, and he has to be. He’s 68 years old.

White is at an age when many senior citizens are in the easy-chair phase of life, taking grandkids out for ice cream and traveling for fun. Not White — and not an increasing number of people who, like him, fell into homelessness past their 50th birthdays.

In a study that raises alarms about an increasingly tattered safety net for low-income seniors in America, researchers have found that just short of half — 44 percent — of all homeless people older than 50 years old hit the streets for the first time after they were 50.

While a full half of the nation’s people living without homes are older than 50, it’s the growing number of those who fall into homelessness after that age that most concerns Margot Kushel, the UCSF professor who heads the study. The problem is especially acute in the Bay Area, where housing costs, including rents, have risen dramatically over the past decade.

The study’s finding speaks to the danger of a shrinking ability of people to adequately save money and make other arrangements for retirement, Kushel said. And it indicates, she said, that there is too little help in place to catch them before they fall into homelessness when hard times hit.

Perhaps most disturbingly, it reflects society’s ambivalence toward the plight of the elderly, she said.

“It should shock us as a nation that we have this problem,” Kushel said. “It’s almost too painful to realize.”

Kushel, whose study just concluded its fifth year and has just been renewed for another five, said White and the 450 other people she’s been tracking serve as a warning that a veritable tidal wave of older people will probably be living on the streets in the coming years.

A separate study on aging homeless, released last month by other researchers, echoed Kushel’s concerns and projected that the elderly homeless population will nearly triple over the next decade.

Over and over, she said, the story is the same: A person works into late middle age at a low-wage job, hanging in there but unable to save much money, and then trouble strikes. He or she can no longer swing a hammer, sling a shovel, stand all day in front of a cash register, drive long shifts in a truck.

The parents in a multigenerational rental home die, and those left behind can’t afford to stay. Or the older lady or man they were caring for as a home health aide dies, and so does the job.

Or they become disabled, like White, whose left knee is so badly damaged the kneecap juts out at a sickening 45-degree angle from where it should be.

“The problem here is not a lack of willingness to work, or mental health — it’s a society that doesn’t care, doesn’t have an adequate safety net built, especially for our senior citizens,” Kushel said. “This is what happens when you pay people a minimum wage they can’t live on and is worth less than it used to be, there is way too little affordable housing, and there are practically no pensions anymore. They were never able to build wealth, save for their old age.

“You put all these together, and we are ‘shocked, shocked shocked’ that homelessness among older people is rising?”

Data from the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that studies labor issues, show that today’s federal minimum hourly wage of $7.25 would have to actually be set at $19 to pay for food, housing and other costs in the same way possible in 1970. Meanwhile, the average price of a house has quadrupled nationwide since 1980, and the median rent has doubled, according to online real estate databases Zillow and ApartmentList. In the Bay Area, where rents are the highest in the nation, the challenges are more severe. In San Francisco, even the city’s $15 minimum wage can’t bridge the livability gap.

“In this market, in the Bay Area, 10 or 15 years ago we would not have found the quantity of older homeless people that we see every day — we’re just seeing more and more of them all the time,” said John Weeks, a coordinator of the UCSF study. “When things went wrong, you could still rent a room, find a place somewhere, get by somehow. Not now.”

Kushel, one of the nation’s foremost researchers into geriatric homelessness, co-wrote the first study, in 2006, showing that the average age of homeless people in the U.S. was in the mid-50s.

Her latest study, titled “Hope-Home,” doesn’t reach back to the 1980s, when modern homelessness began. So she has no way to estimate how many people were becoming homeless after 50 then. But the steady graying of the street population since 1990 is significant enough to portend a coming crisis for seniors, she said. In 1990, only 11 percent of the population nationwide was 50 or older, according to UCSF statistics. Today it’s 50 percent.

Visual Essay: Homeless after 50 on Bay Area streets

“Margot is doing very important work,” said Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who led last month’s study projecting a tripling of elderly street population. He agreed with Kushel that her research reflects a national problem, not just the Bay Area’s.

“We should all be very concerned about this,” Culhane said. “It’s going to be very upsetting to people to see so many more elderly people who are homeless, but that’s basically what we are facing: a growing aging and frail homeless population.”

Kushel, who found her study participants in Oakland, is tracking them throughout Northern California as they cycle in and out of shelters, camps and stays with friends or family. A fortunate few have gotten into permanent housing. In exploring how they cope, she and her researchers have found that that homeless older folks have far more trouble with depression, eyesight, hearing, balance, and performing average daily activities such as bathing or dressing than housed people their age.

That is unsurprising, Kushel said. Homeless people in their 50s generally display the geriatric difficulties of people age 75 or 80. That means caring for the coming boom in older street people will be expensive.

“We’re going to have to get our shelters and our supportive housing ready for an older population, with more intensive medical care — accommodations for people who have the needs of 80-year-olds,” Kushel said. “We also need to expand our attention to prevent seniors from becoming homeless to begin with, perhaps by giving subsidies so they can stay with families, the way we do for children through child welfare services.”

About 80 percent of the UCSF study participants are African American. Across America, a disproportionate 43 percent of homeless people are black, a number reflected in the Bay Area. In contrast, just 13 percent of the national population is black.

Kushel attributes this local and national disparity to a grim history of redlining, economic oppression and other ills.

“We’re going to have to make some hard decisions as a society to address how racial inequality affects so many things, but in this case, homelessness,” she said. “For one, we have to more vigorously enforce fair housing laws. Create more affordable housing for everyone. Pay people something they can actually live on.

“This will take some painful and honest conversations about housing segregation and income inequality. But they are conversations we have to have if we don’t want it to get worse.”

Three Bay Area residents in Kushel’s study spoke with The Chronicle about how they ended up homeless after age 50. Here are their stories:

Wayne Shannon

Most of the people in Kushel’s study were low-income before they became indigent. But some weren’t. They were just laid low by bad luck, a debilitating injury — or, like Wayne Shannon, by an inability or unwillingness to plan for their golden years.

Shannon is 74 and worked a full career as a draftsman, having earned a bachelor’s degree in 1973 in industrial arts at San Jose State University. He held great jobs one after the other, working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Chevron, in addition to contractor gigs in Alaska and the Philippines. But he never stayed long in any one place, and he didn’t save his money.

He also never married. Never had children. And many years ago sold the only condo he ever bought.

In 2001, at 56, he found himself laid off from what became his last job. Too young to begin receiving Social Security, he couldn’t afford rent anywhere in the Bay Area. So he began living in a van. That’s where he was when Kushel’s team found him at a soup kitchen five years ago and recruited him into the study.

“I guess I didn’t think things through,” he said in a habitually slow, careful tone. “I never stayed in a job long enough to put down roots, and my retirement plan was to collect Social Security. But who knew things would get so expensive?

“I never thought I’d be living in a van. Time just kind of snuck up on me.”

Shannon said he has always believed in carrying his own weight, and aside from using veteran medical services — he was an Army sergeant in the Vietnam War — he asks very little of anyone. He lived in his van until it fell apart two years ago. With a governmental housing subsidy, he moved into senior housing in Oakland.

That’s where he is today, now carefully managing his budget from a monthly Social Security check and making regular three-hour trips to the Fort Miley VA Medical Center in San Francisco for checkups on diabetes, a crushed vertebrae and other ailments he picked up from his time with no permanent roof.

Shannon visits his two brothers in the Central Valley, but only at holiday time.

“You don’t want to impose,” Shannon said. “We’re supposed to take care of ourselves in America, and that’s what I do. I would never think of imposing on my relatives. They’re good people, and I see them at Thanksgiving and the like, but I’ve always taken care of myself. And I’m fine with that.”

Echoing that sentiment is Shannon’s brother, who also had a full career — in water management — but planned more effectively before retiring to Lodi (San Joaquin County).

“Wayne has not ever asked us if he could live with us,” Warren Shannon said. “It’s not out of animosity or disunity. We do love each other. But he’s independent.”

Joe White

His ruined knee is what steered Joe White to a soggy tent on the asphalt in downtown Oakland.

He put in a decades-long career as a food services worker for the Oakland Unified School District before he fell off a ladder, severely fractured his kneecap and everything around it, and ended his career. An operation to repair the knee failed. That was six years ago, when he was 62. He never saw homelessness coming.

“I worked all my life until I was in my 60s, hurt my knee and couldn’t work anymore,” he said recently as he carefully unfolded a batch of rain-drenched clothes and spread them out on his parking lot home. “I never in a million years thought I would wind up here in this parking lot, living like this. No sir.”

A tear trickled from one eye as he smoothed out a crease in his jeans, which, like his black jacket and sneakers, were tidy and clean — not the signs of guy who’d been sleeping in a tattered tent in the rain.

“It’s been a hard struggle, man,” he said quietly. “But I’m not the only one. I see a lot of old guys like me out here. It’s getting worse. Not better.”

White’s parking lot is on 13th Street, across from the historic Hotel Oakland, where movie stars and presidents from Wilson to Roosevelt stayed before it was turned into a senior citizens home. Over time, he has become a somewhat beloved figure on his block.

He wears a big smile and chats up everyone who stops by. He watches after people’s cars when they’re at work. He reports problems when he sees them.

It’s a common technique for older homeless people living outside — they become what some street counselors call neighborhood “mascots.” Stay nice, help out, don’t be a problem, and you won’t get rousted. You’re too old to really fight with anyone, so create your own peace as much as possible.

For White, it’s not always easy. Sometimes the throbbing in his damaged knee is so bad that he has to heat a needle in his tent and lance it to drain it out. But he manages.

“What amazes me about Joe is how he’s created his own community out there,” said Corinne Jan, who works nearby. “Some people outside isolate themselves, and it’s harder to know them, know what to expect. Not Joe. Everybody knows him and likes him.”

Jan is head of Family Bridges, a nonprofit that helps low-income families find resources, and this winter she took White on as a mini-project. She connected him with a transitional housing program, and though White doesn’t like crowded buildings, preferring to stay in his tent most of the time, he is working with counselors to get a permanent studio with government assistance.

“CJ — she’s a very sharp lady, and she cares,” he said during a visit to her office. “She opened up my heart.”

“You can do this, Joe,” Jan said, leaning her face close to his. “I know you can get inside. You just have to keep with it.”

Michelle Myers

About 30 percent of older homeless people bunk with family now and then, Kushel’s team has found — but they typically can’t stay. More often than not, the relatives are barely hanging on economically themselves and can’t afford to permanently provide for another mouth at the dinner table, Kushel said.

“There’s a lot of pride among these older homeless people,” she said. “A lot of lower-income families rent places with restrictions, and they don’t want to screw up the lease by staying there against the rules.

“And if there is one more person in the house, that’s one more who is eating, flushing the toilet, using the lights. Time and time again, they say, ‘I don’t want to take food out of my grandbaby’s mouth, so I’d rather be outside and take care of myself. But as much as anything, they just plain don’t want to impose.’”

That’s how it is with 62-year-old Michelle Myers.

A waitress who raised three sons alone, she’d been living with her father with only intermittent jobs until 2013, when he died of cancer. Her mother had died a few years earlier. Before that, her second husband died of a heart attack.

Without a parent or spouse to share rent, she burned through her paltry savings, couldn’t find work — and wound up living in her Volkswagen bug. Heroin soon captured her. She gave up.

“In the state I was in, I didn’t — and don’t — want to be a burden to my children,” she said. “So I just tried to handle things myself. Didn’t work out very well.

“It’s hard to get help when you’re like that, no money, no home. People push you away because you’re older. They down-rate you. Yeah, it’s my fault I did drugs. Everyone makes mistakes. But my gosh, how our society neglects its older people.”

Landing in a hospital with pneumonia two years ago saved her — along with the kindness shown her by Kushel’s study team. Encouraged by the researchers to accept the help the hospital staff offered her, she enrolled in a residential rehab program and got clean. A year ago Myers scored one of Oakland’s scarce government-funded residential placements for the homeless and moved into the Harrison Hotel supportive housing complex.

Her room was supposed to be temporary, but last month it became permanent when she was diagnosed with stomach cancer — which came on top of an existing HIV diagnosis.

A few years ago, Myers said, she might have crumbled with the diagnoses.

“Not now,” she said, standing in the century-old, restored residential hotel and grinning as she saw the sun peeping through her window. “I am picking myself up. I pray. I go to church. I stay clean. Seniors shouldn’t have to go through what I’ve gone through, but I won’t be a burden to my sons.

“I got lucky here. Not everyone else is. No sir, no. I’ve had too many friends wind up in coffins too early.”

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron