Robert Kirk, a retired jack of many trades, finds himself homeless at the age of 74 after a chain of events that could happen to almost anyone.
His landlady in Brooklyn died, the building’s new owner raised the rent and later evicted the tenants, and he could not find another apartment he could afford with his Social Security check.
Now his neighbors at a hotel shelter in Brownsville, Brooklyn, include a 69-year-old ambulette driver who lost his job and apartment after a leg injury, a 73-year-old former plasterer from Panama and a 78-year-old retired sushi chef from Japan.
They are among the swelling ranks of older people who are homeless in New York City.
According to a report released on Thursday, the number of single adults ages 65 and older in the city’s main shelter system more than doubled from 2014 to 2022, growing nearly three times as quickly as the number of younger single adults in shelters.
There were about 1,700 people older than 65 in single-adult shelters, which house a vast majority of the older New Yorkers who are homeless, during the fiscal year ending in June 2022, up from about 700 eight years earlier. The share of residents in those shelters who were older than 65 increased to 8 percent from 5 percent.
The nonprofit group that released the report, LiveOn NY, which works to improve conditions for aging people, says the rising numbers point to an affordable housing crisis-within-a-crisis in New York City.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people who just muddle along, and they just muddle until they can’t,” Allison Nickerson, the group’s executive director, said in an interview.
More and more older New Yorkers are just a job loss, an uninsured illness or a real-estate flip away from homelessness, LiveOn NY said. The group studied data from the city departments of homelessness and housing and conducted a survey of property managers to produce its report.
About 315,000 older New Yorkers are on waiting lists for affordable apartments in federally constructed buildings reserved for people 62 and older, up from about 230,000 in 2016, the group said. The typical wait is six years; many buildings have longer waits.
“When you’re on an affordable housing wait-list and you’re living on a couch and you’re 80, you don’t have seven or nine years,” Ms. Nickerson said.
The overall market for affordable housing in New York is the tightest it has been in half a century, with vacancy rates for the lowest-priced apartments below 1 percent.
Slowly but surely, Ms. Nickerson said, older people who are too able-bodied to qualify for nursing homes or assisted living facilities but simply have nowhere to live are “infusing into the homeless system.”
The phenomenon is unrelated to the thousands of migrants who have traveled to New York since the summer of 2022, overwhelming the city’s social service apparatus. Few of the migrants who have entered the shelter system for single adults are older, LiveOn NY said.
The number of older adults in shelters is also growing considerably faster than the broader population of seniors is increasing as baby boomers hit retirement age.
There are about 10 specialized shelters in the city for older adults. From the outside, they tend to look like other shelters housed in low-budget hotels, but for the prevalence of people using walkers going in and out.
In recent interviews, several residents of the senior shelters said they preferred them to mixed-age shelters, where conditions can be rough. In senior shelters, people tend to sleep one to four to a room. Some general-population shelters have dozens of people sleeping in one space.
Mr. Kirk, who worked as an administrator at a yoga foundation and as a cabby instructor, said that at one mixed-age shelter he was assigned to, he complained to the staff that his much younger roommate was blasting the TV in the middle of the night.
“I woke up and he was right next to me and he punched me in the face,” Mr. Kirk said.
His neighbor the ambulette driver, who gave his name only as Barry M., said that their senior shelter, at the Days Inn Crown Heights, was a decent place for him to stay while he applies for a subsidized permanent apartment.
“It’s not the Waldorf Astoria,” Barry said, “but my room is clean.”
While many newly constructed buildings in New York have affordable apartments marketed through the city’s fiercely competitive housing lotteries, including some reserved for people ages 62 and over, there are simply far too few to keep pace with demand, LiveOn NY said.
About 30,000 lottery apartments hit the market from 2020 to 2023, LiveOn NY said, but only about 10 percent were in buildings that included apartments reserved for older people. Households with older adults filed 220,000 applications for lottery apartments during that period, and fewer than 2,000 of the households received apartments, the study said.
LiveOn NY urged the city to strengthen its existing affordable-housing programs for older people, particularly those with the lowest incomes. Older adults who enter housing lotteries tend to have significantly lower incomes than younger adults, the group said. They are also more likely to live on fixed incomes and to have mobility issues, both of which limit their housing options.
The City Department of Social Services said on Thursday that during the 10-month period ending in April, nearly 650 single adults older than 65 moved from shelters to subsidized permanent housing. This was more than in any fiscal year since 2019, the city said.
If there is a silver lining to living in a homeless shelter, it is that it can be a shortcut to finding permanent housing, said Karen Jorgensen, the director of the Valley Lodge shelter on the Upper West Side, a temporary home for about 100 older adults.
Many new apartment buildings contain subsidized units set aside for people who have been homeless, and Ms. Jorgensen said that most Valley Lodge residents find a permanent subsidized apartment within two years.
Earl Boyd, 83, a unicyclist, D.J. and former aquarium cleaner who moved to Valley Lodge in May, said he saw people moving out to permanent housing several times a week.
Valley Lodge’s parent organization, the West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing, also operates an adjoining supportive-housing building — permanent apartments that come with a range of on-site social and medical services — and some Valley Lodge shelter residents wind up there.
Tanya Anderson, a great-grandmother who bounced between streets and shelters for over a decade, has lived in one of the supportive-housing apartments with her son since last year.
“I feel so nice there that I don’t have to live in the street,” said Ms. Anderson, 61.
Another recent arrival is Locket Strowder, 61, a former warehouse worker. Within the space of a couple of years, Mr. Strowder was disabled by tumors in his back, lost his wife to cancer, moved in with a niece in Queens, suffered a reaction to medication and spent three months in a nursing home, fell out with his niece and entered the shelter system, where he was eventually assigned to Valley Lodge.
When a supportive-housing apartment opened in October, he moved in.
“To this day, I’m not where I want to be, not where I used to be,” he said. “But if I can just stay here long enough, I think I’ll be OK. I’ve got people watching over me.”