Not too long ago, Valerie Fisher had what she called a “cushy, comfortable life.” The 69-year-old was raised in Northfield, attended Norwich University and even lived in Europe, doing translating work before having two children.
Fisher returned to Northfield to care for her ailing parents, whose home she later inherited. Unable to keep up with tax payments, she was forced to sell the house and move into an apartment in town. Fisher liked the duplex, but a few years later her landlord sold the building to someone new, she said, who decided he wanted to move into Fisher’s unit — and kicked her out.
“The bottom fell out of my world really quickly,” she told a reporter last week, sitting in an office at the Good Samaritan Haven’s shelter in Berlin.
Fisher recalled her relief at being given one of the last remaining available spots at the 35-bed Welcome Center, which had opened a few months prior, and being told that she’d been approved for a 90-day stay.
“I thought 90 days was — wow. That’s forever. That’s great,” Fisher said. “I can get a lot accomplished, get my life back somewhere else and start afresh.”
That was one year ago.
Such extended stays in Vermont’s shelters are now par for the course amid Vermont’s acute affordable housing shortage.
But Fisher’s story also illustrates another troubling trend. Vermont is an aging state, and increasingly, advocates and service providers say that means they’re grappling with a sizeable — and growing — number of older people who have nowhere to live.
The shift is national, and demographic patterns suggest the problem is likely to get worse throughout the decade.
“I can tell you — as someone who’s worked with the homeless population for many years now — that it was very unusual eight to 10 years ago to see someone elderly within the homeless population. And that is a common occurrence today,” Alison Calderara, the director of programs and advancement at Capstone Community Action, an anti-poverty nonprofit serving central Vermont, told lawmakers earlier this month.
VTDigger could not locate comprehensive data tracking this trend over time in Vermont. But the latest available figures on homelessness indicate that roughly a fifth of the state’s unhoused people are in their upper 50s and 60s — or older.
This is the first year that granular age data has been recorded in the point-in-time-count, an annual, federally mandated census of every state’s unhoused population, according to Martin Hahn, the outgoing executive director of the Housing & Homelessness Alliance of Vermont.
January’s survey showed that at least 611 people aged 55 and over were experiencing homelessness in Vermont. That’s 18.5% of all unhoused people, according to a VTDigger analysis.
(Homelessness — and particularly unsheltered homelessness — is notoriously difficult to track, and the point-in-time count is widely considered to be an underestimate of the problem. People doubling up with friends and family, for example, are not included.)
On the ground, the trend is evident. Rick DeAngelis, the co-executive director of the Good Samaritan Haven, last week recalled the Welcome Center’s first guest: a man in his 70s.
“We should have taken that as an indicator of what was to come,” he said.
Now, DeAngelis said, people 55 and over typically represent about a third of the shelter’s residents.
Guy Arthur Sanford, 62, is among Fisher’s neighbors at the Welcome Center. Like Fisher, he’s lived there for nearly a year.
“Usually it’s a 90-day program,” he said. “But housing around here’s just so crazy.”
Sanford, who goes by “Crickett,” started staying at the Welcome Center when the neuropathy in his legs made it impossible to camp in the woods. The caseworkers there have helped him get Social Security and put his name on the waitlist for subsidized housing in Montpelier.
A small, slight man — his nickname dates back to infancy, when he was born premature with underdeveloped lungs — Sanford is also proudly self-reliant. While the former carpenter and stone mason said he’s grateful for all the help, he’s also eager to have a space of his own again.
“You just can’t make this place home,” he said.
Officials and service providers alike say that the driving causes of homelessness among older people are often the same as those faced by their younger peers — namely, inflation and the scarcity of affordable housing.
“Fundamentally, this is a housing problem,” DeAngelis said.
But older Vermonters also have their own set of risk factors, and, once unhoused, they often face different hurdles finding both adequate shelter or housing, providers and officials said. The people they once relied on for support may have died or become estranged. They are more likely to be living on fixed incomes. And they frequently have complex medical needs that shelters or state-subsidized motel rooms aren’t equipped to handle.
The effects of homelessness, meanwhile, can quickly compound the ailments that make caring for older people more difficult. Research consistently shows that living without permanent shelter can accelerate the aging process. One study conducted in Oakland, California, found that research participants who were unhoused were more likely to suffer from falls, incontinence and cognitive and vision impairments than housed people who were 20 years older.
“Homeless older adults tend to have even more chronic conditions than the average older adults,” said Angela Smith-Dieng, the adult services director at the Vermont Department for Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living. “So they may be dealing with multiple chronic conditions that just exacerbates the challenges in finding an appropriate housing placement.”
The scarcity of beds in assisted living and nursing homes — stemming largely from staffing shortages — is well-documented and compounds the problem. Vermont legislators significantly increased Medicaid reimbursement rates to such facilities in the most recent state budget in hopes of alleviating the problem.
But advocates and service providers say it’s also more complicated.
Private facilities can choose who to serve, and will often pass on individuals with difficult backgrounds. So while waitlists are long, some people never advance in line. Calderara, from Capstone, told lawmakers last week about one of the agency’s clients, who had recently died. The man, who required a wheelchair, had frequently been in and out of the hospital, and always discharged back into homelessness.
“Nursing homes would not take him because of his history of cocaine use — even though he was clean,” she said. “He passed away at a friend’s house.”
Mike Ohler, the director of resident services and homelessness prevention at the Champlain Housing Trust, an affordable housing provider in Chittenden County, said some facilities will even decline to accept individuals even if they are simply too sick or frail to plausibly repeat the behavior that got them in trouble earlier in their life.
“There’s a huge, huge need for a type of facility where people that don’t have, you know, sparkling histories would be able to go and be taken care of,” he said.
Some facilities do take a more inclusive approach, Ohler said, citing Cathedral Square, which builds affordable and supportive-living facilities in northwestern Vermont, as one example. But such places remain in the minority.
“There’s just not enough of it,” he said.
In Berlin, DeAngelis hopes to develop an in-town parcel owned by the shelter network, with an eye toward his aging clientele. He said he’d like to create a medical respite program on the site, if he can cobble together the necessary financing and community partners.
It’s a model that Capstone also pitched to lawmakers earlier this month: one that aims to serve people who can’t be discharged from hospitals because they have nowhere to go by giving them a place to safely convalesce.
But even as central Vermont contemplates opening such a program, another has shuttered in Chittenden County. A seven-bed respite program run by the Community Health Centers in Burlington, with funding from the University of Vermont Medical Center, quietly closed a few months ago.
“Both UVMMC and CHC recognized that the model we had developed could not meet the increasing medical and mental health needs of patients in that original setting,” Kimberly Anderson, the director of development and communications for the Community Health Centers, wrote in an email. “This group of partners agreed that a higher number of people could be served if this program were reimagined, as this was a medical respite program and not permanent housing.”
She said UVMMC “is working hard to reassess the most appropriate next steps” and referred a reporter to the medical center. Its spokesperson, Neal Goswami, said “conversations will continue” about “what the best path forward is.”
