This article is adapted from an episode of our podcast, “Civic.” Click the audio player below to hear the full story.
Homelessness among older adults is on the rise in California. Nearly half of all single homeless adults in the state are age 50 and older, and many of them are experiencing homelessness for the first time, according to a recent study by the University of California, San Francisco, Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.
A 2024 documentary directed by Davey Schaupp, “No Place to Grow Old,” showcases the driving factors of this crisis by following the daily lives of three older adults experiencing homelessness in Portland, Ore.
In San Francisco, older adults face the same struggles those in Portland do: high cost of living on fixed incomes, health challenges, loss of support networks and more. Local officials acknowledge that the percentage of older adults in San Francisco is rising, and experts point out that San Francisco is not building enough affordable housing to keep up with the rising need for low-cost options where people can age in place.
This episode of “Civic” explores the problems people face as they age without housing in San Francisco, and the national political context that caused the crisis.
At the same time, rather than investing in solutions, governments from the local to national levels are increasingly turning to policies that criminalize homelessness. Threatening rhetoric from President Trump and even city residents toward unhoused people has increased.
“Ultimately it’s less expensive to build that RV park, or have affordable housing, or have health care, because emergency health care is much more expensive,” said Amy Fairweather, director of policy at Swords to Plowshares, a local nonprofit that assists homeless veterans. “Jail and prison is much more expensive.”
Fairweather participated in a panel discussion on homelessness organized by the San Francisco Public Press following a screening of Schaupp’s documentary. The Sept. 30 talk, which I moderated, examined why homelessness is rising among older adults and how San Franciscans can be a part of the solution. Two of the three speakers had experienced homelessness themselves and all were involved in support services, advocacy or both.
Suggested strategies included passing an affordable-housing bond, investing in land trust housing models, fairly compensating nonprofit service providers and instituting a temporary tax on local billionaires. Panelists also encouraged audience members to support local nonprofits and the arts, engage with local government, run for office and acknowledge the humanity of their unhoused neighbors.
Fairweather spoke on the panel alongside Joe Wilson, executive director of Hospitality House, and Armando Bravo Martinez, a member of the Bernal Heights RV community and the Coalition on Homelessness.
The full audio recording of this panel will air on KSFP 102.5 FM and is available in our “Civic” podcast feed.
The following is an excerpt from the Sept. 30 discussion, edited for brevity and clarity:
Madison Alvarado: To kick things off, Joe, I wanted to ask you if you could talk about how we got here and why you think we’re seeing such a rise in the number of older adults experiencing homelessness locally.
Joe Wilson: An easy question. Well, probably decades and decades of intentionally bad choices. We can point to the deliberate military buildup in the ’80s at the cost of public housing. We can point to previous years to deinstitutionalization that had the effect of further burdening localities in terms of their ability to confront that crisis, and then to rebuild community-based mental health and health facilities that are a backbone of any country’s health system. I think the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy continues to leave tragedy in its wake. I think the reality of a capitalist system that makes housing a commodity rather than a public good, the fact that we are, generally speaking on our best days, a throw-away society, and it’s no surprise that we would throw away our elderly in the process. …
Ultimately, the homelessness crisis is as much a comment on us and the things that we pretend to be in this country. And I think there is great reckoning confronting us now. Multiple things can be true at the same time: Homelessness is affecting younger and younger people at an earlier age, and people are staying on the street longer and longer, and that has tragic consequences for us all, not only tomorrow, but today. So if we can at least confront our inability thus far to invest in the importance of community, I think that’s a good start, and to resist the trend to continue to invest in this insane and obscene military buildup at the cost of so many other things.
I think that is the decision that confronts us now, and until we manage to come to grips with the costs — the human costs of capitalism.
I think the film does an amazing job, like Joe was saying, of just focusing on the very human stories that we see playing out all the time. And so, Armando, I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about your experiences and how you came to live in your RV.
Armando Bravo Martinez: Well, I had a little bit of savings and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to afford the rent anymore. I’ve been a caregiver for about 15 years and so I’ve lived with all my clients. I sort of fell into it. I was just a tenant in Berkeley, and I started being more and more responsible for my landlady’s needs, and we got along great. She was from New York. Her name was Heidi, and when she passed away, her daughter got me another job at a much more posh neighborhood in Piedmont. Something hit me: that I was going to have to prepare for this part of my life again.
I’ve been homeless before. I was homeless in San Francisco from 2002 to 2007 and I didn’t want to repeat that. So I bought an RV with my savings. I was not expecting the animosity, the hatred, that’s out there for us in general. But if you’re in an RV, it’s even more pronounced because you’re sort of taking up space, public space, in front of someone’s house, or in front of someone’s building, business, and it creates a lot of conflict. So it’s been a difficult journey, but I’ve learned a lot about human nature.
Can you talk a little bit about how navigating this system — you said you’ve experienced homelessness before — doing it at a later age, how things are different, or how that’s maybe made that more difficult? Or maybe it’s not more difficult, I don’t know. Do you have any reflections on that?
Martinez: I was homeless in the the Mission District, and I wouldn’t say that it was a party but it was definitely much easier to be homeless when I was younger.
There was an attitude shift that happened, I would say, in the 2010s and ’20s, where we started being very less compassionate, much more individualistic and much more concerned with our “This is mine, that’s yours.” Whereas before, I would wake up in somebody’s front porch and they would say, “Oh, don’t worry, just keep sleeping. I’ve just got to get to my car.” And I’d be like, “Wow.” There’s no way that I would come across that right now. This one gentleman pulled a knife on me and said, “You gotta go because you’re in my million-dollar neighborhood.” And I looked at him and I said, “Really, your million-dollar neighborhood? You live in a box, you know, it’s only a million-dollar neighborhood because we’ve made it a million-dollar neighborhood.” …
Why can’t we make it something else, something much more palatable, something much more amiable, something much more loving, dare I say?
Director Davey Schaupp invites community groups to organize local screenings of “No Place to Grow Old.” View the trailer above and visit noplacetogrowold.com to learn more.
Amy, your organization focuses specifically on veterans, many of whom are older. How well do you think San Francisco’s homeless response system is set up to address the unique needs of groups like veterans or older adults?
Amy Fairweather: There’s a common mythology that veterans get everything they need — and they don’t. There are some systems that are really good and some models for handling homelessness that actually should be replicated for other communities, as far as the vouchers and the shallow subsidies, etc. But everything is not taken care of by the feds and it’s very difficult to get local funding because — it’s not out of malice, but people think, “Oh, vets just get everything you need.”
Of course, everyone else is struggling as well. And when we talk about the capitalist society and that the social safety net has been unraveled, and it has us all struggling for the same crumbs of any public funding or any philanthropy or any attention. We’re basically forced into being in competition with other community groups or other cohorts — transition-aged youth, aging, veterans, this, that — and it’s grotesque. The other thing, when you were talking about the military buildup, well, a lot of the people who we serve — we house about 500 veterans in permanent supportive housing — many of them joined the military because they were from an unstable background, so the trauma that they’ve experienced in their lives is before, during, after. They’re just throw-aways. They’re just fodder, in terms of that military-industrial complex. So, you know, it’s not nearly enough.
And the other thing too is that even if you get people into permanent supportive housing and then you see that you have this aging population, how are they going to retain that housing? How are they going to remain or maintain health at all? Is there transportation? Are there peer specialists who can help them? We run a pilot program that’s just one-time funding doing this, but it’s so needed for all aging who finally, once they do get permanent supportive housing, that they have those supports and preventing isolation, creating community and making sure that maybe their first and last home is dignified and that they can truly be at home.
We’re seeing massive investments in ICE and funding being put toward that, at the same time that we’re also seeing major cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Lots of folks are worried about the future of Social Security and housing programs like Section 8. I was wondering if any of you have thoughts about how these cuts to our social safety net could affect this issue moving forward.
Fairweather: I mean, obviously it’s going to make it much worse. As I said, we’re struggling for crumbs and the crumbs are going away. So, it’s going to get a lot tougher out there.
Wilson: Well, we hope this is a recipe for revolution. Ultimately, the course that we’ve chosen cannot continue without consequences. And thus far, it’s been the poor, the elderly, people of color, women, who are marginalized in this society and continue to pay the cost for not only bad decisions, but stupid s–t that we tend to tend to do with alarming rapidity. So I think recognizing the depth of what confronts us — the economic system, the banking system, the criminal justice system, the education system, the political system — those are all interconnected because they’re designed to maintain the status quo. Ultimately, this exercise in storytelling is a great place to start. It reconnects us with our own humanity, that thread that unites us rather than divides us. …
We now have more people in the prison system than we have residents in public housing and so we’re making some conscious choices about the things we want to invest in. …
Also, that we invest in things rather than people. I think that localities such as San Francisco can make some informed choices about doing things differently, one of which is moving the needle on forcing housing development to be more affordable for people of very low income. Hearing Armando, I mean, it’s so frustrating that city leaders have, in their wisdom, made a housing problem a parking problem.
As an example, Hospitality House runs one of the city’s oldest emergency shelters. … Directly across the street from us is a relatively new housing development, market-rate housing, where the people in the shelter cannot afford to rent … So at least one thing to do is to push the policy needle so that we are doubling what is called the Inclusionary Housing Ordinance, from 13% to 25%, so one in four.*
We could also say that, in terms of making some commonsense relationships between the importance of our workforce development system and our housing subsidy system, to prioritize new job hires in creative industries, to invest in the arts and music and culture in our own city and county of San Francisco, to have living communities for our elderly that will allow them not only to survive, but to thrive. To say thank you for all that you have done and meant to this society. We can do that in San Francisco as a starting point and where we can establish ourselves as a leader rather than a follower.
*Editor’s note: Wilson is referencing a city program that requires developers to reserve a certain percentage of units in new buildings to be rented or sold at a below-market rate, or to pay a fee.