A long wait for senior housing

For two years, Pat Blair has been engaged in a grim guessing game.

Will she be able to keep up with the rent on her apartment - scrimping on food and selling her jewelry piece by piece - until government-subsidized senior housing becomes available?

"They told me it would be nine months to a year, and that depends on how many people die or go into nursing homes," said the 65-year-old Lindenwold resident. "It's two years now, and I'm barely getting by. I get my Social Security check, which just covers the rent, and then it starts all over again."

The waiting list for subsidized senior housing has been growing steadily for years, with the average wait for a unit now 13 months, according to the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, an advocacy group in Washington representing senior residences.

But the problem tends to be far worse in more densely populated areas. In South Jersey, the wait can be four years. In some parts of New York, applicants can wait up to eight years.

A sampling of five subsidized buildings in Philadelphia showed waiting lists between six months and two years.

"There's 10 people on the waiting list for every unit that becomes available. And it's getting worse," said Lauren Shaham, a spokeswoman for the senior-housing association. "These are people living on Social Security or very modest pensions, and all their income is getting eaten up by rent."

The subsidized units, for which qualifying seniors pay 30 percent of their income, were created under a 1959 initiative by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Today about 250,000 units exist, providing a comfortable place for low-income seniors.

But the over-65 population is increasing rapidly with the aging of the "baby boom" generation. By 2030, the number of U.S. residents over 65 is projected to almost double to 72 million, representing nearly 20 percent of the population, according to U.S. census estimates.

Meanwhile, federal funding for new subsidized units has been flat over the last three years, according to HUD.

"Very few buildings are actually getting funded," Shaham said. "Unless we speed up the pipeline and get some new places built, this is just going to get worse."

For those at the bottom of waiting lists, there is little to do but try to find alternative accommodations until their number is called.

Some stay with friends and family, but most are left to move into what is termed "affordable housing," apartments slightly below the market rate run by public-housing authorities and for-profit companies attracted by government tax credits.

Barbara Henry, 65, pays $550 a month for such an apartment in Bellmawr. That represents almost 60 percent of her Social Security income, the rest of which is eaten up by Medicare, health insurance, and the cost of prescription drugs, Henry said.

Henry raised three daughters alone on a florist's salary, living paycheck to paycheck with no retirement plan. Now she works part time at a shoe store just to have some money to buy food.

"A lot of my friends sold property and put the money in the bank. But I was always moving from apartment to apartment," she said. "If I could go back and do it all over again, I would have found a job with a pension or something."

Thousands of subsidized units have been funded, but they are not yet built, as developers work through a system that can take up to five years to bring a project to fruition, according to information provided by HUD. Agency officials are working on an overhaul of that system, which they plan to present to the White House's Office of Management and Budget at an unspecified date.

Jo Ann Yourison, a service coordinator at Barrington Mews, an affordable-housing building for seniors in Barrington, said her tenants' costs, particularly those related to health care, had risen sharply in recent years.

"Some of them can't afford a new pair of dentures," she said. "They don't tell me, but I figure there's a lot of them waiting for [subsidized] housing. Some of them die waiting on that list. It's a shame."

Blair is hopeful that she is now in the homestretch, that with another year or so of counting every dollar, the unit she has been waiting for will finally become available.

Up until about nine years ago, she was a nurse's assistant at Underwood-Memorial Hospital in Woodbury and had her own house. But then she fell ill with an infection that nearly killed her. She had to quit her job and eventually lost her home.

Now Blair cleans her friends' condos, weeds their gardens, and sells off the possessions that once filled her house and are now crammed into her small Lindenwold apartment.

"I'll do pretty much anything that's legal," she said. "There's a lot of people out there that are like me, that need help. We look out for each other."