A surge in Minnesota of homeless elderly
By
Gary Joad
22 April 2017
According to interviews broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio earlier this month, “alarm bells are going off around the state,” over the surge of older persons entering homeless shelters both in the urban and rural areas.
Sue Koesterman, pastor and executive director of Churches United for the Homeless shelter in Moorhead, Minnesota told MPR’s Dan Gunderson, “I think we are beginning to see the wave. It offends me as a pastor that someone who is at end of life should have to receive hospice care (for example) in a dorm of a homeless shelter. To me, that’s just offensive to my sense of human dignity.”
Persons over the age of 55 are the smallest grouping of homeless in the state. However, across Minnesota, older people are the fastest growing demographic without a permanent address, according to the Wilder Foundation which has been performing a “point-in-time” one day counting of homeless people every 3 years since 1991.
According to the Wilder Foundation’s 2015 report, the number of Minnesota’s homeless persons 55 to 80 years old has increased by 45 percent since the last survey done in 2012. The latest single day survey counted 9,312 adults, youth, and children without a permanent address, including 843 over the age of 55, comprising 9 percent of the homeless population in Minnesota.
Koesterman told MPR that, absent a political commitment to reverse the trend, matters are going to get much worse. Minnesota’s Republican controlled legislature, in its most recent session, did not even give a hearing to a proposal to allow financing for affordable senior housing. The Trump administration has unmistakably signaled its intention to abolish grants for the funding of lower cost housing for…