By ALANE SALIERNO MASON
People crossing a traffic light by crosswalk in Harlem, Manhattan. (Jordi de Rueda/Getty Images)
“Don’t get old,” the old folk used to say. But the golden years in New York City are full of advantages over the suburbs: no driving, no lawn maintenance, an endless cycle of museum exhibitions, half-price theater tickets and free concerts. That is, if your monthly fixed income is well above $1,458, the average Social Security payment in New York State.
If you’re at, near or below that level, don’t get old, and especially don’t get disabled. Even unfashionable neighborhoods may no longer have a place for you.
When my 64-year-old friend with multiple sclerosis could no longer manage the stairs, she found no help in locating an affordable, accessible apartment. Like many others in the city’s 40,000 walk-ups, she was increasingly becoming a prisoner in her home.
Then she and her father, a retired landscaper in his mid-80s, were evicted by their landlady of over 20 years. Their Bronx neighborhood was suddenly advertising many newly renovated two-bedroom apartments at $1,800 and up, priced to appeal to young careerist apartment-sharers with prosperous parent guarantors.
Despite decades of legal efforts, there is next to no affordable senior housing in New York City. A new building of transitional and affordable housing with 135 apartments that opened in the Bronx last year had 50,000 applications. Organizations like Breaking Ground and the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens list low-income apartments with a complicated application process requiring elderly, disabled applicants to have executive function and saintly patience to wait, literally, for years.
Community organizers at Metro IAF have been pressuring Mayor de Blasio to make good on his promise to build senior housing for public housing residents on vacant NYCHA land, freeing up larger units for younger, larger families. But they haven’t gotten far.
Meanwhile, on rental sites like Streeteasy, you can search by “pied-a-terre allowed,” by gym or swimming pool, pre-war or “green” building; terrace or balcony — but not “wheelchair accessible.” “Elevator” is a search term among “amenities” — but no site will tell you if there are stairs between the sidewalk and the elevator.
Craigslist includes a search term for “wheelchair accessible,” but for under $1,500 per month, the hits are in Connecticut. Thankfully Zumper, so fine-grained as to allow search for a concierge service, a ceiling fan, or a walk-in closet, does include “wheelchair accessible,” and even “income restricted” — but, unfortunately, there is “nothing here… yet” — nor will there ever be, unless the city takes action on a massive scale.
It is staggeringly difficult for a healthy person — let alone anyone with any sort of cognitive decline — to navigate the dozens of overlapping and redundant not-for-profit organizations and government agencies tasked to prevent homelessness.
My friend has been on a waiting list for a Section 8 voucher for nine years. At a targeted telephone number for housing assistance in the Bronx, the voicemail is full and no longer taking messages. Multiple exchanges with the Mayor’s Office of Adult Protective Services provided one lead: a number for a landlord in Staten Island who never answered his phone.
From the Multiple Sclerosis Society to the local City Council office, the ultimate advice is that if you are elderly, disabled and in need of city-subsidized accessible housing, you must go into a homeless shelter and hope.
So my writer-friend with MS did. The first night in the shelter, she ended up on the floor in the bathroom, unable to pull herself up; there were no handholds on the wall or other provisions for the disabled. She ended up in the hospital, severely dehydrated, her neurological condition greatly worsened due to stress.
Two and a half months later, she is still in the medical system. Her elderly father is still in the shelter. Early on, the city did offer him one — if only he and his daughter could get up a flight of stairs. Alternatively, New York City will give them a travel voucher, one way, to take their aging, disabled bodies anywhere else in America.
Mason is an editor at W. W. Norton & Company.