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How a generation's struggle led to a record surge in homelessness

Advertisement Throughout their lives, late baby boomers like Forrest — people born from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s — have suffered homelessness at uniquely high rates, for reasons many and varied. Their sheer numbers ensured they came of age facing fierce competition for housing and jobs. They entered the workforce amid bruising recessions and a shift to a postindustrial economy that pummeled low-skilled workers. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Rents soared. Housing aid faltered. Crack, especially in poor neighborhoods, left many in their prime grappling with addiction and criminal records. Now the death of parents in their 80s or beyond is extending the tale of generational woe, leaving thousands of people newly homeless as they reach old age themselves. In four years, the number of unhoused people 65 or older has grown by half to more than 70,000. Related : Advertisement 'You have a generation of adult children who depend on their parents because they can't afford housing on their own,' said Dennis Culhane, a social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. 'When their parents die, they have no place to live. We're seeing more and more of them on the streets and in the shelters.' While homelessness is brutal at any age, Culhane called its surge among the elderly especially troubling. 'If you go back to the creation of the American safety net, public destitution among old people is the very condition it was meant to prevent,' he said. A worn figure whose life has been sculpted by twin forces — economic inequality and inner-city distress — Forrest personifies his generation's struggle. He has been a dishwasher, a janitor and what his mother called a 'prodigal son,' whose drinking and drug use have been hard to overcome. A drunken driver nearly killed him two decades ago and left him too weak for steady work. Through a lifetime of rising rents, he has never had his own housing. Forrest, left, who is homeless, with a friend at his usual spot in the Shaw neighborhood of D.C. on March 11. LAWREN SIMMONS/NYT But in health or hardship, one safety net caught him: his mother's apartment. Since losing her, he has returned to his childhood neighborhood to sleep in shelters and abandoned buildings, rustle odd jobs and commandeer friends' couches. Most days he sits on a stoop, drinking beer with an affable presence so enduring he calls himself 'the mayor of Ninth Street.' Street life has stolen many of his teeth and numbed his fingers. In a reminder that homelessness kills, his longtime partner in sidewalk survival recently died when a fire consumed the abandoned camper where he slept. A year ago, Forrest began working with two outreach workers who said his vulnerability might gain him a scarce spot in subsidized housing. After a winter of waiting, he could be housed as early as next month. Advertisement Despite the painful odyssey, Forrest sees himself less a victim of the outsize forces that left his generation prone to homelessness than a man with the strength to survive them. 'I been through hell and high water,' he said. 'But I'm still here. Good Lord willing, I always make a way.' Recessions and a neighborhood in decline Graduating from high school in 1974, Forrest joined the workforce during the worst recession since the Great Depression. Two recessions followed in the early 1980s, meaning the economy shrank for more than a third of his first decade as a worker. Recessions have scarring effects on young workers, reducing their long-term earnings and employment on average and elevating problems such as disease, divorce and increased mortality well into middle age, with disadvantaged groups harmed the most. Forrest found work but not advancement. He buffed the floors of federal buildings for cleaning contractors. He washed dishes in a museum and a nursing home. He calls the work satisfying, not drudgery, and did it long enough to qualify for Social Security. But the jobs were low paid, nonunion and often less than full time, in an economy with a declining need for manual labor. While his parents had unionized government jobs in an age of rising blue-collar pay, Forrest's generation faced union retreat and falling wages. Two decades after he took his first job, wages for the bottom 10th of workers were nearly 10% lower, after inflation, than when he began. He made do, in part, by living with his parents. Related : Advertisement As his earnings prospects declined, so did the neighborhood, Shaw. Once a showcase of Black achievement a mile or so from the White House, Shaw had already gone through decades of decline when crack arrived in the 1980s and hit it with special force. Forrest pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor drug charges in his 30s (two for cocaine and one for PCP). Another misdemeanor cocaine conviction in his 50s suggests addiction was hard to escape. As his record closed more doors, Forrest combined odd jobs with other ways to get by. 'You know Malcolm X, everything he went through — that's my story,' he said. 'The drugging, mugging, stealing, trying to make money.' Misfortune mounted when a drunken driver sped through a Shaw intersection as Forrest crossed the street. The blow broke his ribs, an arm and an ankle. He spent months in a wheelchair and emerged with the prospect of self-support more remote. One safeguard remained. His mother was a source not just of shelter but also emotional ballast — the person he trusted most not to give up on him. 'She used to tell all her children, 'Look in the mirror and talk to the Lord — he'll tell you what to do,'' he said. Forrest, at a temporary apartment in Washington on March 13. LAWREN SIMMONS/NYT Though her life was as straight as his was wayward, she made sure her son, however prodigal, had a key to the apartment. She worked until 79 and had a heart attack two years later. Forrest was 55 when she moved to a nursing home. Unlike his mother, he did not have a pension. His siblings, wary of his drinking and drug use, did not take him in, and the housing market had little to offer. Advertisement A uniquely vulnerable generation While Forrest's story is unique in detail, the elevated risk of homelessness stalks millions of people his age. They have consistently been unhoused at rates much higher than people born before or after. The existence of a generation uniquely vulnerable to homelessness was first identified in 2013 in a study led by Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania. A co-author, Thomas Byrne of Boston University, working with others, recently updated the findings. Analyzing census data at 10-year intervals, he found that throughout their lives late baby boomers had been at least 1.5 times as likely to become homeless as people born roughly a decade later. That was true in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. It was true whether the economy was weak or strong. It was true in every geographic region. Related : With Social Security meant as a safety net, it was not clear if the trend would persist in old age. But in an analysis for The New York Times, Byrne found that late baby boomers in their early 60s were 1.4 times as likely to be homeless as people who had reached that age a decade earlier and twice as likely as those two decades ahead. 'It continues to be really unlucky to have been born in the latter half of the baby boom generation,' Byrne said. While the data concerned men in shelters, he said, the same pattern most likely exists for women and people sleeping outdoors. As with Forrest, many aging people say they became homeless after the loss of a parent. In a survey of people age 50 or older when they first became homeless, more than 1 in 8 cited the death of a friend or relative as a reason. Advertisement 'We hear that again and again,' said Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Initiative on Housing and Homelessness at the University of California, San Francisco, which conducted the survey. 'It's usually guys who worked in low-wage jobs throughout their lives and made it by living with mom.' Related : A generation uniquely vulnerable to homelessness may also cast light on why homelessness exists. Policymakers sometimes debate whether homelessness is best understood as the product of human failings or structural forces such as inequality or aid policy. While individual stories often can be read as failures of personal responsibility, 'a birth cohort is by definition a structural explanation,' Culhane said. 'Something happened to these people as a group that continues to generate homelessness.' Forrest looks at a yearbook showing him on the junior varsity basketball team, on March 11. LAWREN SIMMONS/NYT 'The mayor of ninth street' In seeking places to sleep, Forrest proved inventive beyond the parking lot. A padlocked school had sheltered steps. The playground never closed. For a while Forrest thought his problem solved with free rent in a boardinghouse that he cleaned in exchange. But his girlfriend stole from other residents, he said, and the landlord put them out. One story he likes to tell sounds like a caper in a buddy movie — and produced a buddy. A street acquaintance had the keys to an empty building awaiting conversion to condominiums. The two men moved in and rented out rooms. The 'Abando-minium' scheme got them through the winter and established a contentious friendship of the sort that unhoused people often form for mutual aid and protection. Though younger than Forrest, Jason Vass was another late baby boomer rendered homeless in part by the death of a parent, his father, with whom he often had stayed. He was also an inspired storyteller and a legend as a drinker. 'I'm not an alcoholic — I surpassed that,' he said a few months ago. 'I'm a drunk!' Despite his stoic front, homelessness has left Forrest worn — slower, sadder, and sicker than when his street sojourn began. His gait is unsteady. His bones ache. Last year he fell off a ladder and broke the ankle spared in the car accident. Months of inpatient rehabilitation followed. The 'mayor of Ninth Street' has spent much of his time as a homeless man within sight of his childhood home, as if looking for comforting memories. But the gentrified Ninth Street of today is not the Ninth Street of his youth. Young professionals have flooded in and helped displace longtime residents. The drafty rowhouse his parents rented, long refurbished, would sell for more than $1 million. Efficiency apartments a block away fetch rents of $2,600 a month. His mother's death after years in a nursing home added to his sense of loss. He had a seizure after seeing her in the coffin. Related : The District of Columbia has an extensive network of outreach workers to serve the homeless. Last year, two of them — Nicole Dixon of Miriam's Kitchen and Quinntez Washington of District Bridges — introduced themselves to Forrest and Vass as the men sat on a Ninth Street stoop. Forrest said he did not need help. Overcoming his wariness, they helped him replace his lost ID and claim a range of benefits he said he had not known he could receive, behavior at odds with stereotypes of poor people maximizing aid. With Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, disability aid and food stamps, he now has health insurance and $1,300 a month in cash and food assistance. Housing aid is in shorter supply, and neither man proved an easy client. After the caseworkers secured Vass a rare spot in assisted living through Medicaid, he showed up drunk and berated the staff, who rescinded the offer. For a few weeks no one saw him. Then on the coldest night in February, the fire department responded at 3:45 a.m. to a report of flames in an abandoned camper. When they extinguished the fire, they found Vass inside, dead. Forrest was stunned. For all his vulnerability in living on the street, his partner had seemed to him invulnerable, built for sidewalk survival. Forrest, left, is visited by his niece Tarshia Holmes in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington on March 11. LAWREN SIMMONS/NYT Last year, the caseworkers put Forrest on the list for permanent supportive housing. The program provides chronically homeless people with subsidized apartments and offers voluntary treatment for problems such as substance abuse and mental illness. But the aid is limited, and waits are often lengthy. Conservatives have criticized the program, and the Trump administration wants to end it. The examples of Forrest and Vass encapsulate the debate. Critics say providing housing without treating mental illness or addiction leaves them unstable. Supporters say the housing saves lives by getting fragile people off the street — a program with a sobriety test is not one either man would pass. After a year's wait, Forrest was tentatively offered an apartment. It is a mile and a half from Ninth Street, outside his comfort zone. At first he said no. He was sleeping on a friend's couch. Then his friend died. Mindful of Vass' death on the street, he agreed to the move. Final approval is pending. But seven decades after being born into the most homelessness-prone generation in modern history, Forrest may soon have a home. This article originally appeared in .