MORE ELDERLY BEING DUMPED BY STRESSED OUT FAMILIES OUT ON THE STREET

Shelters seeing more elderly homeless
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Register | Log in Logout | Member Center Deb Gruver | Wichita Eagle
Deb Gruver The Wichita Eagle
On the afternoon of Jan. 17, when the temperature dipped below freezing, a family from Kingman drove to Wichita, dumped a 78-year-old relative at the Inter-Faith Inn homeless shelter and quickly drove away.
They left her on the sidewalk with her wheelchair and a few suitcases.
“She wasn’t crying,” case manager Amanda Merritt recalled. “But she was upset about the situation. She said they were kicking her out.”
They left so quickly that no one from the shelter was able to talk to them, Merritt said. They didn’t even knock on the shelter door to make sure there was room at the inn.
“That’s unbelievable that someone would do that,” said Janis Cox, co-chairwoman of Advocates to End Chronic Homelessness, an area faith-based volunteer group.
Shelter staff took the woman, who was in poor health, inside.
To accommodate her frailties, the staff hustled to set her up with a room on the ground floor.
She stayed at the shelter more than two weeks until she found an out-of-state friend who agreed to take her in. She left Wichita a week ago.
The woman’s story may seem unbelievable, but it’s not that rare, said Sandy Swank, director of housing and homeless services for Inter-Faith Ministries.
A 2010 study by the Homeless Research Institute, an arm of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, projected that the number of elderly people who are homeless would increase by 33 percent, from 44,172 in 2010 to 58,772 by 2020, and would double to 95,000 by 2050.
“It seems like there are two main things going on,” said Nan Roman, president and chief executive of the alliance in Washington, D.C.
“One is that there’s a group of people who are homeless who are becoming older. They were younger homeless people, so the population is aging that way. The other thing is that our whole population is aging. Even though older people are less likely to be homeless than other people because they have more of a safety net, because there are more and more older people in general, we are going to have more and more elderly people vulnerable to homelessness.” Numbers up locally
Swank sees the numbers increasing locally.
“I’ve been working at Inter-Faith since October 1990,” she said. “In the beginning, we’d have an occasional elderly person come in, but if they came in, they came in with someone else. They always had someone to look after them. In the last 10 years, we have seen more elderly people, and each year it seems like the number increases.”
Swank remembers another woman left at the shelter. She arrived in a hospital gown with no shoes. There was snow on the ground. The front left wheel of her wheelchair was off.
“I was just outraged,” Swank said.
The woman eventually was able to move into an apartment of her own.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/02/11/182651/shelters-seeing-more-elderly-homeless.html#storylink=cpy