Over 65, With No Place to Call Home

The number of older people living in homeless shelters in New York City is growing quickly, in an unheralded sign of the affordable housing crisis.

Robert Kirk, a retired jack of many trades, finds himself homeless at the age of 74 after a chain of events that could happen to almost anyone.

His landlady in Brooklyn died, the building’s new owner raised the rent and later evicted the tenants, and he could not find another apartment he could afford with his Social Security check.

Now his neighbors at a hotel shelter in Brownsville, Brooklyn, include a 69-year-old ambulette driver who lost his job and apartment after a leg injury, a 73-year-old former plasterer from Panama and a 78-year-old retired sushi chef from Japan.

They are among the swelling ranks of older people who are homeless in New York City.

According to a report released on Thursday, the number of single adults ages 65 and older in the city’s main shelter system more than doubled from 2014 to 2022, growing nearly three times as quickly as the number of younger single adults in shelters.

There were about 1,700 people older than 65 in single-adult shelters, which house a vast majority of the older New Yorkers who are homeless, during the fiscal year ending in June 2022, up from about 700 eight years earlier. The share of residents in those shelters who were older than 65 increased to 8 percent from 5 percent.