San Francisco – So where does he go, this aging veteran, now that his legs and kidneys don’t work and everything he owns fits inside the pair of pajama pants tied to his wheelchair?
John Knight, 60, spends his days wheeling to dialysis treatments, soup kitchens and the freeway ramp where he begs for change. A hospital has become his primary residence, but he sometimes scours the city for “a hole to climb into before it gets dark.”
“I have one thing on my mind – that’s to eat, sleep and stay out of the way,” said Knight, a former manual laborer who has been homeless for nine years.
Older men like Knight once made up a comparatively small share of the nation’s homeless.
But researchers say seniors now represent the group’s fastest-growing segment, a byproduct of an aging baby- boom generation.
University of California, San Francisco researchers who tracked the city’s transients found that between 1990 and 2003, their median age rose from 37 to 46 – aging at a rate much faster than the nation as a whole.
Those 50 or older represented 11 percent of the participants at the beginning of the study and 30 percent at the end, according to Judith Hahn, the lead author.
Hahn and her colleagues found similar trends in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and New York.
That has implications for governments, which may find housing the chronically homeless is cheaper than treating the health problems exacerbated by aging on the streets.
Without regular medical care, conditions such as hypertension and diabetes easily can degenerate into strokes, blindness and other infirmities that require more intensive treatment, if not around-the-clock inpatient care.
But Hahn noted another finding of their research that gave hope: While the homeless population is aging, it is not growing.
“If it’s a static population, it’s something you can solve,” she said. “Something can be done right now for the people out there who really need help and are going to become more and more expensive to the system.”
