Portland documentary, Eugene panel bring visibility to homeless elders

Presenter: Older adults are the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population. Earlier this month, a screening of the documentary, No Place to Grow Old, was followed by a panel discussion with the film’s director and Eugene leaders serving the unhoused. At the Art House Dec. 5, event moderator Anni Katz:

Anni Katz (Moderator): I want to start off by talking about something really specific. Why focus on this specific population of unhoused people?

[00:00:30] Presenter: Director Davey Schaupp.

[00:00:31] Davey Schaupp (Director, No Place To Grow Old): Yeah, that’s a great question. I think for a few reasons, one, the fact that older adults are the fastest population entering homelessness, is not a fact that most people are aware of. You know, 2017, when the articles first started coming out, like, no one was really talking about this. So I think first we just felt like it was an important subject to bring to light.

[00:00:54] And I think second is, it challenges a lot of narratives people have around people who are unhoused, and at least for me, I grew up in the South, and so, you know, when I talk to family, when I talk to friends, a lot conversations around people who are unhoused come straight to things like work ethic and individual, you know, performance.

[00:01:16] But when the subject changes to someone who has worked their whole life, has a pension, has Social Security, and still can’t afford housing, then it starts raising these bigger questions is, like, maybe there is a systemic problem here.

[00:01:30] And so we just thought it’d be really interesting to focus on this particular demographic. One, because we felt like it was underrepresented, and two, because it felt like it might disarm some of our audience.

[00:01:42] Presenter: Panel Moderator Anni Katz:

[00:01:44] Anni Katz (Moderator): I think what’s interesting about seniors being homeless is that those are two populations that are considered invisible. Seniors separately and the unhoused population and then when you put them together maybe they’re double invisible. I don’t know how to say that. How do you go about taking a population that is invisible and making them visible? How do you bring attention? Movies like this are obviously a great place to start by letting everybody else know that they’re there.

[00:02:19] Presenter: Discussing what she has seen on the streets of Eugene, Sabra Marcroft:

[00:02:25] Sabra Marcroft (Panelist): It was right about—I want to say 2010 or 2011—when I started noticing a growing number of homeless elders. And maybe they were there before then and I just hadn’t noticed, but the number has been growing and growing.

[00:02:48] And then also on the opposite side of that, none of my kids’ friends—my kids are in their 30s—and none of my friends’ kids can afford to live here anymore. And what am I facing myself if what I’ve got going on right now skips a beat, falters? It has become impossible. And when I hear people blaming and shaming, it just makes me so sad. I get angry too. Who wouldn’t? But I am mostly sad.

[00:03:35] We can make this better, but we have to stop shaming and we have to start recognizing each other’s humanity. And we have to start recognizing when we’re doing things that are causing other people to have no place to grow old and be willing to give back, to share what we’ve gained instead of being greedy.

[00:04:07] Anni Katz (Moderator): In your experience, you talked about what the causes are. What do you think is behind it, for the people that you speak to?

[00:04:16] Presenter: Sabra Marcroft.

[00:04:17] Sabra Marcroft (Panelist): There has not been an investment in providing housing that is affordable and especially housing that is permanently affordable. A lot of the housing that is capital-A Affordable, it’s only Affordable for 20 years and then they can charge whatever they want for it, because, you know, that’s what the grant was for, that’s what the subsidy was for, was 20 years.

[00:04:48] And we’ve seen here in town there were a lot of units of housing that were permanently affordable, that were owned by the housing authority, that got sold off because they had not had whatever resources they needed to maintain the maintenance on the properties, and they couldn’t afford to bring them back up to code, so they sold them, and we lost that permanently, because those were snapped up and redeveloped into for-profit housing, rental housing.

[00:05:27] Presenter: Local artist and activist Rico Perez:

[00:05:30] Rico Perez (Panelist): Back in the ‘90s, early ‘90s, before Egan Warming, I’ll never forget one very, very cold winter where the warming center was at the Armory and I could not believe the numbers of folks who were living in their cars with their kids. Those numbers were really, really huge.

And I would find out later that the school, like, 4J, was underreporting how many kids were actually homeless. I mean families, whole families, 3,000 people showed up that night because it was so damn cold. And a lot of them were families at the time. We have an epidemic going on, a serious one, I mean, like, super serious.

[00:06:25] Since I’ve been here since 1984, I have watched the population of the homeless grow massively. And we cannot put a distinction of mental illness on this problem. Greed has a lot to do with this.

[00:06:49] And so, you know, the other part of this that bothers me is that while we have an epidemic going on, we also have what is touted to be the richest nation in the world, 78% and growing are one to two paychecks away. What do you think is going to happen as greed continues to live freely as it’s doing right now…

[00:07:16] We are a community and I want everybody to get that in their damn minds that we are community. We cannot survive without being a community. We need a community that has a level of compassion that is not happening right now. And that’s what I’m trying to create here. Let’s give some love to these folks. Support, you know, sometimes you don’t even have to do anything with them, but support the places that are trying to help them. There are quite a bit out there.

[00:07:54] I keep seeing cars drive by all the time. They don’t see the unhoused that are sitting on the street. They don’t even bother to look. This is really messed up. This is not supposed to be the kind of society we live in. We can do a hell of a lot better.

[00:08:12] And speaking of these sweeps, what the city is doing constantly—of telling the unhoused where they can’t be, but never telling them where they can be; of trying to stop feeding them—this is all a form of violence against them, you know? So this is a real real deal.

[00:08:35] And because of this, I feel it’s absolutely prudent to raise a challenge to city council and the county commissioners. I know they’re not going to do it, but my challenge is: Five days, five nights on only $50. Go somewhere where no one is going to help you.

[00:08:57] Come back and let us know the level of discomfort, the lack of sleep, where you’re going to try to clean yourself, eat—everything that you can’t do in a home. If you don’t know what it’s like, stop making policies that are going to affect the unhoused.

[00:09:17] And that is really, I mean, I have to ask these folks, is this the kind of community you want to foster? Because what you’re doing is a lot of violence to a whole bunch of people that don’t have what we have right now.

[00:09:39] Presenter: Moderator for the panel discussion, Anni Katz.

[00:09:42] Anni Katz (Moderator): Over half of the clients at Egan are seniors. I did not know that. How has that changed over the years? Is that a statistic that has adjusted?

[00:09:53] Presenter: David Strahan.

[00:09:54] David Strahan (Panelist): I still hold hope in my mind that last year’s ice storm really woke up people particularly in Springfield at the matrix of what that makeup was, at the only open shelter in Springfield, at how quickly so many elder people became unhoused, that quick.

[00:10:12] Twelve years ago, we had—I’m going to make some rough estimates here, please, nobody hold me to it—but about 12 years ago, the makeup of the guests that we were seeing was maybe 5% elderly, and I say ‘elderly’ because on the street at 50 you’re old. You are coming close to the end of your life when your years double living on the street.

[00:10:37] Twelve years ago, five to 10% of our visitors, our guests were elderly. There was a huge crowd of young skateboarders—bikers, wanderlusts. Some folks chose to live that way. Some folks took that route because of pressure at home, loss of a partner.

[00:10:57] The last ice storm, last year’s demographics, I’ll going to try to get as close as I can off the top of my head: 30% to 35% were over 50. If we had 50 guests in a sleep room at night, you could count up to 10 walkers in that room. Walkers or wheelchairs in a warming center—these are people living on the street.

[00:11:26] That’s not going to change. That’s going to get worse. The loss of a partner, a hospitalized illness will take you out of housing. A tree branch coming through your roof that you can’t repair will take you out of housing.

[00:11:40] The road to homeless is really short and really quick. The road out of homelessness is a maze that only the most educated, the most intelligent, or those really hooked up can maneuver.

[00:11:55] Presenter: Rico Perez.

[00:11:55] Rico Perez (Panelist): I am so sick of people making policy for folks that can’t help themselves right now. If you’re going to keep pushing them out—

[00:12:06] You know, I raised a question to City Council back in the ’90s. There should be a collaboration between the state, the county, and the cities. Buy a property. Don’t be for-profit all the time, buy a property, put five-story and social services in a program where it keeps people in housing. At least make an effort to do that.

[00:12:34] They’re not making this effort. They keep talking about, ‘We’re making affordable housing.’ None of it is affordable at this point.

[00:12:44] Presenter: David Strahan.

[00:12:45] David Strahan (Panelist): One of my earlier experiences, getting this couple into housing, I thought, ‘I’m going by where their apartment is. I’m going to pop in and just see how they’re doing.’ And they’re sleeping on the floor, paper cups in the kitchen, with nothing. But they’re housed. Again, that’s a society and organizations not following through.

[00:13:14] I followed through. I brought sleeping bags and beds and what I could do to help them and then contacted St. Vincent’s and found resources where they could go shopping and things like that, but then the next problem came up: They didn’t have a vehicle. How do you get furniture to an apartment when you don’t have a vehicle? There’s so many pitfalls to once they’re housed, to staying housed, getting comfortable, staying warm.

[00:13:37] Presenter: Sabra Marcroft.

[00:13:38] Sabra Marcroft (Panelist): The most important thing that we need to get better at is cooperation. We’ve got everything else. All the information about how to do anything is available, but the experience and the skill to actually do it without ripping each other apart is what we lack.

[00:13:57] And if we can take some of the good examples that are out there and start learning to help each other well and reduce the amount of constant damage that’s being created by misguided enforcement. I think that’s key.

[00:14:22] Because you can help a person 50 times, but if somebody with a paycheck and a uniform is making sure that none of those times are successful in getting them anywhere better, it tears you to pieces, it just does.

[00:14:47] And you know, I don’t want to bring up too much of this, but one of the things this community really needs, and I think probably lots of communities need, is mental health support for caregivers, whether we’re volunteer or paid. None of the little nonprofits we work for or even the big ones have any level of mental health support for dealing with this level of trauma on an ongoing basis without becoming completely burnt out or heartless.

[00:15:28] You can lose compassion, not because of what you know is right and wrong, but because your heart has been hurt so many times. You help someone and you help someone and you help someone and you help someone. You still can’t get them into housing and they die because they couldn’t get into housing. And how many times does that happen before you have to take a step back?

[00:15:59] And if we don’t have any support in continuing to do that work, and if we continue to have people that are making it harder instead of better, I don’t know what we’re going to do. So it’s the cooperation and the care that we need help with.

[00:16:20] I couldn’t keep doing it and it wasn’t that the guests at the place that I worked were so difficult. Some of them were. They were really difficult. But that wasn’t what was hard. What was hard was watching their efforts go unmet. And they would try, and they would try, and they would try, and they would not get anywhere because there just wasn’t the support, and it was so sad.

[00:16:59] And so, you know, I’m in college to learn multimedia design so I can help share people’s stories and I can help bring attention to solutions that work because I was, I can’t claim credit for what it became, but I was one of the first people at the table dreaming up Opportunity Village and I saw what the power of just going ahead and trying could do.

[00:17:35] And for a while there, there were stories that went out all over the world. And people started their own versions all over because of what people here in Eugene did. And they saw this example and they thought, ‘I can do better than that. We can do better than that.’ And they were right because they were in a different place and that our solution might not be perfect for them.

[00:18:05] But the story helped and if we could bring stories of solutions along-with, to inspire people so that they don’t give up, so that they think of the next right thing they can try.

[00:18:26] Presenter: Discussing his project, The Many Faces of the Unhoused, Rico Perez:

[00:18:30] Rico Perez (Panelist): I have a project called The Many Faces of the Unhoused, which I am trying to put a face to the unhoused in a way that has not been done, but to try to make a bigger point that institutionalized greed between that and the militarism has a lot to do with this…

[00:18:51] I’ve talked to a whole lot of people. They’ve got stories. Every one of them has a story. If you guys want to hear some stories, go talk to some of these folks. If they gain your trust, they’ll tell you their story and some of these stories are heartbreaking. Some of them you’re going to laugh because they’re being funny about it and I love that part of them, that, ‘Hey, my situation is screwed up, but I got a lot of humor behind this whole thing…’ I am really excited to go back and to talk to more people.

[00:19:35] Presenter:  Local leaders hope to bring visibility to a doubly invisible group, unhoused elders. Sarah Koski and Anni Katz host a screening of the documentary No Place to Grow Old, sponsored by Advancing Community Together, ACT Now Lane.