Housing Instability for Older Adult Renters and Homeowners

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unparalleled amount of physical, emotional, and financial stress on households and families in Baltimore and across the country. The economic impacts of COVID-19 are making the housing crisis worse, threatening those who are most at risk of infection with homelessness.  Nationally, hundreds of thousands of older renters are still behind on their rent payments and fear eviction even as the economy improves. From Justice in Aging’s Policy Paper, Recommendations for Achieving Housing Stability and Ending Homelessness Among Low-Income Older Adults, “Regardless of economic status, all should be able to live and age in affordable, age-friendly housing. Yet, older adults are at the epicenter of the national housing unaffordability and homelessness crises. Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ older adults are disproportionately impacted by housing insecurity and homelessness, because they have experienced a lifetime of racism, discrimination, and inequities that compound in old age and negatively impact their access to safe, affordable housing.” 

Housing instability has no standard definition. It encompasses a number of challenges, such as having trouble paying rent or mortgage, overcrowding, moving frequently, staying with relatives, or spending the bulk of household income on housing expenses, including taxes and utility bills. These experiences may negatively affect physical health and make it harder to access health care. Households are considered to be cost burdened if they spend more than 30% of their income on housing and severely cost burdened if they spend more than 50% of their income on housing. Cost-burdened households struggle with food, clothing, utilities, pharmaceutical and health care expenses contributing to heightened anxiety. Black and Latinx households are almost twice as likely as white households to be cost burdened. (Statistics quoted by the Office of Disease Prevention & Health Promotion on Housing Instability as a Social Determinant of Health.)

Please join us for MPN’s Baltimore Seniors and Housing Collaborative session, Housing Instability of Older Adult Renters and Homeowners, in partnership with the Community Development Network of MD and MD Consumer Rights Coalition. 

We have invited distinguished experts:

• Ira Goldstein, PhD, President of Policy Solutions, Reinvestment Fund
• Jun Zhu, PhD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Finance, Indiana University-Bloomington; Nonresident Fellow, The Urban Institute 
• Maddy Ciulu, Director, Single Family Housing, CDA, Maryland Department of Housing & Community Development 

The experts will help us learn how we can collaborate and support a coordinated, equity-focused policy response to maintain housing security for seniors, including presentations on new research on reverse mortgage patterns among senior homeowners in Baltimore City, recent national research on the lack of sufficient affordable housing available to a growing share of senior renters, and plans for the launch of federal stimulus aid to prevent mortgage foreclosures in Baltimore City and the State of Maryland.