It’s mid morning on a Thursday in Brevard County, just over the Cocoa Beach causeway and not even the breeze off the nearby Indian River Lagoon can compete with the Florida sun.
The sun, which will only get more intense as the day goes on, signals the ticking of time. As people get moving, and traffic on U.S. Highway 1 grows louder and more congested, a shuttle bus stops to drop off about a dozen people. The vehicle is emblazoned with a large purple logo for Matthew’s Hope, a homeless services day center just north of Cocoa Village.
The shuttle picks up mainly unsheltered people in the area and takes them to the center, where guests get a break from the weather and the noise and can enjoy a shower, get some clean clothes, and eat a hot meal. The nonprofit even has a salon, a medical clinic, and a chapel. The center also provides access to computers and internet, case workers, as well as connections to housing programs, substance use help, and employment resources.
Most of the passengers getting off the bus carried with them what looked like bags with their belongings. They thanked the driver several times for the ride as they exited and headed toward the double doors that lead into the center’s mess hall, where they’ll fraternize over a free breakfast.
Inside, one of the dining areas has been endearingly dubbed the “old table.” Staff said that’s because the presence of older generations at the center has been dominating in recent years and they like to sit together.
A place for the placeless
For older, unhoused people like 72-year-old Ron Frisby, Matthew’s Hope is a place for them to catch their breath and rest their bones.
The Vietnam veteran is currently staying in transitional housing through Volunteers of America Florida, which helps veterans and their families with safe shelter and other forms of support. Frisby said he hates it there. He became homeless less than two years ago, after a bitter divorce from his wife of 22 years that he said left him almost half a million dollars in the hole.
“That led me to homelessness. She forged my signature. I didn't press charges, but that's what put me here,” he said. “I slept in the car from December of ‘23, I left Ocala, and since I went to high school on Merritt Island, Brevard County is my turf, as I call it.”
Frisby is now disabled, dealing with health problems, and living the life of unsheltered homelessness. It can be brutal.
“I was actually sleeping between a couple of cars that guys were out at Lee Warner Park. There's a car here and a truck here, and there was some grass right there. That's where I'd stay, in that grass,” he said.
Frisby likes to think of himself as tough and adaptable and said that, so far, he’s made out alright. But it hasn’t been without turmoil. While riding his bike recently he was hit by a car and suffered injuries to his head and knee. He’ll have surgery soon, he said.
While some older adults have children who may be able to lend a hand, Frisby and his ex-wife never took that step. He said he gets around $1,300 a month in social security but that it’s not enough to cover his living expenses.
“It's just evil, you know. Back in the 50s – it was way less. I mean, you're looking at eight, nine cents a gallon. You're looking at it now at $3.25, you know, and trying to get understanding, how you can get to figure everything out. It's a total different scenario,” he said.
It’s happening everywhere
Every year, local organizations across the U.S. help conduct a federal census mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD-designated Continuum of Care agencies in each state manage the count, gathering a limited yet useful number totaling the number of people found experiencing sheltered or unsheltered homelessness on a given night.
This process takes hundreds of people per region, including volunteers, and takes place during the last 10 days of January. The results provide a sort of snapshot of our unhoused communities at one point in time — and Central Florida’s picture has grown grimmer over the last five years.
The largest Continuum of Care in our region, called CoC FL-507, is handled through the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, located in Orlando. This nonprofit oversees the HUD Point-In-Time Count, as well as the distribution of funds among local charities, for the Orange-Seminole-Osceola tri-county area, which includes the cities of Orlando, Kissimmee, and Sanford, and regularly scores among the state’s top five most homeless-populated regions.
In its most recent PIT count, the HSNCFL revealed that children and older adults continue to make up 40% of the area’s unhoused people. In fact, according to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the demographic of people aged 50 and older is now considered the largest and fastest-growing group experiencing homelessness across the country — many of them living unsheltered. Nationally, they make up about half of the homeless population, and their numbers are estimated to accelerate throughout states, potentially tripling by 2030, according to the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, an official who advises the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In a final report addressing homelessness, the ASPE stated that perhaps the most significant challenge with housing assistance for older adults experiencing homelessness is that there is not enough housing available to meet the need, as this age group continues to also grow among low-income households.
“The lack of affordable housing coupled with increases in the numbers of older adults eligible for housing assistance creates challenges,” it stated. “Only 37 affordable and available homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renters in the U.S. (those with incomes less than 30% of the area median income), nearly a third of whom (30%) are seniors.”
Central Florida counties are no exception.
The Brevard Homeless Coalition, CoC for the county in its name, reported this year that one of every three unhoused people in the region are aging adults. That means that one third of Brevard’s homeless encampments and shelters are occupied by seniors.
At Matthew’s Hope, founder and CEO Scott Billue said his work has changed since he first started 15 years ago.
“We're approaching 33%. That's a third of everybody we see is a Baby Boomer,” he said. “I'm calling it ‘the silver tsunami.’ It's a trend that's starting now and will go for the next 20 to 25 years.”
To be clear, HUD often considers housing for older persons to start at age 55. Anyone younger than 60 belongs to Generation X. People 60 and older are considered Baby Boomers.
Still, homelessness is increasing within these aging generations.
Causes at multiple intersections
Billue said there are two main reasons. One is that a lot of these numbers are coming from people who experience chronic homelessness. This means, they’ve been homeless for a long time and it has continued into older age.
According to Florida’s Council on Homelessness, the U.S. aging population is projected to reach more than 80 million by 2040 — that would be 22% of the total population. The Council also found that this population of seniors often have compounding vulnerabilities, such as extremely low and fixed incomes, comorbidities, as well as mental and physical disabilities, and many may lack a support network.
“As the aging population increases, so does their rate of homelessness. The root causes of homelessness among older adults include community-level factors such as lack of accessible and affordable housing, as well as individual risk factors including medical conditions, substance use disorders, social isolation, and financial insecurity,” the Council stated.
For Billue, another main driver is death.
“As these people die off and are leaving spouses behind, or becoming retired or what have you, and losing benefits. So, we have a crisis at hand that I really think, especially our state legislators, are ignoring,” he said.
Billue’s fianceé and the director at Matthew’s Hope, Sharlene Dewitz, said some of the unique challenges for older adults once they become homeless includes surviving isolation. She said self-sufficiency and independence are issues without a support person, like when widows and widowers become incapable of caring for themselves after the loss of a longtime spouse.
Younger people experiencing homelessness may not experience this hardship.
“I have found, especially with my older gentlemen, who have lost their wife, oftentimes they don't know what medication they were taking or what they need. Their reply to me is always, ‘Well, my wife always handled that,’” she said. “Now, their wives have passed, they have lost half their income, they are now out on the streets or in a camp, and they have no clue what they were even taking.”
Dewitz said finances can take a hit, too, if the surviving senior never paid the bills or learned how – or if they need the money their partner used to make.
Billue is watching this theory play out both every day at Matthew’s Hope and in his own personal life. His mother in Tampa recently lost her husband of 45 years, his stepfather.
“Her income went from $109,000 to $29,000 overnight, immediately,” Billue said.
He is now left making tough decisions – whether to help pay for his mother's bills, move her out, or bring her home. At least, Billue said, his mother can count on him. Unhoused, older people, like Frisby, who never had children and have no surviving family, face homelessness alone.
It’s a community problem
Back at Brevard’s CoC, Planning Director Sarah Slone said that while the trend is national, solutions from place to place and person to person may differ. Slone said there are many factors at play and that the needs of unhoused people often involve nuanced conditions and events, including regionally and historically specific socioeconomic pressures and modern problems. All of these things can and do differ drastically and are best tended by the unhoused residents’ own community members, organizations, and local governments.
She said that in a lot of cases, the problem is not individualized. It’s systemic.
“Often we find that people enter the homeless system of care when all other systems of care have failed them. And so it's very difficult to solve for many people, and often the systems of care have failed them even through childhood. So, it's not one thing often that trips somebody into homelessness. It's many different things, and it really requires a full system of care to work on these issues,” she said.
Another thing is locality. Having community members become engaged with their unhoused neighbors because they share a lot with them and are part of the same ecosystem.
Unlike places like Orange County, where many of the homeless populations come from different cities and states, down in her neck of woods on the Space Coast, Slone said that the problem seems to be homegrown.
“We look at the data and we see that 81% (of the unhoused people) became homeless in Brevard. These are our residents. They're not transitional,” she said.” We just have to care about our own.”
But Slone said the issue can get complex, especially when it comes to funding and affordable housing. Her organization has a plan and feels confident that doing outreach and educating the community will help form valuable relationships and partnerships.
“We're a small organization. There's just really six of us and one that's part time. We just feel like, listen, we're on the Space Coast. We put a man on the moon. We can solve our homelessness, right?” Slone said.
But until some out-of-this-world idea solves the homelessness crisis, Frisby had some advice to future older people about how the current economic structure requires that people plan ahead.
“The way that everything has to come around. If you don't think about it ahead of schedule. When you start working, if somebody offers you the 401K plan, take it – even if it is not what you want,” he said.
Frisby said he’s awaiting an inheritance and after his surgery he hopes to purchase an R.V. and move to Tennessee with his girlfriend. He said a house on wheels might just be affordable enough for him to live out the rest of his years out of the woods and off the streets.
Lillian Hernández Caraballo is a Report for America corps member.
