Three years ago, I went on a subsidized housing list. It has fallen through.
As folks know here, we have been facing economic troubles for some time. Yesterday I had to eat ground turkey for dinner, from a food bank, I made left overs and gave us smaller portions to have dinner tonight. Hopefully these will ease up when my husband will be going on Social Security [for old age]. I still need so many things. It is sad how many things I miss out on simply for having no money. I even wish I had some art supplies for one project. I did switch to water colors recently since they are cheaper. A good friend bought me some shoes for my birthday.
He wants to stay here. I am okay with that and always liked our apartment here. I told him let me investigate having us move somewhere cheaper, it hasn't gone well. I looked for apartments in the 500-800 range and even included other states. Sadly, I would never see some medical benefits again if I moved to some states. Oh I "make too much" for a lot of stuff now since all cut-offs for social services were kept at 2019 prices. They don't care that prices have gone up by 50 percent. I have explored what to do with the housing issues for a long time.
Housing Issues: Trying to Choose Where to Live is Not Easy
I didn't know what town to move to especially ones that had cheaper rent. I would rather stay here if I can, I'm used to the place. Every place has good and bad.
It can be hard to live in a town where everyone is wealthier than you, I've written about this already several times, though richer places have more resources we benefitted from too. It's complicated.
When you get old, you get tired of constant change. My family set up a life for me from all the moving and financial abuse to where I never got to have a "hometown" or a place to "belong". It is not a good feeling to be in your 50s and not know where to move to. I wrote about this very issue in the Economic Nomads article. Everyone in my life including friends is scattered here and there. There's a few regional friends I would rather stay living closer to.
My old small town is too economically demolished to go back to, and has too little medical care. Most people either have left or are deceased. Sadly, one of my friends there years ago wrote that the town had seriously declined, they had a homeless encampment there for a time in recent years. A couple friends even years ago told me, "Don't move back here!" One friend used the word "desolate" to describe things.
There was another small town I liked and considered, I visit the place a lot when I can, it's too remote though, not enough medical care, there's no pharmacy which is a big issue for me, and the water is bad, to the point people need to have expensive water filters. Every place has problems. Rentals are rare there too.
Another town I have considered and still thinking about, well, all the cheap apartments are small. They are in houses with stairs and those horrific claw-foot tubs. I can get 400 square feet for 660 dollars, but what do I do with all my stuff? My medical supplies, mobility--we both are on a walker, and hobby related items would fill the place up.
Some factors that apply here:
1. We both have clean records, and our credit is at a decent level now. I have some small medical bills I pay on now but that's it.
2. I have kept the rent paid here on time for years and years. I never have paid the rent late. I don't have any evictions on my record. Even in the poverty of Chicago, I kept all the landlords paid.
I like my present apartment, it is safe, quiet, they fix things and it's on the first floor so there are no stairs or elevator to worry about. I'm okay with staying here, there's just the money angle side of things.
The housing that is cheaper is so substandard, it brings up survival issues, with no air conditioning, endless stairs I can't do, and fears of crime, mice and roaches from my past. I joined all these neighborhood boards for one town I considered moving to for cheaper rent, and the place seems like a crime fest. There are meth heads all over and stolen motorcycles for some reason. Where I live now is calm compared to that place. The exterior of the town looks okay but I wondered about one apartment complex that had very small apartments [480 square feet] for 660 dollars when people on the board, said, "The pizza man won't even deliver pizza there!" That's not a good sign! My burn out at looking at endless all the same "cheap" apartments, hit new heights. They all looked the same. There were no deals. Everything looked very small, worn and broken down. It was depressing. Life for the poor in America is definitely getting worse.
I and my husband do not qualify for HUD. Even if we both just get Social Security and nothing else, we are still over the line. I think the cut-offs for married couples in my state are a joke. Who thought of all that?
So I found another low income senior/disabled housing program to apply to and went on the list three years ago. I don't want to get into detail here, it's a long story, but we got skipped on the list, and things were strange, the rules made no sense. All I can figure out is, the building manager may not like self employment. Maybe she doesn't like fat people? I don't know. Some rules of this other program which is unlike HUD disturbed me like finding out they could raise your rent mid-lease.
From what I can tell, they don't like any self-employment, at all. If your income changes every month and ours does. They don't like it. My husband will still have to do some work for us to survive even after he goes on Social Security. This is coming very soon. It is kind of nuts to me that supposedly no other old people do gig employment or self employment. How do they survive? Maybe there are no married people in these places. Something makes no sense.
The social worker, basically found out everything was HUD except the one place and "family housing". He found some cheaper complexes, but they were very broken down or had stairs. He told me, "You may have to go to a more populated area". Bigger cities are harder to get by in, they are more expensive, there's far more competition for resources. Been there, done that. There's one town I used to live in years ago, I won't go there, why? The place is overrun with the homeless. While they have some programs for them, tent cities have proliferated all over the town. Drugs are a huge problem. This is a sign of how bad the economy is. You won't hear this stuff in the news.
Where I live now, they treat me well, they even made some disability accommodations for me. So I had it very good on that score. We can get plumbing problems here but they have fixed them. There is far more risks in moving, people don't want to rent to supersized people. Housing can be scary for us. Landlords don't get medical reports detailing my Lipedema or other medical causes. They may think I am like the people on My 600lb life, and the pizza boxes will pile up or something. I have heard, "Will you go through the floor before?" when looking for apartments. I was told before a house apartment was "not available" years ago. One friend when I told her the subsidized story even said, "Your husband has long hair, maybe she though he was a druggie or something". We don't even drink.
I'll probably stay in the present apartment for now. One can't take secure housing for granted.
The cut-offs for married couples are so low for HUD to be laughable. I wanted to stay in the county for various things and activities but looked around just wondering what others pay. One day I looked up all the under 800 dollars a month apartments in my entire state. There were only 541. They were either in very remote towns with no hospitals, think 1000 people or less or in very crime ridden "ghetto" towns, think "Newark" NJ-- something along those lines. I was thinking of the budget arriving at the 800 mark to try and ease things up.
Cheap apartments were all alike. Stairs galore, nothing is built for disabled still, claw foot tubs, etc. They brought flashbacks to horrible places I lived in before, but even my boarding house rooms seemed in better shape in the 90s than what I saw. We haven't seen a mouse or a roach in 25 years. My husband has said, he wants to stay here.
My town should build some decent senior housing. [I hate elevators and towers] and or moderate senior disabled affordable housing. They need to step up on the ball. This whole process was harder and more disappointing than I expected. This apartment is good, I lived here long enough, except for the inspections, LOL
much the same , hes disabled and younger than me , but they moved retirement to 67 so ive another 5 years , we are in state housing which everyone looks down on , they also try to hound you into a smaller property and when i say small i mean broom closet sized , we would struggle to fit in his disabled equipment , let alone us ! the social women said you can move tomorrow , we will take care of everything . what they mean is they will chuck everything you own in a skip and you will be stuck in a pensioner ghetto
ReplyDeleteHi Kate, they keep moving retirement up here though I guess husband can still get it earlier, grandfathered in. Soon will make it so old barely anyone will be able to get it. It's terrible they look down on state housing there, they do here too. Many of the apartments are very small and in "towers" [towers are scary to immobile people like me in case there is a fire or the power is shut off [our power goes out constantly in the USA] and you can't leave [get down stairs] or lets say you come home and can't get upstairs to get your stuff--too disabled to do stairs, and 10 flights is even impossible. Even in our private apartment the elevator was being repaired/replaced and was out of commission for three months so if I lived up stairs would have been trapped, thankfully live on a first floor. Some apartments here are only 400 square feet with very small lay-outs, I did a lot of tours, well with HUD found out the cut offs were so low. Yeah disability equipment can take a lot of room, walkers, canes, nebulizer, CPAP, leg machine with huge box of leg garments, and there's more than that. Here they never answer questions, and "oh the market rate has gone up by 200 dollars!" Market rate the term for endless rent increases private and public. Yeah can see them throwing all your stuff out and then stuck in the ghetto. A lot of housing here is in the "ghetto". One place so bad, my old medical house call people were afraid to go there. They closed three places that were in safer areas. The social work women are scary. I may write an article about social work soon. some are sincere but it is a "weed out" system and noticing these homeless agencies getting millions of dollars, and homelessness gets worse. I'm tired, always feel like they want to trip u up, and or not tell you anything. At least in private, just pay your rent, decent place will fix things, and left in peace. Hope things get better for you.
DeleteYeah, I too have chuckled over the seemingly benign-sounding contradiction of a term like "market rate," which is just a nicer way of saying, "You're gonna pay through the nose." For years, I always prayed that our complex would never get written up anywhere, or discovered en masse, because we'd probably have gotten stuck with those initially astronomic increases a hell of a lot sooner than we did.
ReplyDeleteHousing is like infrastructure, something that too many places have neglected for too long, which is why you see the results that you do. It wasn't something that the feds really prioritized until the Biden era, when he passed those two infrastructure bills, which fixed a lot of the worst problems in certain areas, but did not amount to a permanent solution for woes that will surely come around again, in a few years' time.
One qualifier I would make on your statements -- unless you can find a better deal that we just can't pass up, I don't think we have any other choice, for now, than to work with what we already have. If we can make the financial underpinnings a bit more stable -- as we have discussed -- then that will go a long way toward ensuring a bit more security than we have now.
As far as what you think the building manager's quirks may or may not be -- it's supposed to be irrelevant under federal law, and state law, too, which puts her in material breach of it. We have to push back against this stuff that Trump and his goons are busily reviving -- the notion that your rights depend on "El Patron" looking kindly on you, but first, the price of admission comes down to bending the knee, and kissing his shiny little ring. Is that the kind of world you want to live in? Not this bird. --Mr. Peep
When they start using new words watch out, it's usually a con of some sort. Market rate is another way to say "price fixing" and they seriously when they say that stuff, that means, "I have to price the rent, the same as everyone else" which didn't that use to be illegal when businesses would price fix. I am old but I remember that being a big no-no decades ago.
DeleteI hope our complex never gets written up too and then has the rent go up. This place is getting gentrified enough as it is. Also I hope tourism drops in popularity, people probably won't have as much money to come here anymore.
The search was scary, things were far more awful than I expected them to be. I think most raised the rent into the stratosphere, in the late Covid era. Many places I looked at I thought [seriously] I don't know if I can even stay alive in that place. [no air conditioning, very small, disability inaccessible, and where we live now, I worry because my walker doesn't fit into the bedroom or bathroom and no wheelchair ever would either. I hope things get better. HUD was far more straight forward, u either accept your apartment or you don't and they go to the next person, there was no game playing like "I call 5 people at once". I think being a private place, there's more protection under HUD against discrimination but who knows. I am unsure of that area now, and joined neighborhood boards and more and saw stuff that scared me and thought maybe the place wasn't right for me anyway. That kind of treatment didn't endear me to the idea either. I just wanted treated fairly, was that too much to ask? I don't like people who operate on favoritism or secret rules or confusion. I had enough of that in my family.