The Fastest-Growing Homeless Population Is Hiding in Plain Sight

For many people, the picture that comes to mind with homelessness is a man on a city street, sleeping under cardboard or pushing everything he owns in a trolley, and yes, individual men are still the largest visible group experiencing homelessness.

But the face of homelessness is getting older, and it's getting older fast. The median age of a single homeless adult has shifted from 35 in 1990 to around 50 by 2010, which tells you something very important about what has been building underneath the surface for decades. And women over 50 are standing right at the nasty little crossroads of it. This isn't a sudden moral collapse. This isn't women “making poor choices”. This isn't a personal budgeting failure, as if the right coupon folder and making one's morning coffee at home could somehow repair forty years of economic extraction.^[1]

What we are seeing now is the predictable end-stage of a working life the economy was never built to recognise as economically productive.

The official numbers tell us two things very clearly. In the United States — where the data is most comprehensively tracked — older adults, usually counted as those 55 and over, are described by the National Alliance to End Homelessness as the fastest-growing group of people experiencing homelessness. The same analysis shows that women's homelessness is increasing at a faster pace than men's, even though men still make up the majority of those counted.^[2] So if you are looking for the woman in the data — the woman who is 52, 58, 63, who worked, cared, loved, cooked, washed, drove, soothed, made appointments, remembered birthdays, stretched the grocery money and put everyone else's needs before her own teeth — you have to look at the intersection of those two trends, and it's at the intersection where women often vanish.

A woman does not usually become homeless at 57 because one thing went wrong. She becomes homeless because a thousand things were never counted properly in the first place.

She may have worked for wages her whole life while earning less than the men beside her. The wage gap is a global pattern. For example, in the United States women working full-time still earn about 81 cents for every dollar earned by men, and over a forty-year career that can mean more than half a million dollars in lost income before we even get to retirement savings, investment growth, pension credits, or the simple fact that money makes more money when you are allowed to keep enough of it.^[3] The figures differ by country but the pattern is similar. Compounding is marvellous when it works for you but when it works against you, it's a quiet little thief in sensible shoes.

And then there is the “invisible” work women did that never arrived in a pay packet at all.

Caring for children, ageing parents, husbands who had the “real” job. Taking the part-time role because someone had to do school pickup. And let's not forget her leaving the workforce for a few years because childcare cost more than the wage. She turned down the promotion because the household would have collapsed without her unpaid labour. This labour fed families, held marriages together, kept men employable, kept parents out of institutions, kept children alive and reasonably clean. That's no small achievement, mind you, and yet when retirement arrives, the system looks at her record and says, “Well, you didn't earn very much, did you?”

How convenient.

The whole thing was built on the assumption that women would be attached to men. That a husband would provide the wage and a marriage would last forever. A home would be paid off and a woman's caregiving would be compensated indirectly through family stability, inheritance, widowhood benefits, or a pension that someone else earned. That was the bargain, spoken or unspoken. But the bargain has cracked, and women are the ones standing in the cold air coming through it.

Take widowhood as a salient example. When a husband dies, the rent does not reduce by half. Nor does the electricity bill, and the leaking roof doesn't miraculously adjust to the number of occupants in the house. The car still needs tyres and the prescriptions still cost money. If a couple had two Social Security cheques coming in, the surviving spouse will generally keep the larger benefit, but the household has still gone from two checks to one. Social Security itself says survivor payments for spouses and ex-spouses can start at 71.5% of the deceased spouse's benefit and rise as high as 100% at full retirement age, but the survivor does not get both checks added together.^[4]

This is why widowhood can be financially brutal for women. Women tend to live longer than men, are often younger than their husbands, and are more likely to be the one left trying to pay fixed household expenses with a single monthly cheque. The Centre for Retirement Research describes exactly this: two Social Security cheques become one, and women more often have to adjust to those fixed expenses after the death of a spouse.^[5] And adjust is such a tidy word, isn't it? As if we are talking about moving a cushion on the couch, and not sitting at the kitchen table with a calculator, deciding whether you can afford both blood pressure tablets and the heating bill.

Then there is grey divorce.

No woman should stay in a miserable, unsafe, belittling, soul-sucking marriage because it makes financial sense. But we do need to tell the truth about what happens financially when a woman exits a long marriage after 50, because attachment, fear, shame and relief can all cloud the practical matters, and practical matters have a nasty habit of becoming urgent at 3am.

Research on grey divorce has found that women experience a 45% decline in standard of living after divorce, compared with 21% for men, and both women and men experience roughly a 50% drop in wealth.^[6] That's not a small bruise, it's a structural injury.

It's one thing to divorce at 32, when you still have decades to rebuild superannuation, retirement accounts, credit, career momentum and housing security. It's another thing entirely to divorce at 57, with a patchy employment history because you carried the unpaid work of the household, a retirement account that was never in your name, and a rental market that seems to believe every woman should earn like a corporate lawyer while living with the modest needs of a houseplant.

And this is where the “tweener trap” becomes so cruel.

At 50 or 55, a woman may be too old for the labour market to treat her kindly, but too young for many senior supports. She may be too old to be seen as a “family” case, because the children are grown or gone, but too young to qualify for housing that starts at 62. HUD's Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly, for example, funds and subsidises rental housing for low-income adults with disabilities and residents aged 62 or older.^[7] Helpful, yes. Necessary, yes. But what about the woman who is 54 and living in her car because her body has been worn down by decades of low-paid work and unpaid care? What about the woman whose knees, teeth, nerves and sleep have all aged faster than the calendar?

The system looks at her birth date and says, not yet.

She's not yet old enough, poor enough, disabled enough, visible enough, or in the right category. Not yet in the right queue or sleeping somewhere we can count.

And the count was never designed to find them.

A woman facing homelessness may not be in a shelter bed. She may be on a sister's couch, though the sister's husband is making it clear the arrangement is wearing thin. She may be in the spare room of a friend who drinks too much. She may be sleeping in her car behind a supermarket because at least there are lights and cameras. She may be staying with a man she does not want to stay with because the alternative is the street, and the street has never been a neutral place for women.

So when we talk about homelessness, we must ask: what are we actually counting?

HUD's Point-in-Time count is a one-night estimate of sheltered and unsheltered homelessness, and HUD defines unsheltered homelessness as sleeping in places not designed for regular sleeping accommodation, like tents, train stations, sheds or unfit garages.^[8] That matters. But it also means that a great deal of women's homelessness is hidden in arrangements that are unsafe, unstable, humiliating, or temporary, but not always visible to the official eye. A woman can be homeless while still having a key in her hand. It just may not be her key.

And all of this is happening inside a housing market that is squeezing people from every side.

So what do we do?

They're evidence of a false ledger.

The economy counted the man's wage, but not the woman's unpaid labour that made that wage possible. It counted retirement contributions, but not the caregiving years that interrupted them. It counted home ownership, but not the woman whose name was not on the deed. It counted marriage as protection, but not the cost of divorce, widowhood, violence, illness, age discrimination, rent inflation, or simply living too long in a system that only values women when they are useful to someone else.

So the next time you hear about an older woman sleeping in her car, do not ask, “How did she let this happen?”

• Ask what was taken from her, year after year, while everyone called it normal.
• Ask who benefited from her unpaid work.
• Ask why a lifetime of care does not buy care in return.
• Ask why senior housing begins after so many women have already fallen.
• Ask why such a wealthy country can count every transaction, every click, every credit score, every overdue bill, every dollar of debt — but somehow cannot find women until they are already outside.

This isn't bad luck, it's the predictable outcome of an economy that extracted women's labour, discounted women's wages, attached women's security to men, punished women for caregiving, and then acted surprised when older women began disappearing into couches, cars, shelters, motel rooms and unsafe arrangements that no woman should have to call home.

We can see them now. And once we can see them, we have no excuse for looking away.

How You Can Help

Services supporting women experiencing homelessness are chronically underfunded. The most useful things you can do are also the most direct: find your local women's shelter and donate. A small recurring contribution beats a single larger one because it lets organisations plan. If you can't give money, give time. And advocate for increased government funding, because the gap between need and resource isn't a funding mystery, it's a political choice.

In Australia: Homelessness Australia can help you find services in your state or territory.

In the US: The National Alliance to End Homelessness maintains a service directory.

In the UK: Shelter and St Mungo's both run dedicated women's programs.