The new face of Miami’s homeless community — senior citizens

It’s a special Thursday afternoon at Mia Casa, a former assisted living center turned homeless shelter for the elderly during the pandemic.

As a professional salsa singer belts out familiar tunes, two residents join him on the claves and a few septuagenarians show they still have what it takes as they swivel their hips, wowing the other seniors with their fancy steps and dancing with the Mia Casa staff.

Others sit quietly sipping coffee as the staff passes out pastelitos, but the music soon entices even the reluctant to tap their toes or keep beat on the tables with their palms.

“We’ve brought the outside world inside, so they’re not tempted to leave,” said Roxana Solano, the director of Mia Casa. “A sense of community is so important for these seniors.”

As the pandemic began to ripple through Miami-Dade County in early 2020, the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, the taxpayer-funded county agency that helps people dealing with homelessness, knew it had a problem.

There were dire predictions that COVID-19 would spread through the homeless population and worries that seniors living on the streets or in homeless facilities would be especially hard hit.

Protecting homeless seniors during pandemic

As part of its plan to protect the most vulnerable of the homeless population, the Homeless Trust began quarantining those who tested positive in hotels and motels and isolating seniors from the general homeless population at facilities such as Mia Casa.

In mid-October, there were 63 seniors housed at the 118-bed facility but at times there have been as many as 100. Residents leave as the Homeless Trust finds them more permanent housing arrangements. Since it became a shelter, Mia Casa has served more than 300 seniors.

“So far we have not had one single case of COVID in the 16 months we have been open,” said Solano. Residents must now be fully vaccinated for admission.

Just before the pandemic hit, a new operator had taken over Mia Casa and completed renovations to the assisted care facility but had yet to accept any clients.

That made it perfect for housing homeless seniors, many who suffer from underlying medical conditions that make COVID-19 especially dangerous for them. The Homeless Trust quickly signed a contract to rent the North Miami facility, said Ron Book, chairman of the Homeless Trust.

Some Mia Casa residents came from other homeless shelters; others came directly from the streets.

Virginia “Jeannie” Mayhall, 65, was sleeping in a small tent community near downtown Miami when a worker at the shelter operated by the Missionaries of Charity of Mother Teresa, where she sometimes went for a meal, suggested there might be a better spot for her.

Mayhall had been homeless for about four months at that point. After living in Colorado for 22 years, about a year ago, she decided she wanted a beach in her life.

When she arrived in Miami Beach, Mayhall said she had money. When it ran out, she began sleeping in a tent.

Mia Casa is a godsend, said Mayhall, who previously worked as a bartender and in the service industry. “The staff is wonderful. They make you feel comfortable. There’s A.C. here. It’s a blessing.”

Restoring her personal documents, which were stolen, has been a process, Mayhall said, but the Homeless Trust is helping. “This will give me more stability to move on,” she said.

The Chapman Partnership prepares three meals a day for Mia Casa residents and delivers them to the shelter. Camillus House sends nurses, and the staff provides laundry and housekeeping services.

Mayhall is the face of a trend that was becoming apparent even before the pandemic hit: There is a growing crisis of senior homelessness in Miami-Dade County.

Seniors are large part of Miami’s homeless community

Those over 60 now account for 1 in 4 of the county’s homeless population, said Book. “Pre-COVID, we were already seeing an overload with senior homelessness,” he said.

There were 183 seniors living on the streets and 425 seniors — about 78 percent of them male — housed in shelters when the Homeless Trust took its biannual census in August.

South Florida has long been an expensive place to live, and the mounting cost of living and a severe shortage of affordable housing have left an increasing number of seniors without a roof over their heads.

“People on fixed incomes have run into needs and demands they cannot meet,” said Book. That has led to seniors becoming “situationally homeless,” he said. But without intervention, that situational homelessness can turn into chronic homelessness.

Financial difficulties during the pandemic exacerbated the housing problem for the elderly. As in other age brackets, mental health and substance abuse problems also afflict some homeless seniors.

About 90 percent of Mia Casa’s residents are men, said Solano. A number of them became homeless after making bad decisions or after their release from prison, she said.

That was the case for José Manuel Duran, 67, who was caught up in a reverse sting operation decades ago and has been living at Mia Casa for around four months.

After serving a 25-year term in federal prison for conspiracy to distribute cocaine and marijuana, he had nowhere to go and spent five months on the streets in Miami, sleeping in doorways and wherever he could get out of the rain. Sometimes he only ate one meal a day.

He was more than willing to go to Mia Casa. He saw it as a path toward more permanent housing. The staff is also helping him restore his ID and documentation, which had been lost during his time in the streets.

“They take very good care of us here,” he said. He spends his days playing dominoes, walking throughout the facility for exercise and enjoys the food.

Evictions may be coming

Not all the seniors facing homelessness have gone into the shelter system, said Book. The Trust has helped some apply for rental assistance money and other services and it started a working group in November 2020 to try to prevent evictions.

All told, Book said, the Homeless Trust has assisted several thousand people over the course of the pandemic.

Most federal rental assistance money has been distributed, Book said. Now Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava is in the process of getting federal pandemic money unused for various reasons “reverted back from the feds to go into a pot that can help communities like ours,” he said.

Book said the Homeless Trust hasn’t seen an “explosion” in senior homelessness or homelessness in general since the federal moratorium on evictions expired in late August.

But he says a crisis could be coming. “Part of the problem is a lot of people think the government is going to keep kicking the can down the road [preventing evictions],” he said. “We tell our folks this is a very, very bad assumption.”

Ramping up COVID testing for homeless population

Fortunately, the dire predictions about the homeless population and COVID haven’t come to pass.

Before the delta variant surge, nine deaths among the Miami-Dade homeless population were recorded, said Book, and since then there has been one additional death.

Eighty-five homeless people had been hospitalized with COVID as of mid-October, according to Book, and 24,000 COVID tests have been administered. For much of the pandemic, the positivity rate has remained below 2 percent, he said.

“No one in the homeless space that we’re aware of has tested as many people as we have,” said Book.

However, he said there needs to be a more permanent solution for the seniors who now live at Mia Casa. After the pandemic, he said, they can’t just be returned to the street and be expected to somehow survive.

“It would be nothing short of irresponsible to put them on the street,” he said. “For some it would be the equivalent of a death sentence.”

Capital campaign to buy Mia Casa, restore funding gaps

To tackle the problem, the Trust has launched its first-ever capital campaign to buy Mia Casa immediately. The nonprofit eventually wants to acquire a second and third building to house the elderly and the special needs homeless population.

The Homeless Trust has never gone directly to the public before for funds because it didn’t have to, Book said. “Now we’re desperate, desperate, desperate, and we’re turning to the community for help,” he said.

The trust hopes to raise $1 million to $2 million during the capital campaign, which began in February. The Miami Foundation got the ball rolling with a $50,000 challenge grant and so far about $100,000 has been raised, said Book.

The Homeless Trust, which was created by Miami-Dade County commissioners in 1993, receives its funding from the county’s 1 percent Food and Beverage tax, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the state and through private contributions.

As the pandemic shut down some restaurants and others in the hospitality industry struggled to survive with restrictions on occupancy, the tax took a hit and so did the funding streams the Homeless Trust relies on to support 20 or so nonprofits and government programs.

“We took a devastating blow to our revenue from the Food and Beverage Tax. I’ve been bled dry,” said Book. Over the years, he said, the Homeless Trust has always been careful not to spend down to zero and keep an emergency fund.

“Now that emergency has come,” he said.

Tightening of Homeless Trust budget

The annual budget for the Homeless Trust averages around $66 million but has been cut to $63 million for the current fiscal year. “We managed to cut things so we didn’t have to curtail any services. We got very creative,” said Book. “We’ve managed without turning anyone out [of shelter care].”

That includes 38-year-old Jeremy Lowery and his sister, who are the youngest residents of Mia Casa.

After he swerved to avoid a child when he was a teenager, Lowery’s car hit a stump and rolled multiple times. He has been in a wheelchair ever since he broke his neck in the accident. Lowery is no longer able to walk and has only limited use of his arms and hands.

Despite the federal eviction moratorium, Lowery said when he had “issues” with the owner of his apartment in early May, he was told he would have to leave. As he was getting his things together, he said, the apartment owner had all his possessions moved out to the parking lot. “We sat there in the parking lot a good 12 or 13 hours,” said Lowery.

That’s when the Homeless Trust swung into action. “We got an emergency call from the Homeless Trust saying they had been evicted into the street and could we take them,” said Solano.

The seniors who have been moved to Mia Casa need to be independent, but Solano said an exception was made for Lowery because his insurance pays for a 24-hour health aide and a nurse who comes once a day.

During his eviction, Lowery said he lost his Social Security card and identification, and his hospital bed was stolen from the parking lot. “I’m pretty sure it ended up in the scrap heap,” Lowery said.

“It’s been nothing but help since I came here,” said Lowery. A hospital bed arrived within days, and the Homeless Trust is helping him replace his personal documents. If everything goes well, Lowery said, he and his sister hope to be placed in an apartment in the next 30 to 60 days.

Helping those evacuated after Surfside

Also putting more pressure on the Homeless Trust in recent months is assisting people from the buildings that were evacuated after failing safety audits in the wake of the collapse of the Champlain Towers South. Some of the buildings had large senior populations.

“Not all the evacuations resulted in a need for placements in the shelter system, but we met the challenge even though we’ve never been responsible for this type of thing before,” said Book.

Currently, he said, the Homeless Trust estimates there are about 892 unsheltered people living in the community. That represents a 90 percent reduction in homelessness in the 26 years since the Homeless Trust was established.

“We’re grateful for the giving community we live in, but we’re really in need of help and hope that this community doesn’t go backwards in homelessness,” said Book.

How to help

The Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust: 111 NW First St., Suite 27-310, Miami.

Helpline: 877-994-4357 and press 3; website: www.homelesstrust.org

The Homeless Trust is not a direct service provider but rather the administrator of 85 percent of the proceeds from the 1 percent county Food and Beverage Tax. It implements the Miami-Dade County Community Homeless Plan and contracts for homeless services with organizations such as Camillus House, the Miami Rescue Mission, Lotus House and Mia Casa.

Donations for the Ending Homelessness Fund can be made at:

https://miamifoundation.org/make-a-donation-homeless-trust-fund/

This story was originally published November 1, 2021 at 6:00 AM.