Issue Spotlight: The Aging City

By Laura Nahmias

City Hall News, September 19, 2011

When it comes to aging policy, is the city getting any wiser?

The stooped woman hustling through the Sunnyside senior center’s main hall at lunchtime is Gertrude McDonald, age 95. She’s spent most of her adult life in politics, as an aide to former state Sen. George Onorato, and as the first woman from Queens to run for the state Assembly in a Democratic primary, back in 1968.

“That was a time when women were still just licking the backs of stamps,” she said.

But McDonald’s latest political role is slightly more accidental. She is one of the 3,500 members at Sunnyside, one of more than 200 city senior centers that have found themselves fighting the city, state and federal governments for money to provide core services to seniors—services that aren’t mandated, but are seen as a safety net for New York’s elderly.

Since 2008, city budget cuts, combined with state and federal reductions, have bled $55 million from the Department for the Aging (DFTA). Cuts to case management, home-care contracts and adult day programs are among those advocates say are the most severe.

“The irony is, it’s this tiny department, but it affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of seniors,” said Bobbie Sackman, director of public policy at the Council of Senior Centers and Services.

The most recent budget cycle, in which cuts were proposed and then partially restored by the City Council, is typical of the way the DFTA has been cut during the Bloomberg era. Cuts are blamed in part on the recession, on DFTA’s funding structure (money for DFTA is related to the city’s tax levy) and on federal dollars that haven’t grown to meet demand. The cuts come at a time when the city’s elderly population is preparing for a population boom: New Yorkers over 65 are expected to grow as a group from 1.3 million to 2 million by 2030, an almost 50 percent increase.

“Save the senior centers!” McDonald said as she walked past Judy Zangwill, Sunnyside’s executive director. The center runs a $200,000 operating deficit every year, Zangwill said—and it’s getting worse as the population grows and funding grows ever more scarce.

“It’s a safety net,” she said, “that’s always been tattered, but now I think there’s a gaping hole.”

The city’s planning for older adults is dual-pronged, said City Council Aging Committee Chair Jessica Lappin.

“First…there are the seniors who are more frail and vulnerable, who really depend on us for care and support,” Lappin said, noting that about 302,000 of the city’s elderly residents are considered poor. They comprise 23 percent of the total elderly population and are growing, as national poverty levels climb with each year of recession. These are the people for whom city-funded programs like senior centers and Meals on Wheels are necessities.

The other story is that of more mobile, wealthier people—“the majority of older New Yorkers, who are active, engaged, who we want to keep here in the city,” Lappin said. “How do we think and plan as a city for them as well?”

It’s a question that already has an answer, at least in theory.

For the past decade the city has begun warming to its changing older-adult demographics. By the year 2030 New York will have more people over 65 than school-age children, according to the most recent U.S. Census statistics.

In 2007, armed with this knowledge, Mayor Michael Bloomberg rolled out a plan in coordination with the New York Academy of Medicine called Age-Friendly NYC. It is a series of 59 initiatives meant both to address dire need in the city’s growing elderly population and to improve quality of life for seniors overall, through transportation improvements, increased interagency cooperation and pilot programs in volunteering and information technology.

The plan’s ambitious scope—to help the city serve as both safety net and retirement destination—seems now at least partly a product of the rosier economic time it was conceived in, advocates said. Its major victories have been in small efforts, traffic safety improvements, cultural opportunities and increased access to technology for seniors.

“‘Age-Friendly NYC,’ it has good intentions,” Zangwill ventured, cautiously. “To me, one priority would be to sufficiently fund these services like senior centers in order to deem it an age-friendly city.”

The Bloomberg administration points to the mayor’s announcement of 10 new innovative senior centers as a bright spot in this year’s especially gloomy budget process. Only two are new structures, with the other eight being revamps of already existing facilities, to provide increased health and technology services and cater to populations that are underserved, like the visually impaired and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender elderly.
But the budget also cut DFTA’s funding for case management by 15 percent, bringing the ratio of clients to social workers up to 90:1. That kind of ratio leads to issues with what clients and politicians alike refer to as “quality of care”—placing burdens so great on caseworkers that the possibility of negligence and accidents rises.

The city has to cut everywhere, said DFTA spokesman Chris Miller. The federal government hasn’t increased funding for aging programs in years, and the state cut funding to the city this year too.

However, this summer the City Council and the mayor agreed to baseline $14 million for senior centers next year, a step that ensures that money for centers makes it into the budget to begin with, Lappin said—though it can still be cut later.

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Contact:
Andrew J. Martin
Director of Communications
The New York Academy of Medicine
1216 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10029
212-822-7285
amartin@nyam.org

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