One woman's story of homelessness, and revival, in the South End

(Brooks Canaday/Boston University)

By Emily Cataneo, Globe Correspondent

When Estelle Morris spoke of her younger years, she grinned and laughed softly. In her slow, steady drawl, she described the expansive cotton and corn fields of the farm where she grew up in Mississippi. She counted on her plump fingers, trying to recall whether she had six or seven siblings. She spoke of her decision to move North at age 23 to try to make more than $12 a week. She kept smiling as she described her adult life in Massachusetts. She worked as a clothes presser, feeding laundry through a mangle at a factory so close to Fenway Park that she could hear the announcers calling out strikes on summer afternoons.

But then her voice hardened.

“The worst part of my life was when I got homeless,” said Morris, 67. Nine years ago, her son Keith had a car accident and went into a coma. While taking care of him, she lost her job and her home. For the summer of 2001, she lived on the street, sleeping under bridges and scrounging for food.

“I know what it’s like to have one pair of shoes with a hole in them. You don’t think of these things when you have stuff. You only think of them when you don’t have anything,” said Morris, who for the past seven years has lived in the Anna Bissonnette House, a permanent living facility at 1640 Washington St. that houses formerly homeless or sheltered elders.

The house is one of seven run by Hearth, an organization dedicated to ending elder homelessness and based in the South End, a neighborhood with a long history of settlement houses and philanthropic organizations to help the city’s poor.

But Hearth has a reach far beyond the South End and its other houses in Boston. Its combination of permanent housing, outreach, and services has been recognized by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration as a model for curbing elder homelessness, and the Cambridge-based Social Innovation Forum named Hearth a 2009 Social Innovator.

Homelessness among the elderly can happen suddenly, because of a traumatic event, or it can happen as part of a lifelong cycle of poverty. And it’s on the rise. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the number of homeless elders is expected to increase by 33 percent by 2020 and to double by 2050. Mark Hinderlie, CEO of Hearth, the homeless housing organization where Morris lives, said this increase will happen because of two groups.

One group is aging Baby Boomers who didn’t do as well as the rest of their generation and are now living exclusively on Social Security. A second group is drawn from the second half of the Baby Boom and comprised mostly of minority young men. They had trouble finding jobs because so many people had flooded the job market as the first half of the Baby Boom generation came of age. They were teenagers in the 1980s, when federal support for low-income housing was cut. Many became substance abusers and after racking up criminal records, have yet to find stable employment.

“It’s a serious, serious issue we’re worried about,” said Hinderlie of these projected increases.

Since 1991, decades before the crisis surfaced, Hearth has attempted to combat elder homelessness by providing permanent housing to about 1400 men and women. Hearth accepts anyone over age 55, since, according to Hinderlie, homelessness can age a person’s body by 15 years, so a 55-year-old homeless person may well have the body of a 70-year-old.

But besides the rising number of homeless elders, the recession has threatened to take its toll on Hearth. In 2008, the organization received $216,000 from the state of Massachusetts, and in 2009, it received $108,000. In 2010, it received nothing, according to Hearth. So far, the group has been able to earn most of its lost income back through fund-raising events such as a party last month at Boston Beer Works.

At the event, Annie Garmey, Hearth’s director of institutional advancement, noted that other demographic groups also are experiencing more homelessness. According to the Fifth Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress, family groups are one of the fastest-growing segments of the homeless population, making up 29.8 percent of the sheltered homeless population in 2007 and 34.1 percent in 2009. But Garmey said the tricky part about elder homelessness is that because of age and the hardship of life on the street, elders can’t simply be given housing and job-hunting help--instead, they need service-enriched housing, where they can get assistance with daily tasks that they may no longer be able to accomplish.

“[The elderly homeless] can’t do job training, since they’re more dependent. Instead of needing less and less services, they need more,” said Garmey. A 2009 report by Hearth found that some of those services involve remembering which medications to take, bathing, and grocery shopping. Of the participants surveyed, 57 percent needed help with medication management, 70 percent needed help doing laundry, and 6 percent needed help eating.

Garmey said that one way to encourage people to take notice of the elder homeless issue is to point out that bad luck could befall an aging family member at any time, and that the elders living on the street are not so different from anyone’s beloved parents or grandparents.

“A lot of people we help don’t have family, and we step into that role,” said Garmey.

But Estelle Morris said that during her summer on the streets, most people she encountered didn’t seem to put themselves or their loved ones in her shoes. Morris’ story may have a happy ending—she filled out the application, passed her interview, and moved into Hearth, where she lives in a corner apartment on the fourth floor. She now can spend an afternoon sitting by a window looking out at a roof terrace, ensconced in a pink sweatshirt and reminiscing about her childhood. But though smiling, Morris hasn’t forgotten the way people treated her when she lived under bridges.

“[People] talk about homeless people like they’re talking about a dog,” said Morris. “They don’t think about maybe this could happen to [them]. They never think twice. They look down on you like you ain’t nobody.”

This article is being published under an arrangement between the Boston Globe and the Boston University News Service.