Here in Central Florida,
U.S. Housing Secretary Ben Carson warns of the dangers of a senior housing crisis.
Seniors are increasingly in danger of being denied housing because of rising home prices, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said Monday at a conference at the Championsgate Resort.
Carson, named by President Donald Trump to head the HUD Department, was speaking on senior housing issues as the keynote speaker at the LeadingAge Florida annual convention at the Omni Hotel in northwestern Osceola County.
“I’m very concerned about seniors who become destitute, who are forced into low-income housing,” Carson told the audience.
“Many look to HUD for affordable housing or assisted housing, but they confront a brutal reality: The market is becoming more expensive. Inner cities have become high-end markets, pricing lowand middle-class Americans out,” he said.
Carson, a retired neurosurgeon from Palm Beach Gardens and former Republican presidential candidate with little housing experience, was a controversial choice to lead the housing department.
The Trump administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2018 includes more than $6 billion in budget cuts to HUD, including funding for senior and public housing.
But Carson said afterward that HUD has increased public housing programs for the elderly this year. He said he did not have details on those latest numbers.
“The key is, what we’re doing with all programs is looking at the good, the bad and the ugly,” Carson said.
Steve Bahmer, president and CEO of LeadingAge, an association of about 250 senior service providers across Florida, said the senior affordable housing situation in the state was in “crisis … reaching perhaps new levels.”
Seniors can expect to wait three to five years for an affordable apartment in Central Florida, Bahmer said, with waits of five to seven years in the Miami area.
“There’s a lack of infrastructure, a lack of housing units available,” Bahmer said. “The waiting list doesn’t end when new apartments are available; the waiting list ends when people in old apartments die.”
In his speech, Carson mentioned a proverb that “you can gauge a society by the way they treat their elderly,” adding, “to me, as a physician, as a son, as an aging American … this is personal.”
He cited HUD’s three-year grants to help housing facilities hire wellness coordinators and a recent study on the importance of preventing falling, one of the biggest sources of health problems among the elderly.
The secretary laid out proposed changes to reverse mortgages, a popular method for seniors to access a portion of the equity in their homes and convert it to cash, to prevent situations in which seniors find themselves with
financial problems.
While joking that he knew Tom Selleck, who stars in reverse mortgage commercials, he warned of situations where a spouse would get a reverse mortgage in one name only and not include the other spouse, leaving the latter facing the financial consequences upon the first person’s death.
Carson said HUD proposes limiting the initial amount of equity seniors can draw on, requiring a financial assessment to make sure seniors have enough resources to continue to pay property taxes and health care costs and to ensure that lenders fully disclose all conditions of the reverse mortgage.
“The government works for the people; the people don’t work for the government,” Carson said. “We need to listen carefully to what people are saying, and react in a way that increases everyone’s freedom. Through good health practices, good financial health [and] creative leveraging of finances, we’ll meet the needs of seniors and maintain their independence.” Asked if HUD was investigating the Orlando Housing Authority after its former budget officer alleged financial misconduct in a lawsuit earlier this year, Carson would only say the department is “investigating multiple things.”