Road to homelessness

Cross, now 81, grew up in north Philadelphia and said he was stricken as a child with meningitis.

“The doctors told me they’d given up … called me a statistic and told my parents to make my final arrangements,” he said.

As a sickly child, Cross said he grew up not strong enough for manual labor and without much of an education, so he worked as a short-order cook, washing dishes and, for a time, as a cameraman for a local television station.

He also served time in prison for nonviolent crimes, including a 3 ½-year term, he said, in federal prison in the mid-1970s for a drug offense. Under federal guidelines, such an old conviction would not bar a person from public housing.

Cross said he once owned a home in Philadelphia, but lost it when he used it as collateral for bail and then failed to appear for court. After that, he rented houses and apartments. He moved to the Lehigh Valley in the early 1970s to escape the grit of life in Philadelphia and be closer to a woman with whom he had a relationship, he said. About a decade ago, he had a house in Allentown with government subsidized rent, but said he lost it after he chose to live with and care for a friend who was dying.

That, Cross said, put him on the path to living in an Allentown-area motel, where the rent grew to consume all but $13.10 of his monthly Social Security check.

A study this year by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University found that the number of senior citizen households paying more than 30% of their income for housing has grown to an all-time high of 10 million. HUD considers that a threshold at which people are likely to have trouble paying for food, clothing, transportation and medical care.

Among senior citizens who rent and earn $15,000 or less, nearly three-quarters spend more than 30% of their income on housing. That means a record number of seniors will lack affordable housing options as they age, and the demand for housing assistance is expected to soar in coming decades, the Harvard study found. The growth is a result of the enormous baby boomer generation reaching its senior years, as well as people living longer and economic factors such as the Great Recession and income inequality for minorities, the study said.

A coalition of government, business, nonprofit and faithbased organizations called the Regional Homelessness Advisory Board works to improve availability and access to affordable housing in the Lehigh Valley. Among its objectives are identifying opportunities and securing funding to build affordable housing, but the challenges are formidable, said Alan Jennings, director of Community Action Coalition of the Lehigh Valley.

Commercial builders aren’t interested in affordable housing because they can’t make money from it. Affordable housing costs almost as much to build as market-rate housing and is subject to the same economic volatility, such as spikes in the cost of lumber. And affordable housing developers often compete with commercial builders for property to build on, Jennings said.

The answer is more money, said Beers, who is also director of Valley Housing Development Corp., which develops federally subsidized housing. HUD’s $48.6 billion budget allocation for 2020 is about $3.6 billion larger than this year’s.

“We could use thousands of units and the funding that’s available is going to get us hundreds of units,” Beers said.

Those unable to find affordable housing and trying to stay off the streets also face challenges finding beds in shelters or transitional housing, with fewer than 700 available in the Lehigh Valley.