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‘Unconscionable’: Baby boomers are becoming homeless at a rate ‘not seen since the Great Depression’ — here’s what’s driving this terrible trend

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unconscionable-baby-boomers-becoming-homeless-103000310.html?guccounter=1

Experts have dubbed it a “silver tsunami.”

‘Unconscionable’: Baby boomers are becoming homeless at a rate ‘not seen since the Great Depression’ — here’s what’s driving this terrible trend

I wish I could feel sympathy, but I don't. The Reagan generation did this to themselves, and the rest of us have to suffer with them.

54 comments

2Password2Remember

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"I don't have sympathy for homeless old people" is not the own you think it is

Death to America

Kuori

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no one should be homeless

fascists should die. libs should be re-educated.

but absolutely no one, under any circumstances, should ever be homeless

Banshee

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I agree. I guess I'm feeling schadenfreude because boomers are finally getting the short end of policies they supported their whole working lives. But nobody should be homeless.

ShieldsUp

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I mean, people are easily manipulated and the flow of information was funneled through even fewer sources back then. I do feel bad for them, and all of us subsequent generations, and the anger could be focused toward current politicians who can improve things instead of dividing us from our elders. Its all easy to see in hindsight of course.

roux

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Your introspection just in these comments have got me looking at myself lol. I hate that my knee jerk response to this post at first was "fuck em" lol.

JuneFall

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no one should be homeless

Exactly

Unconscionable

What is a Conscionable rate of houselessness?

LaGG_3

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2Password2Remember

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evergreen meme

Death to America

SaniFlush

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Dios mio

Maoo

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Generational fights are mostly incorrect. It is rarely one generation oppressing another or even themselves, it is class(es) oppressing others. It's annoying when another generation is out of touch, though. Boomers are often, but not always, guilty of that.

The homeless are generally the least to blame, they are the poorest of the poor in a capitalist hellscape. Their mistreatment at the hands of our economically-carved society also serves a function for the ruling class: it's what will happen to you if you (allegedly) don't accept that shit job for that subsistence pay.

Rather than directing your frustrations at generations or the poorest and least powerful, get organized to fight the ongoing class war. The ruling class is always fighting it whether you join or not.

Awoo

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It's annoying when another generation is out of touch, though. Boomers are often, but not always, guilty of that.

I'm starting to see their being out of touch as partly because they only engage within their generation. If we want to put a stop to generational shit what we need to do is build more cross-generation communication. Arguably social media is doing this already though.

AkariMizunashi

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bigboopballs

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and the younger generations get absolutely 0 third spaces or anywhere IRL to hang out and make friends sadness-abysmal

Maoo

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100%. Even things as simple as tabling can help with this.

bigboopballs

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what is tabling?

Maoo

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It's where you set up a little table, usually with some pamphlets or something, and set up where there's lots of foot traffic. It's handy for getting petitions signed, collecting money for whatever, or just talking to people about a cause to build community support.

save_vs_death

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generation is not real, class is

FourteenEyes

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Generation is absolutely real and informs people's decisions and attitudes

invalidusernamelol

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The only way you can really define generation is by way of political economy though.

Boomers grew up during the post war era when the social services created by the post depression era were being leveraged to build up white wealth after the war.

Gen X grew up during Nixon and Reagan, experienced stagflation and the massive austerity imposed by the new neoliberal ideology. The wealthy ones got wealthier and the poor ones got poorer.

Millennials were in that post neoliberal haze of the 90s where American empire seemed to have come into it's power. It has subjugated all developing markets in Asia and Europe and cemented itself as the sole superpower after killing the USSR.

Gen Z and the younger millennials grew up with 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the 2008 housing crisis, and COVID recession, something that caused complete and total disenchantment of America.

It can feel like it's hard to discuss things between these generations, because any one of them trying to find common ground with younger people only has their own experience in the economic climate of their time. Boomers just say "get a job" because for the white ones it really was just that easy. They don't grasp the idea of economic stagnation as something that happens when you're young and that it causes you to enter a state of perpetual poverty that benefits their pension funds.

FourteenEyes

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And you don't think the political economy of a person's formative years will affect their view of politics?

invalidusernamelol

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It does, but you said generations inform decisions. Which is such an ambiguous term as to be useless. I was just more clearly defining generations by major economic factors.

Lots of "generation" talk is about nostalgia and culture. When it's really economic.

Tachanka

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Generation is absolutely real and informs people's decisions and attitudes

to an extent but the bourgeoisie capitalizes on these differences to divide the proletariat. This episode of citations-needed is pretty good:

https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-38-the-medias-bogus-generation-obsession

“Baby Boomers are bloating the social safety net!” “GenXers are changing the nature of work!” “Millennials are killing the housing market!". The media endlessly feeds us stories about how one generation or another is engaging in some collective act of moral failing that, either explicitly or by implication, harms another generation. It’s a widely-mocked cliché at this point, namely the near-constant analyses detailing what Millennials have “killed” or “ruined” lately - everything from Applebee's to diamonds to top sheets to beer to napkins.

The first rule of drama––and by implication, the media––is to create tension. But what if tensions that actually exist in our society, like white supremacy and class conflict, are too unpleasant and dicey to touch––upsetting advertisers and media owners who benefit from these systems? To replace these real tensions in society, the media repeatedly relies on dubious and entirely safe points of conflict, like those between two arbitrary generations. It’s not the rich or racism that’s holding me back--it’s old people running up entitlement spending or lazy youth who don’t want to work!

In this episode we talk about why this media trope isn’t just hacky and cliche, but also subtly racist and reactionary.

cynesthesia

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Banshee

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This one hit close to home. I literally just talked about this here, where I was worried about libs 'letting red states secede' to own the right.

And I did the same thing for boomers. Seems like I need to introspect more. I've been making progress, considering I grew up in a fundamentalist, far right household, but I clearly have a ways to go.

Anyway, thanks for this. Of all the criticism I saw, yours resonated with me the most.

cynesthesia

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D61

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The impulse of the thought is normal, but yeah, its a wrong thought that we should try to catch and fight against.

Banshee

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I'm going to strive to do better going forward. Venting my frustrations out on an entire generation is childish and unproductive. Glad folks here helped set me straight.

D61

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Poboy's nerfect.

Judge_Jury

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Not that I blame you, OP - it is poetic compared to other waves of housing exclusion - but I do feel bad for them. Besides the chill boomers that are going to be part of that statistic, I can't really blame the US people for how the US is. Our political machine creates the public sentiment that it needs to run smoothly most of the time, and it rejects public sentiment on the rare occasion that public sentiment opposes its goals

I just see yet more people being forced, completely unnecessarily, to live without housing. And as people so often do in this god-forsaken place, a lot of those people suck tremendously on a personal level

pooh

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Our political machine creates the public sentiment that it needs to run smoothly most of the time, and it rejects public sentiment on the rare occasion that public sentiment opposes its goals

Reminds me of my favorite Albert Einstein quote:

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

Tachanka

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I wish I could feel sympathy, but I don't.

My grandparents would already be homeless if they weren't borrowing money from me on occasion. Why? Because their social security doesn't cover their rent, their food, and their medical issues, despite them working hard their whole lives. Who cares what year they were born in? They weren't Reagan voters. Not that this should be the metric. They're proletarian. They're lesbians They're women. Therefore they're oppressed in a threefold manner, along class, gender, and sexuality lines. They're liberals, but I view that as a result of indoctrination by the bourgeois society. They're products of their environment. Indoctrination, as much as we hate to admit it, is another form in which the proletariat is oppressed, because they are mesmerized into fighting themselves by an anti-materialist and undialectical mode of analysis pushed by the bourgeoisie.

The Reagan generation did this to themselves, and the rest of us have to suffer with them.

Yeah. I'm paying money out of my pocket to stop my grandparents from becoming homeless while also paying to raise my child. I would be in much more dire straits if I weren't lucky enough to have stable employment in what is in fact a terribly unstable economic situation, further complicated by hyperinflation.

In any case I don't think the question of whether you feel sympathy or not for the "reagan generation" really matters and that this is a misfocused way of looking at it in the first place. It's actually very similar to how liberals draw lines between "red state" proletarians (who they insist deserve their suffering) and "blue state" proletarians (who they insist do not). Assuming you do not own means of production, assuming you do not employ others, assuming you do not accumulate the significant part of your income through financial assets like stock investments or mutual funds, you are a proletarian. Your class position is proletarian. Your parents and grandparents, assuming they weren't small business owners driven from the market, were probably proletarian. When we become old, I hope the revolutionary consciousness is more developed among the younger generations than it was among us, but if that is the case, expect some of them to say that we deserve death for not fixing the problems sooner, and be prepared to accept that as a consequence of being born when you were.

FourteenEyes

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This popping up in the middle of the article is so perfect

ChaosMaterialist

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Same on the desktop

Banshee

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I think maybe the description is a bit harsh, but for real, they eagerly helped prevent or overturn just about any social policy that didn't benefit them. And now we're stuck with the consequences.

I know a boomer couple that is extremely conservative. Lived in a nice house that got foreclosed on when the guy took out a loan and couldn't pay it back. They berated their kids for being "failures" their whole lives.

Their kids are too poor to help them and the social services they opposed or helped gut won't either. At least they have some bootstraps to pull themselves up by.

AOCapitulator

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worth noting that what the people in the US think has about 6% impact on what the US government does

In studies specifically about the senate that rate is a delightful 0%

wifepimp4smokes

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The premise of the article is preposterous. Essentially, older people were rarely homeless in the recent past. Now, boomers are experiencing it. So, we need "to end homelessness in older adults" and "targeted prevention efforts."

We can't fix the actual problem for all of society. We need to come up with yet another way for the boomers to have their lives subsidized by all other generations that have come before or since.

duderium

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Most of the cool boomers are either dead, in exile, or in prison. Now the few cooler boomers left are becoming homeless.

ClimateChangeAnxiety

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I genuinely don’t know how to solve this until the boomers all fucking die. Which is clearly not a great solution to boomer homelessness.

“Group specifically responsible for creating this problem who will fight to the death to prevent solving the problem increasingly at risk from it”

SaniFlush

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It’s a class issue, the idle rich of every generation will oppose change until the reins of power are taken away from them and given back to the people.

Spacemanspliff

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I honestly wonder just how many of the homeless babyboomers have kids who are perfectly capable of helping them, but want absolutely no contact with their parents.

UlyssesT

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I've cut out pretty much every boomer-age person from my life, biologically related and otherwise, in the last few years. Something about trump-moist either made them worse or just made the masks fall off and they were always that way.

I helped a few of them out of homelessness-adjacent financial crises in the past (one was a house-flipping parasite that became over-leveraged during the 2008/2009 recession and lost just about everything and needed enough money to stay off the street until they got a job). If such things happened again now, they're on their own, especially after their red-faced bloodthirsty rants about "the storm" and what they wanted to happen if it came for the (slurs). frothingfash

JuneFall

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Distant family boomer of mine is close to homelessness since he isn't selling his 10 bedroom house to shrink, since he doesn't want to live with other people. Could live on 30k from sold house + 25k pension after taxes for the next 35 years.

Evilphd666

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frothingfash as long as i go bankrupt from propping up a souless corporation than getting a sustainable living from being a SOCIALIST LEECH OFF THE TAXPAYERS.

When souless corp does it so-true it's just smart buisness! Go back to econ 101 commie!

Evilphd666

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Hey Boomers maybe-later-kiddo maybe-later-honey

Harajukum

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FDR's project for America has failed

barrbaric

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I don't know about that, he certainly prevented a socialist revolution.

Harajukum

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America delenda est

Assian_Candor

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Sad but not surprising. Nobody has any money, and when you get so old you can’t work they fire you. Not hard to figure out what happens next.

It’s gonna be even worse for our generation. They had a higher home ownership rate. If you rent and get too old to work you’re really fucked.

a_blanqui_slate

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But there weren't any baby boomers during the great depression.

Mardoniush

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100% homelessness rate.

a_blanqui_slate

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tfw you get an interdeterminant form and there's no hopeatall.

Mardoniush

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Capitalism. It's capitalism.

famskiis

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You are such a terrible person.

FourteenEyes

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Why, because they're not terribly torn up over people getting what they've voted for all their adult lives?

charly4994

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I think the Red Sails essay by Roderic Day is especially important to keep in mind in these situations. There are arguments that the generation has been propagandized to hell from birth, but there needs to be a buy in for it to actually be effective. There needs to be at least something they want to fuck over, someone to conveniently scapegoat that won't force them to look at their own failings.

spectre

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This is liberal bullshit yes

famskiis

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You’re a terrible person.