In California, Great Recession pushes scores of adult children home, and older parents pay
For a variety of reasons — lack of a job, job loss, divorce, home foreclosure — more than 2.3 million adult children in California were living with their parents in 2011, 63 percent more than in pre-recession 2006. There were 433,000 older adults, age 65 and over, who housed approximately 589,000 of those adult children.
Low-income parents, who account for almost one-quarter of the total number of older parents supporting an adult child, are particularly affected. Despite having incomes that make it difficult to survive at a basic level in high-cost California, many do not qualify for state and federal assistance.
This is because their incomes are higher — often just slightly — than the national measure of minimum income, the federal poverty level, or FPL. The FPL is used as a benchmark for eligibility for state and federal support and services that could help older adults bear the costs of their expanded households.
For example, according to federal poverty guidelines, an older couple who rented could get by on $14,710 a year for all expenses in California in 2011. In contrast, the fair market rent alone for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was $17,580 — more than the entire FPL amount expected to cover all expenses for a low-income couple.
If a senior couple's basic living costs were calculated taking into account the true cost of housing, food, medical care and transportation for low-income older adults, the statewide income needs of a couple who rents would be much higher: $32,696.
Add an adult child to that household, and expenses go up even more, to nearly $48,000 — 259 percent higher than the $18,530 of the FPL for an extended household of three persons.
- Raise the maximum assets that older adults can have and still qualify for cash assistance from SSI from its current level of $2,000 ($3,000 for an eligible couple) to $10,000 ($15,000 for a couple) so emergency needs — such as having an adult child return home — can be accommodated.
- Increase the supply of senior and affordable housing.
- Encourage low-income adult children to enroll in Medi-Cal through Covered California to cover their health care costs.
- Increase food assistance to seniors in needy and low-income families by upping the SSI supplement to reflect the increase in the cost of food and by restoring funding to senior meal programs.
Even within California, where an individual lives affects costs: In Kern County, a single, older adult renter with an adult child living at home will spend $30,388 a year. That same renter in San Mateo will spend $44,375. Both numbers are significantly more than the FPL.
Updated every two years by the UCLA Center for Policy Research, in partnership with the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, the Elder Index quantifies the cost of basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter for each county of California and is part of a national movement to improve the way poverty is measured in the U.S.
The methodology for the basic Elder Index was developed by the Gerontology Center at the University of Massachusetts–Boston and Wider Opportunities for Women in Washington, D.C. Some of the data used to calculate needs for adult children is provided courtesy of the Self-Sufficiency Standard project at the University of Washington's Center for Women's Welfare.
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