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NYC expands meal delivery service for seniors as more fall into poverty
By
Karen Yi
Published Feb 28, 2024
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Photo by Karen Yi
By
Karen Yi
Published Feb 28, 2024
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The Adams administration is expanding its program to deliver free meals to older adults at home, citing a post-pandemic rise in isolation and decreased mobility among the city’s oldest New Yorkers.
In addition to weekday meals, city-funded home meal services will include deliveries on holidays and require halal options starting in July, according to city officials.
The expanded services come as a new report by the Robin Hood Foundation found 1 in 4 adults over the age of 65 experienced poverty in 2022, a slight rise from the previous year. During a City Council hearing on Tuesday, councilmembers also underscored the aging crisis facing immigrant communities, who make up the majority of the city's older adult population and often lack safety nets once they’re unable to work.
“What makes New York City affordable and economical is the ability to work,” said Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez, commissioner for the city's Department for the Aging. “It is a lifelong experience of underemployment, poor pay, that then you encounter this in your old age, which is why so many older adults are in poverty."
Andy Marcellin is the chef at Encore Community Services and designs the menu for their clients. That includes a Latin menu to cater to their diverse clients.
Photo by Karen Yi
Citymeals on Wheels, which contracts with providers to feed 22,000 homebound older adults daily across the five boroughs, said it's seeing greater needs among older immigrants. About half of its meal recipients live on less than $19,000 a year and two-thirds of them are women, CEO Beth Shapiro said.
“People did not expect to live this long," she said, noting older adults are the country's fastest-growing population. "And they've outlived their abilities and sometimes their financial abilities to care for themselves."
“In this city, older adults will outnumber children for the first time in history in another decade,” she added.
One in five New Yorkers is older than 65, and the state's population of older residents ballooned by a third between 2011 and 2021, according to the Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan-based nonprofit think tank. The center also found the number of people living below the poverty line in New York increased by 37% over the last decade.
Older adults in New York are more likely to live alone and below the poverty line than their peers across the U.S., city data shows.
Aging alone in the city
Georges Pierre, a dispatching coordinator with Encore Community Services, a nonprofit focused on helping older adults, has been delivering meals to seniors for the last eight years. Citymeals helps pay for additional weekend and holiday meals.
“I grew up with my grandmother. That's why I love that job," he said as he wheeled a large red-and-blue cooler filled with frozen and hot meals among crowds in Midtown last week, dodging delivery bikes and large sidewalk cracks. "I feel I'm helping my family, my whole family."
Rubem DaSilva, 78, has relied on Citymeals since the pandemic. He is a movie buff and street photographer who retired as an accountant for the parking lots at LaGuardia Airport, and said he now lives off his Social Security income in a studio apartment on Eighth Avenue in Midtown that's replete with CDs and DVDs.
But he added that his money doesn’t go as far at the grocery store these days.
“I live in a very expensive area, so going to the supermarket is kind of a murder for me,” said DaSilva, who lives alone and has no family in the city.
DaSilva, who immigrated from Brazil, said he fully relies on Citymeals to eat regularly, but tides himself over by snacking on peanuts or cooking supplementary items like black beans.
“They are little portions," he said. "So I am a big guy. And I feel a little bit hungry."
Shapiro, the Citymeals CEO, said a year of home-delivered meals costs about the same as a week in the hospital or a month in a nursing home, so it's more cost-effective for the government to invest in supporting adults aging at home. She said keeping people in their homes is especially important as people live longer and adult poverty rates remain high.
“If you've been in a low-income job all of your life, guess what? Your Social Security is going to be low, your savings are going to be low and more than likely, you were not in a job that had a pension,” Shapiro said.
Zoila Chunoo, 86, lives on the second floor of a steep walk-up building and said she received her first Citymeals delivery in February 2015. She retired after working several jobs as a bookkeeper and secretary.
Zoila Chunoo, 86, holds up the menu of the first hot meal she received from Encore that partners with Citymeals on Wheels in February 2015. Chunoo lives in a Midtown walk-up and has limited mobility.
Photo by Karen Yi
“I have to remember when people helped me and who helped me,” she said, holding up a copy of the menu of her first Citymeals delivery: baked fish with basil, red-skinned potatoes and veggie blend. “That's important for me. I never forgot.”
Chunoo, who's lived in the city for more than 50 years after coming from Ecuador, said she needed the services after she had shoulder surgery and ran out of savings, in part from ordering food deliveries to her house. Now she can’t cook, she said, because she forgets whether she left the stove on.
“I burn my food, I burn even the water," she said. "I burn myself. Sometimes I forget the pot is hot."
Chunoo added that if she's craving pizza, she'll order it.
"I like pizza, too," she said.
Tagged
new york city
economy
Politics
eric adams
Karen Yi
Karen Yi covers homelessness and poverty. She joined the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom in 2020. Before that, Karen covered Newark for the Star-Ledger and spent almost a decade working for newspapers in New Jersey and Florida. She grew up in Miami and has a dog named Cashew. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 917-589-1460.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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