Posted on June 25, 2015 by Suzanne Travers in City Limits City Limits, By Suzanne Travers Finding affordable housing is a challenge for most New Yorkers, but it isn’t hard to find seniors who feel great strain over the hard-to-reconcile realities of low incomes and high rents. Half of senior households pay more than 30 percent of their income toward housing costs, including approximately 300,000 renters and 150,000 senior homeowners, according to census data. Ninety thousand New York seniors pay more than 50 percent of their income in rent, and over 2,000 seniors per night reside in the shelter system, a 2014 LiveOn report on “Building a Housing Agenda for Older New Yorkers” found, noting that the city faces “a massive shortfall of senior housing.”
