Boomers Go Bust: Santa Barbara Supervisors Receive Bombshell Report on Aging
Report Addresses Challenges Posed by County’s Rapidly Aging Population
While the adventurous sexual agency of perimenopausal women has recently morphed into a lucrative literary subgenre, the Santa Barbara County Adult & Aging Network has found that the economic challenges facing the county’s increasingly aging population is far more fraught than frisky. According to a 44-page bombshell of a draft report dropped on the county supervisors on Tuesday, people 60 years old or older will make up fully one-quarter of the county’s population by the year 2030.
When it comes to economically accessible housing and home care, the gap between supply and demand for this population has eclipsed the Grand Canyon. Many elderly people fortunate enough to own their properties sold their homes five years ago to cover the cost of care and have since outlived their money.
The median cost of in-home care is $84,500 a year, but most in-home care workers make only $16 to $26 an hour, low enough for many to qualify for public assistance to get by. This, in turn, is responsible for a significant shortage in in-home care workers; the number of applicants for such job postings dropped has dropped 70 percent since 2018. Of those holding these jobs, the report found 80 percent are women, 74 percent are people of color, and 47 percent are immigrants.
Roughly one-third of this 60-year-plus cohort report having some form of disability as well.
The elderly, it turns out, make up the fastest-growing segment of the county’s homeless population. For 55 percent of older adults who live here, Social Security covers less than half their cost of living. For people seeking residency in in-home care facilities, the costs jumped from $128,000 a year in 2021 to $182,5000 last year.
The report was released as part of a master planning process the Adult & Aging Network hopes to have finalized and submitted to the state this summer. It was also an invitation to the supervisors to endorse the effort to help encourage greater participation and involvement. The supervisors embraced the initiative with a unanimous 5-0 vote, with supervisors Joan Hartmann and Steve Lavagnino weighing in most heavily. Hartmann termed the report “a wake-up call,” citing the case of an elderly woman with dementia who wound up in county jail for shoplifting.
“If we don’t have systems in place,” Hartmann said, “it all goes kaflooyie.”
After the report gets refined during the public process in the months ahead, it will be brought back to the supervisors for further action.
