Miriam and Benny Saladin thought they were in good shape for retirement.
They had savings from Benny’s work in the printing department of a financial company and Miriam’s work as a foster parent. They had Social Security payments coming in. They owned a two-story home in Manville, N.J. — a small town where Benny coached baseball at the local high school. Many of their 15 grandchildren lived just a few minutes’ drive away.
“We were doing good,” said Miriam, who’s 66 years old. “We had stability.”
But the Saladins’ home was located between two rivers, in Manville’s flood-prone Lost Valley neighborhood. In the more than two decades the couple lived in Manville, their house flooded three times, each time worse than the last.
Eventually, a massive flood shattered the couple’s stability. Their biggest asset became a liability, and their hopes for a comfortable retirement slipped out of reach.
“We lost everything,” Miriam said.
The Saladins’ experience is increasingly common for older people across the United States who are struggling with the everyday costs of living with climate change.
As the Earth heats up, severe weather — like the floods that damaged the Saladins’ home — is getting more common. Meanwhile, the cost of home insurance is also rising. So are utility bills during intense heat waves. That’s taking a profound financial toll on retirees who live on fixed incomes, many of whom also have looming medical and housing costs associated with aging.
“These are all significant financial burdens to older adults,” says Jennifer Molinsky, who directs the Housing an Aging Society program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
And the problem is only growing. Older adults are the fastest-growing demographic in the country. In the next 10 years, older adults are projected to outnumber children in the U.S. for the first time.
“It’s kind of like this quiet crisis that I think is confronting a lot of older adults,” says Danielle Arigoni, a climate and aging expert who currently works for the Environmental Protection Agency and wrote a book about the intersection of climate change and aging in the U.S. “We can see that climate is disproportionately impacting older adults, and we can project that they’re going to be a larger and larger share of our communities.”
The nest egg that wasn’t
The Saladins loved their home in New Jersey. It had a big backyard and a pool where their kids and grandchildren could play. It was the place the family gathered every birthday and holiday, where the grandkids would carve pumpkins and build gingerbread houses.
“Mama’s and Papa's house was everything — Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter,” Miriam said. “It was a dream house. Our dream house.”
The couple imagined living in the home for decades and eventually passing it down to their eight kids. And if they ever needed to free up cash to pay for emergency expenses or help fund their retirement, the house could be that “backup.”
“That’s how we think about our housing, as a nest egg,” says Molinsky. “That it’s something that we could tap if we needed to.”
But climate change is driving more severe flooding, wildfires and hurricanes. In recent years, the cost of damage from such disasters has soared into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, affecting millions of homes across the country.
For those who are nearing retirement age, major damage to their home can undo decades of investment and saving, research finds.
The Saladins experienced that firsthand. In 2021, as the remnants of Hurricane Ida dumped rain over the Northeast, the rivers near their home in Manville reached record levels.
Several feet of water gushed into the Saladins’ house — trapping the couple upstairs with their three youngest sons while they waited to be rescued by boat. Downstairs, the flood caused tens of thousands of dollars' worth of damage, destroying floors, walls, furniture, appliances, pipes and electrical wiring. A disaster assistance check from FEMA covered just a fraction of the bill, so the Saladins spent their savings and took on credit card debt to pay for the rest, Miriam said.
“Whatever we had, everything went into that,” she said. “You had to buy everything brand new.”
The couple worried they could drown if the house flooded again. So they decided to sell their dream home to a state government program that buys out and demolishes flood-prone properties.
“I was not going to risk his life or mine — or my kids — anymore,” Miriam said. “That’s it.”
The couple hoped to buy another home. But after using the buyout money to pay off the rest of their mortgage and with housing costs rising, they could not find anything they could afford.
They were forced to rent instead and found their new rent much higher than their old monthly mortgage payments. The couple now has no buffer for surprise expenses. At 66 and 73, they feel they’re starting over.
“It’s still hurting us,” Miriam said. “We have to live on giving somebody else our savings.”
Climate change is exacerbating a larger housing affordability crisis in the U.S., says Molinsky. “Millions of older adults are not affordably housed,” she explains.
Monthly income from pensions and Social Security isn’t keeping up with the cost of rent. And the share of people over 80 years old with mortgage debt has increased dramatically, from about 3% to more than 30% since the late 1980s.
That means many older households have little financial wiggle room to take on bills for big repairs, or foot the cost of moving altogether. For many families, like the Saladins, that means saying goodbye to the retirement they expected, and instead buckling down and trying to make ends meet well into their later years.
For others, the financial impacts of climate change can be even more profound. After Hurricane Ian hit the retirement enclaves of western Florida in 2022, thousands of older adults were displaced from their homes, and the number of people experiencing homelessness in the affected counties increased dramatically, according to the Lee County Homeless Coalition.
There’s evidence that a similar trend may be playing out nationally. “We’re seeing increasing housing instability in older adults,” Arigoni says. “The share of older adults in the unhoused population has grown in recent years.”
Protection from climate change is expensive
Many of the most insidious costs of climate change are mundane, compared with huge bills from weather disasters.
More severe heat waves mean people have to run their air conditioners nonstop. Home insurance that covers flood or wind damage is getting more and more expensive. In areas that are prone to intense wildfires, residents must clear flammable brush from around their homes so it won’t ignite if embers land on it during a blaze. In places that are prone to flooding, basement doors and windows need to be replaced to keep out the water.
The cost of such basic adaptations can be in the thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. “Many times, those are landing on the shoulders of people who just don’t have the financial flexibility to absorb higher costs,” Arigoni says.
Although older Americans are more likely to be homeowners, and have the wealth associated with owning that asset, they often don’t have the income or savings to upgrade and protect their homes in response to changing weather, she says. “They may be house-rich, cash-poor.”
Rising insurance costs in places that are prone to intense hurricanes, flooding or wildfires can be enough to upend retirement plans.
When they were in their 40s, Kim Williams and her husband bought a vacation home east of Sacramento, Calif., thinking they’d eventually move there full time when they retired. The cost of insuring the home was already high, Williams said. But after a wildfire hit the area in 2021, the couple’s home insurance company canceled their coverage altogether, forcing them to buy the even more expensive publicly backed insurance-of-last-resort. By 2023, they were paying upwards of $700 per month for minimal insurance coverage. They abandoned their retirement plans and put the house on the market.
“I can sort of afford the expenses now, while I’m working,” says Williams, who is 56 years old. “But I can't imagine retiring somewhere where homeowners insurance could be as high as $1,000 a month or even more some day.”
The quest to protect lives and livelihoods
The inability to protect oneself from the effects of climate change can be deadly. Older adults die at much higher rates during weather disasters than the general population, according to epidemiological research and federal mortality statistics. That includes thousands of older Americans who have died of heat-related illness in recent years, due to inadequate access to air conditioning.
Saving the lives, and protecting the livelihoods, of older adults as the Earth warms requires that policymakers acknowledge that older people have specific vulnerabilities, aging experts say.
“I think there’s an assumption that the fate or the well-being of older adults is not unlike that of the rest of the population. And the reality is it’s quite different,” Arigoni explains.
Many older Americans don’t drive, for example, which means local governments must make sure cooling centers are available by other means on the hottest days. Programs that help pay for air conditioning or subsidize home insurance for those on fixed incomes can also lessen the burden.
But such interventions will not address the longer-term financial effects for families whose elders are caught in the climate crosshairs.
For the Saladins, being able to rely on family as they recovered from Ida felt like a blessing. The couple’s adult children helped them repair their Manville home before they decided to sell it, and replace items like their coffee pot and television.
“At the moment when you need them, they're there,” Miriam said. “It makes you feel good.”
But the last few years have brought a painful realization as well. The Saladins will no longer be able to pass down a house, or any wealth at all, to their children.
“There’s no inheritance,” Miriam said. “House is gone — there's nothing else.”
Copyright 2024 NPR
