A very good friend of mine who lives in NYC has struggled financially for years. I helped bail her out after a brush with homelessness in 2016, and then she won lawsuit that helped keep her afloat for the last 3 years. That money has run out, and she's asking me for financial help again. I can give some short term help, but I'm desperate for some resources to point her to help with this situation. Many details inside.
I've known my friend since 2002. She is a single white woman without a partner, or any living family. For the first 10 years I knew her, she primarily worked administrative temp jobs and pursued her first love of acting. I think she lived close to the bone, and had some housing struggles, but managed to keep herself afloat. After the 2008 financial crisis, temp jobs dried up, but she was able to find a stable admin job working for a vanity non-profit of a wealthy woman. That shut down in 2012, but with a generous severance package. She was able to stretch that along with sporadic temp work until 2016, when it all came crashing down.
She lived in an illegal basement apartment, and when she got behind on rent, her landlord evicted her (illegally of course). My partner and I let her stay with us for a couple of months, but we were in the middle of negotiations with our landlord about a lease buyout, and suddenly they stopped the process, calling her an illegal roommate. None of her other friends could help, so we quickly had to find her someplace else to go. I found a roommate situation with another older woman on the UWS for $1000 a month (including utilities), and paid the deposit and first three months. It was intended to be short term, but that's where she still is today. She won a lawsuit against her landlord (pro-bono legal help), that she's lived off of since 2017, while she's tried to find steady employment.
She has had extreme difficulty finding work. She's applied to a ton of things (admin, call center, etc), but has never found anything permanent. She's had a string of temp jobs, and people seem to like her, but nothing has ever become permanent, although she gets call backs from the same places when they need help. She has some knee and leg problems that means she can't stand up for long periods of time, ruling out retail, food service and the like. I'm sure that ageism has been a major problem... she looks her age (maybe even older), and she is a plain woman, although she does present professionally.
At the end of 2018 she had a health scare where she started falling. It took months to get in with Medicaid, and get it diagnosed, but thankfully it was an easily treatable inner ear thing. But she wasn't able to work at all for a six month period.
So now the lawsuit money has run out. She's got some gigs coming, but had to ask me for help with Feb rent because her roommate is harassing her for it. Her roommate situation has always been a bit strained, and turns out is also illegal... the woman is charging her well more than half the rent on a rent-stabilized lease, and is also getting some sort of rental help that excludes her from getting a roommate. However, I'm not sure there's anyway to leverage this without my friend ending up in a hostile living situation (also the roommate is another older, financially fragile woman...so not someone I want to imperil). I have since moved 600 miles away, so can't actually provide temporary housing.
She's been trying to wait until she turns 65 to collect Social Security, but now I realize that she can't get full benefits until 66 and 2 months (she did have 15 years of steady fulltime employment when she was younger, so there should be something there), so she may have to explore that although I don't know how much that might be. However she is 63 now, so it seems like there maybe more resources for her than there was during her first bout of homelessness.
SO MY QUESTION: What sort of resources exist for a 63 yo woman in NYC on the brink of homelessness?
During the last go round, she did a lot of research but other than a pro-bono housing attorney, she didn't find much. She was never even able to get food stamps because there was problem documenting her income because of all the temp jobs. She was able to get on the wait list for subsidized senior housing with SAG/AFTRA, but they kicked her off because her income isn't stable. She doesn't have a lease, which prevents her from getting other types of help. She also has two cats that are her LIFE. She's lived in NYC for the last 40 years, and has no family... moving else where would be a difficulty. I've done some basic Googling, but nothing looks very promising. |
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