Housing, Aging, and the Systems We Must Reimagine
A clear glass crystal ball resting on a dark, sandy beach at sunset, acting as a visionary, centered lens that captures and inverts a reflection and symbolizing a reimagined perspective of our world.
When Adaptation Becomes Acceptance
“As more seniors become homeless, shelters are trying to adapt.” This headline from NPR is heartbreaking, and not because shelters are adapting, but because I fear adaptation to our societal failures has become our plan. I don't want to see shelters adapt to our societal failures. I want to see us, as a society, give a damn. We have not prepared for the US population housing and care needs. We need to think across systems, care for our elders, empathize for future generations, and collaborate as families, communities, and across sectors to plan and implement solutions. Our elders deserve better. We will want better for ourselves and for generations to come.
The Scope of the Crisis
Homelessness falls hardest on already marginalized communities, but all populations are vulnerable. Overall, the number of people experiencing homelessness increased by 18% between 2023 and 2024. According to a 2024 annual report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), nearly all populations reached record levels of homelessness in 2024. Veterans were the only population with a decrease in homelessness between 2023 and 2024 (8%), and since 2009, the number of Veterans experiencing homelessness has decreased 55%.
A closer look at the HUD 2024 annual report data reveals who is bearing the heaviest weight:
Families with children experienced the largest single year increase in homelessness at 39%. Children under 18 were the age group with the largest increase between 2023 and 2024, and nearly 80% of women with children experience homelessness as a result of domestic violence.
Unaccompanied youth reached the highest recorded numbers, with LGBTQ+ youth facing disproportionately high rates of homelessness
People of color are overrepresented among the homeless population compared to the U.S. population. Black Americans make up 32% of the homeless population while comprising just 12% of the total U.S. population. Hispanic and Latino neighbors accounted for nearly half (47%) of the total increase in people experiencing homelessness between 2023 and 2024.
Older adults (aged 55 and older) represent the fastest-growing demographic group. On a single night in 2024, 1 in every 5 people experiencing homelessness was age 55 or older – and nearly half (46%) were unsheltered, in places not meant for human habitation.
Eroding Safety Nets and a Deepening Crisis
Access to resources that help people prevent homelessness and return to permanent housing is becoming increasingly sparse. On May 1, 2025, the Veterans Affairs Serving Purchase (VASP) program closed, no longer helping Veteran homeowners avoid foreclosure. On September 30, 2025, federal emergency rental assistance (ERA) programs ended, dismantling infrastructures that assisted low-income renter households with rent and utility payments, housing navigation, and legal aid assistance. According to the American Community Survey data, in 2023, more than 80% of the ERA-eligible renters living at or below 80% of the area median income were rent burdened. Securing and maintaining housing becomes a system barrier with restrictive lease policies, application fees, or imposing treatment mandates to access transitional housing programs and permanent supportive housing. As safety nets erode and housing costs increase, the risks of becoming homeless and barriers to successfully rehousing also increase. Homeless program funding faces uncertainty, housing becomes less affordable, Housing Choice Vouchers waitlists close, affordable accessible housing shortage deepens, emergency shelters lack capacity, camping is criminalized, and turnover or lack of funding for critical service positions like case managers and housing navigators are all interconnected systemic challenges. Meanwhile, for many low-income households, housing affordability and stability remains an acute challenge and deepening crisis, and corporate profit finds new avenues.
Seniors and disabled individuals face unique challenges in this landscape. Living on fixed incomes, in aging homes, with rising costs of living and increasing needs of support to maintain independent living. There are few places to land if you cannot return home after a fall or surgery, cannot afford out-of-pocket in-home care, or cannot pay for the home repairs and modifications required for safe independent living.
A Quiet Pipeline We Cannot Ignore
If we don’t act soon, we’ll miss opportunities to create better systems and improve our futures in housing and care. I fear we’ll barely notice as a new industrial complex quietly builds itself around our most vulnerable seniors, disabled loved ones, and neighbors experiencing homelessness. If people cannot access shelter or afford permanent housing, profits will be made from institutionalization rather than investing in care, quality, and dignity. Pipelines to incarceration, conservatorship, and guardianship become hidden-in-plain sight designs initiated as “efficiency improvements” and public safety campaigns.
On July 24, 2025, the Executive Order, “Ending Crime and Disorder On America’s Streets” signaled a new approach in addressing homelessness by shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings through civil commitment. Less than a year later, the blueprint for this guardianship and conservatorship pipeline for disabled Veterans is already laid out. On March 11, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a collaboration to funnel Veterans into guardianships as a plan to place the “most vulnerable” Veterans who lack the decisional capacity and have no surrogate decision-makers to support a timely discharge from the hospital bed. This “collaboration” is the new authority enabling government attorneys to streamline guardianship or conservatorship proceedings – a signal of increased ethical and moral distress for healthcare treatment teams who may need more time and resources to support dignified discharge planning with and for the patient.
Stripping vulnerable people of their rights to free up hospital beds will lead to forced placements in a different healthcare institution. Healthcare systems cannot serve both as the people’s caregiver and the government’s business partner in driving conservatorship or guardianship.
Systemic Failures Dressed as Individual Problems
For healthcare systems, extended hospital stays and readmissions carry real costs, particularly when they negatively impact Medicare value-based payments. Clinical teams are faced with ethical dilemmas in discharge planning when there is no safe home or support system for the patient. For homeless response systems, increased pressures on front-line staff result in burnout, ethical distress, and diminished organizational capacity. But these costs are symptoms of larger, interconnected systemic failures: lack of adequate housing, insufficient caregiver support, under-resourced community services, and inadequate safety nets to help people live safely and independently in their communities.
When burden and blame are redirected onto the very populations being failed, we lose the opportunity to pursue sustainable, long-term change for the greater good. Solutions become narrow, siloed, and harmful. Power structures and profits are built at the expense of others’ dignity, generational health and wellbeing, and our collective moral code.
Placing pressure on community homeless response systems to adapt to specific population needs ignores that the unprecedented rise in homelessness is driven by the nation’s affordability and inventory crisis— not because of personal failings or character flaws of the people experiencing homelessness.
Homeless response workers are working with more people experiencing homelessness for the first time while navigating complex systems to help people access shelter, housing, healthcare, employment, and income support. Successfully helping people secure permanent housing is demoralizing for staff and for those being served when communities simply don’t have enough housing, employment doesn’t guarantee housing when wages have not kept pace with rising costs, fixed incomes limit housing options, and zoning and land use policies have often worked as barriers to housing options and affordable homeownership. The National Alliance to End Homelessness reports that in 2024, no community had enough permanent housing to serve everyone experiencing homelessness.
The Questions We Must Be Willing to Sit With to Inform New Possibilities
What lies ahead when more seniors face homelessness, communities fail to prioritize affordable and accessible housing, and the safety-nets that help people maintain independent living remain undervalued and under-resourced?
What happens when interconnected systems become more disconnected from a deeper sense of purpose?
Where might people working within these systems need more care, community, and recognition?
What’s the cost when social infrastructures are incentivized to prioritize financial impact over social impact?
What are the lessons learned from Housing First philosophy, harm reduction approaches, and emergency rental assistance programs that might be replicated or scaled out?
What does passive compliance to harmful systems look like on an individual and systems level?
What does active ownership of shared values, social norms, and community care look like?
What inner work may need to be done to help collective work and systems change?
Deliberate Design Over Passive Adaptation
Meaningful change demands more than good intentions, fundraising campaigns, short-term seasonal solutions, and new industrial profit pathways to address social problems. It requires governments, organizations, agencies, and the people who lead and work within them to hold both the urgency of today’s crises and a clear vision of what’s possible – without burnout, shutting down, or losing capacity for compassionate, collaborative, and courageous leadership.
The future we want won’t emerge from adaptation to misalignment. It must be deliberately influenced and designed by people willing to do the inner work and lead with courage and shared purpose. The way we build systems, communities, workplaces, and relationships either sustain us or drain us. When we center care for the human experience, honor the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and anticipate and respond to the unique needs of our neighbors living with disabilities and aging, we create possibilities to create with intention instead of urgency, and collaborate for meaningful change that benefits communities and generations to come.
Our Desired Futures Begin with How We Care Now
At Desired Futures, I believe individual care and collective care, and accountability can co-exist. We can tend to our own nervous systems, rest, and realign to our values, while normalizing and socializing compassionate practices and designing systems of care with and for each other.
If you are a healthcare professional navigating ethical distress in the systems you work in, an educator or social service worker struggling with burnout or compassion fatigue, a leader working to align your organization or team with its deeper purpose, or someone ready to think more boldly about reimagining systems and strategies, I’d love to connect.
Desired Futures Counseling & Consulting, PLLC was founded to walk alongside the helpers, leaders, and change makers who want to reflect, reimagine, and act. Reach out and let’s talk about what working together could like. Our desired futures begin with how we care for one another, now.
I’m Andi Phillips, a licensed clinical social worker with nearly two decades of experience across education, community, and health care settings including over ten years in federal health care leadership. Today, I am helping organizations transform workplace culture and organizational health to create desired futures rooted in care, creativity, and connection. I also provide therapy to individuals and couples in Illinois who may be struggling with mental health, identity, relationships, or work/life balance and are seeking clarity, confidence, and sense of purpose. You can learn more about my work at Desired Futures Counseling & Consulting.
For any inquiries, please contact:
Andi M. Phillips, LCSW
Email: andi@desiredfuturescounselingandconsulting.com
