When Father Claude DuTeil started handing out peanut butter sandwiches to his unsheltered neighbors in Chinatown in 1978, he was 58 years old. This month, IHS celebrates our founder’s legacy on the anniversary of that first act of care, with a day of service at two of our shelters this year.

The irony weighs on me. DuTeil was practically a senior himself when he began serving neighbors who had nowhere to turn. Today, kūpuna are increasingly the ones on the other side of that exchange, aging into homelessness in a way we did not see a generation ago.

On Oʻahu, kūpuna age 60 and older now make up 19% of people experiencing homelessness, according to this year’s Oʻahu Point-in-Time Count. Nationally, homelessness among older adults is projected to nearly triple by 2030.

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These are not the chronically unsheltered people many folks picture when they think of homeless people. Many have worked their entire lives, some raised children who may or may not still be here. And they never expected to lose their housing. A spouse may have died and a second income vanished; a landlord sold the building, or a modest Social Security check has failed to keep up with rising rent.

Here is what troubles me most after 20 years of leading IHS. We know how to prevent much of this, and we are funding less of it. This year, federal policy changes and budget cuts forced us to shrink our homeless prevention program from serving 347 households to 201. We lost the ability to help families who hold Section 8 vouchers cover a rental deposit, and fewer vouchers were released.

Prevention is the quiet, unglamorous work of keeping a rent-burdened kupuna in the apartment she already has. We are doing less of it at the precise moment the need is climbing.

I see the result at our door every week. The people arriving at IHS are older and more medically fragile than they were a decade ago. Our health team delivered 4,440 clinical encounters last year. Our medical respite homes took in 182 people discharged from hospitals with nowhere to recover. When an older adult loses housing, the fall is often more impactful and the climb back takes longer, because age and illness magnify every obstacle toward healing.

Some will argue that homelessness is a matter of addiction or poor choices, and that prevention dollars reward bad decisions. I watch who actually walks through our doors. For kūpuna, the problem is most often the math.

Researchers like Dr. Margot Kushel of UCSF have documented that the gap between older adults’ fixed incomes and the cost of housing has become untenable. At a time when it typically requires two incomes to afford to rent a market unit, it just takes a single medical crisis, one hospitalization, one rent increase, one lost partner, to push a rent-burdened elder onto the street.

Prevention costs a fraction of what shelter stays, emergency room visits, and ambulance calls that often follow, once someone has become homeless.

The state and city have partnered and stepped up in real ways, funding new approaches like our neuroscience-informed Kumu Ola Hou kauhale and adopting our re-entry housing model after years of private investment proved it worked. That progress makes the federal retreat on prevention strategies harder to accept, because we can see what homeless prevention investment accomplishes.

No One Is Invisible

There’s no mystery to the fixes. As our governor has reminded us repeatedly: housing is healthcare. Fund housing subsidies for seniors before they lose their homes and we save far more on the need for more expensive shelter and services for those who become homeless.

When it comes to our kūpuna, access to consistent primary care and chronic disease management prolongs quality of life and costly visits to the emergency room and hospitalizations. More housing designed to ADA standards with seniors in mind prevents costly falls. Restore the care homes and adult foster homes Hawaiʻi lost during the pandemic and never replaced for those who need more support and a higher level of care.

None of these solutions need to be debated. They’re already proven. They simply need policymakers to prioritize funding to pay for what already works.

These mandates need to come from somewhere, and it can start with you. Join us on Saturday as we celebrate our Founder’s Day by volunteering to help us brighten and deep clean the first two shelters that were milestones in IHS’s history.

Join our advocacy efforts for the prevention work that includes promoting affordable housing, funding programs for chronically mentally ill and those addicted to a variety of substances including alcohol that provide pathways out of homelessness by getting and keeping people housed, and tell your representatives that protecting kūpuna from homelessness is worth funding.

Father Claude DuTeil began with a loaf of bread and a refusal to let anyone be invisible. Whether Hawaiʻi’s kūpuna grow old with a roof over their heads is not a matter of fate. It is a choice; our choice in this community.