The Adams administration is expanding its program to deliver free meals to older adults at home, citing a post-pandemic rise in isolation and decreased mobility among the city’s oldest New Yorkers.
In addition to weekday meals, city-funded home meal services will include deliveries on holidays and require halal options starting in July, according to city officials.
The expanded services come as a new report by the Robin Hood Foundation found 1 in 4 adults over the age of 65 experienced poverty in 2022, a slight rise from the previous year. During a City Council hearing on Tuesday, councilmembers also underscored the aging crisis facing immigrant communities, who make up the majority of the city’s older adult population and often lack safety nets once they’re unable to work.
“What makes New York City affordable and economical is the ability to work,” said Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez, commissioner for the city’s Department for the Aging. “It is a lifelong experience of underemployment, poor pay, that then you encounter this in your old age, which is why so many older adults are in poverty.”
Citymeals on Wheels, which contracts with providers to feed 22,000 homebound older adults daily across the five boroughs, said it’s seeing greater needs among older immigrants. About half of its meal recipients live on less than $19,000 a year and two-thirds of them are women, CEO Beth Shapiro said.
“People did not expect to live this long,” she said, noting older adults are the country’s fastest-growing population. “And they’ve outlived their abilities and sometimes their financial abilities to care for themselves.”
“In this city, older adults will outnumber children for the first time in history in another decade,” she added.
One in five New Yorkers is older than 65, and the state’s population of older residents ballooned by a third between 2011 and 2011, according to the Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan-based nonprofit think tank. The center also found the…
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