Loneliness And High Rent Prompt California Seniors To Look For Roommates And More Local News
Speaker 1: 00:00 Good morning. It's May 16th I'm Deb Welsh and you're listening to San Diego news matters. Loneliness and financial need are driving some California to seniors to move in together. Aging experts say it's more and more common as the elderly navigate the state's affordability crisis as part of our statewide collaboration covering the California dream. KPBS is a myth, a Sharm of reports. Speaker 2: 00:25 When you think about senior roommates, you might imagine the golden girls, I need somebody to bull with. Please just say yes and nobody will get hurt, but the reality is often less charmed. At 95 Eleanor stone has outlived her husband, three children and five siblings. Speaker 3: 00:44 I'm all alone. I don't have anybody, Speaker 2: 00:47 so she decided to take a roommate into his San Diego home in 2012 68 year old rose Mickey. He Speaker 3: 00:54 I was living in my own apartment and I hadn't been able to find work and the money was just going and I knew I wasn't going to make the next month's around Speaker 2: 01:07 the two. Matt through a San Diego Program called ElderHelp, it matches seniors looking for roommates. There are similar organizations around the state. Speaker 3: 01:16 We get along good. Oh, you know, she does her thing and I do my thing and my cat does her thing. Speaker 2: 01:24 Rose likes that. Elenora doesn't in her words, crowd her too much. Speaker 3: 01:29 I am an introvert and for us we build energy by being alone. Speaker 2: 01:36 The women don't eat together. They don't talk about too much. Speaker 3: 01:40 We do talk about the cat. I tell her what the cat dog or your, all of this stuff, Speaker 2: 01:45 they have different schedules. Rose rises early, eats breakfast, works until TPM and then watching something on Netflix in the afternoon. Eleanor wakes up at 8:30 AM grab the coffee and the newspaper Speaker 3: 01:58 first. I regular sports sector they'll I wrote dear Debbie. Then the real jumble. Speaker 2: 02:04 Bruce Helps Eleanor with the computer and takes her to doctor's appointments. Speaker 3: 02:08 I know I can count on her Speaker 2: 02:10 and Eleanor helps rose Speaker 3: 02:12 if I feel like interacting. There's somebody to talk to because I think if I lived alone, I may never see anybody else. You know, Speaker 2: 02:22 companionship is an important part of these partnerships. Caroline Cicero is a gerontology professor at the University of Southern California. Living alone puts people at higher risk of depression, which you might expect. She says people who live alone are also more likely to be a victim of fraud or a scam, and you're also more likely to have poor nutrition and poor health outcomes. Taking on roommates can help seniors keep a place to live. Fixed incomes aren't keeping up with California's rising rents on your dela. Cruz is the associate director of elder help. Speaker 3: 02:54 We hear a lot of times I never thought that I would be in this position and I don't know what do. I'm scared it's looking like I might be homeless Speaker 2: 03:03 when I ask Rose McGee if she choose this life for herself. Probably not. Probably not. And for Eleanor stone, living with rose has not warded off the pain of outliving her family, Speaker 1: 03:18 but I'm still lonely. You know, in San Diego I'm, I meet their Sharma for moral and California is aging population checkout grain, california.org San Diego officials are proposing a new program to help police officers live within the city. KPBS reporter Lynn Walsh explains how it would work. San Diego. Councilman Chris. Kate is asking for $250,000 from the city to provide down payment assistance to SDPD officers. He says less than 30% of officers live in the city resulting in long commutes and less of a connection to the community they serve. Speaker 3: 03:54 When you have the median home price in San Diego hovering around $600,000 right now, it becomes very unaffordable for officers to purchase a home, whether you're a new recruits or kind of that mid level officer, mid level experience and have a family to have a home of that size. Cost an amount of money. Yeah, Speaker 1: 04:10 he says he plans to work with banks to match the city's funds in order to qualify for the money officers would have to commit to working for SDPD for five years. Council members are scheduled to discuss the proposal. Friday Lynn Walsh KPBS news. San Diego is one step closer to passing a policy to create more affordable housing in the city. KPV As reporter Prius for has details. The city council's rules committee voted three to two Wednesday to pass a new inclusionary housing policy. It would require most new housing projects in San Diego to set aside 10% of homes for low income families or pay into a fund that supports affordable housing elsewhere. Steven Russell is with the San Diego Housing Federation and voiced his support at the meeting. Speaker 2: 04:59 We believe strongly in the role of inclusionary zoning to harness market forces to produce more affordable housing as well as to provide opportunities for lower income families to access the educational and economic opportunities that come with living in diverse neighborhoods. Speaker 1: 05:12 Many developers oppose the policy saying the additional fees could stall new construction. The policy will go to the full city council next for a vote. Prius either k PBS news. San Diego County is celebrating the 29th annual Sandag bike to work day today. KPBS reporter Malayna spits her says the goal is to promote health and reduce carbon emissions. In 2018 San Diego ranked the sixth worst in the nation for smog according to the American Lung Association, but local governments are working to change that by inviting commuters to ditch the car and pedal to work. Imperial Beach. Mayor surge to Dina says, cleaning up our air doesn't have to be a struggle. Speaker 3: 05:52 Reducing our emissions and making the our air cleaner doesn't have to be that hard, can be, we can have fun Speaker 4: 05:58 doing it and really getting people out on their, on their bicycles is a really cost effective, easy, simple way to get people healthier and happier and have a better quality of life and do a lot. To address our climate crisis. Speaker 1: 06:10 100 pitstops will be open across the county from Oceanside to San Ysidro with an unofficial pitstop across the border in Tijuana. Malena Spitzer KPBS news, the San Diego City Council voted to ban homeless people from sleeping in cars on Tuesday. KPBS reporter Matt Hoffman says the decision came after more than an hour of public testimony from people for and against the ban. The city county Speaker 4: 06:35 voted Tuesday to prohibit people from living in their cars from 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM in San Diego. That passes six to three. Among those who voiced their concerns about the ordinance was someone, many of the council members are familiar with. I was apart of electing someone. The members of this council will Rodriguez Kennedy is chair of the San Diego County Democratic Party and for a time was homeless himself. I was discharged from the United States Marine Corps under don't ask, don't tell. As a result of that, I became homeless. He feels the city council. It wasn't acting with compassion for people who have to sleep in their cars. The ordinance has is constructed. Is is an immoral, it's inhumane. The city has two parking lots where people can park and sleep overnight. By next month there'll be a third lot open admission value that we'll be able to accommodate. Rvs, Mount Hoffman, KPBS news. Speaker 1: 07:23 San Diego can expect some unusually wet weather starting today. KPB as reported, John Carol tells us how it will affect the coming fire season Speaker 5: 07:32 even though it's the middle of May. We are not quite done with our rainy season. The first of two storms will move into North Kathy Thursday morning, but it should be gone by early afternoon. Alec study from the National Weather Service says Thursdays Storm. We'll delay the start of fire season, even though the thick vegetation left from this winter's wet weather is slowly disappearing. Speaker 6: 07:52 That's starting to die off. So what this rain does is delays that die off, if that makes sense. And so it pushes our fire, it doesn't end our fire weather stays and pushes it deeper into the warm season or deeper into the summer. Speaker 5: 08:06 Thursday's storm should dump between a quarter and a half inch of rain. A second smaller system should arrive Sunday night, bringing light scattered showers. John Carroll KPBS news. Speaker 1: 08:17 Thanks for listening to San Diego. News matters. Get more KPBS podcasts, a k pbs.org/podcasts.
