The Adams administration is pushing to cut back on delivering meals to New York seniors, slashing millions of dollars of funding from the program. The move comes amid an anticipated boom in New Yorkers over 65, a population segment expected to outpace the growth of any other age group within the next couple of decades.
The administration plans to cut $5 million from its home-delivered meals program for seniors at the beginning of fiscal year 2024. It’ll be followed by another reduction of $7 million in the same time period, and a reduction of $5.6 million in each of the next three years, according to Council member Crystal Hudson, who represents parts of Brooklyn, including Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, and chairs the Council’s aging committee.
City Council member Justin Brannan objected to the cuts at a budget hearing on Monday.
“New Yorkers who built our city – and grew New York – have unique exposure to the challenges facing our city, such as food insecurity, as well as worsening heat waves from climate change,” said Justin Brannan.
Brannan represents parts of Brooklyn including Dyker Heights and Bensonhurst, and chairs the finance committee. He said he could “personally testify that the city’s senior population is on the upswing.”
Right now, nearly 1 in 5 New Yorkers is a senior citizen. But that number is expected to climb as more Baby Boomers – the second largest living generation in the country– continue to mature into this age group. The population of seniors already increased by more than 363,000 within the past decade, according to the Center for an Urban Future. The number of seniors living in poverty is also increasing – and more of those in this new generation of seniors will be foreign-born, or people of color.
That influx of seniors comes at a time when the city’s Department for the Aging (DFTA) is one of the least-funded city agencies. It is expected to receive $469 million in funding during the upcoming fiscal year, less than 1% of the entire $107 billion executive budget for the city. The agency’s budget will receive a nominal increase of $2.4 million from the previous year, less than 1%.
“Amid such challenging times with high food inflation and economic uncertainty, many seniors who are COVID-19 vulnerable are still not fully comfortable in congregate settings, making these cuts on meals extremely concerning,” Hudson said.
Mayor Adams previously said that the influx of asylum-seekers in the city would cost billions – and his administration is pushing for other cuts to its public libraries and resources for the homeless. The administration is rationalizing its cuts to the aging department based on how much money the agency still had left over from last year.
“As we all know, in the executive budget, nearly every agency had to achieve savings in response to this unprecedented fiscal and economic condition – including a projected $4.3 billion spent by next year – to support over 60,000 asylum seekers,” DFTA commissioner Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez said.
Cortés-Vázquez also added that budget cuts are necessary “to support our city workforce while managing the reality of slowing growth in tax revenue.”
Prior to the pandemic, nearly 25,000 New Yorkers were able to pick up free meals from one of the city’s senior centers. But when older New Yorkers at high risk for infection faced the looming threat of contracting COVID-19 if they went out in person, the city started home deliveries for those in need. Within months, the city began delivering meals to an estimated 44,000 older and homebound New Yorkers. When that program shuttered last year, a fraction of those seniors were able to move over to a separate and already overflowing home-delivered meals program provided by the DFTA.
During the hearing, Council member Hudson also called for more funding for DFTA senior centers, technology and homecare services. As of May 1, she said, 233 eligible older adults were waiting for homecare, and another 955 waiting for case management from the DFTA.
