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Some Feel Pinch, Others a Squeeze
By Anthony DePalma, The New York Times September 9, 2003
One of them, Francis X. Forte, a vigorous Navy veteran of 77, marches quickly to the last table at the Ozone Park Senior Center, in the basement of the Queens church. There, with a bunch of old friends, he plays rumino — an intense kind of knock rummy — for $3 a hand until the center serves lunch. He plays every weekday except when he goes to Atlantic City to roll dice or play the slots, where he usually wins enough to keep himself in chips. That routine has not changed in years, even after the recent round of tax and fare increases that have made life more stressful for many New Yorkers. Protected by a generous company pension and tax exemptions that softened the blow of a large property tax increase, he says he realizes he is one of the lucky ones. "About the only thing that's changed," he said, "is that I can't get to Atlantic City as often as I'd like," in part because some organizations that sponsor the trips have cut back. A few minutes after Mr. Forte has played his first hand, Letizia Matriciano, 75, descends the church stairs slowly, hobbled by diabetes, arthritis and a weak heart. Like him, she plays cards, but Italian cards, a game called scopa, which she plays for points, not money. Lately she has been dealt a poor hand. After the city raised property taxes 18.5 percent, her son Frank, who owns the house she lives in, told her he was losing too much money and would have to raise the rent on her two-bedroom apartment $100 a month, to $600. This is still well below what he could get by renting it to someone else, but it is clearly a hardship for her. Although she worked at a nearby candle factory for 20 years, she retired without a pension. Her only income, from Social Security, comes to $770 a month. She has fallen behind on paying her telephone bill and her supplemental health insurance. Sometimes, she doesn't even have $1.50 for lunch at the center. The people who run the center have made it clear that those who have trouble paying can eat anyway, but Mrs. Matriciano said she was too ashamed to ask for something for nothing. So when she can't pay, she stays home. "What else am I going to do?" she asked in a heavily accented English, looking searchingly at a visitor. "You can tell me? What I'm going to do?" Two lives on one block, separated by only a few doors and the differing ways the city's problems have come to settle on the shoulders of its elderly residents. In these tight times, the elderly, with their fixed incomes, are among New York's most vulnerable residents. The city's attempts to balance the budget with new taxes, along with steep increases in regulated rents, transit fares and utility bills, present a scary prospect for the elderly, and for the groups that serve them. But the experiences of Mr. Forte and Mrs. Matriciano suggest there are actually two faces to the crisis. While one neighbor has ample resources and safeguards, the other has been pushed close to panic. This block has its share of elderly residents, people who have lived here most or all of their long lives. They are survivors, many of them Italian- or Irish-American, who have watched the neighborhood change in recent years as large numbers of Hispanic and Asian people have moved in. They are the ones who did not flee or sell their homes for increasingly astronomical prices, but resolutely stayed put, where they grew up, for better or worse. Many, like Mr. Forte, own the homes they have fussed over for decades. He lives in the same brick house, with a small stoop and a lion keystone cast in concrete, that was his boyhood home. Mr. Forte, a widower, owns it with his niece, Rosemary Fermisco, who lives upstairs. Sitting at a wooden desk in his front room, Mr. Forte opened a hand-drawn spreadsheet where he keeps his financial records. He noted that his property taxes rose to $2,888 after the 18.5 percent increase. With no rental income, he and his niece had to absorb the extra expense. "I put away less in savings now than before, and I had to take some money out to pay the taxes," Mr. Forte said. "But no big deal." He lives alone in a cluttered apartment, with handmade signs from his children on the refrigerator door and dining room table reminding him to take his medications. With cable television, air-conditioning and his 10-year-old Chrysler New Yorker parked outside, he said he had no complaints. Mr. Forte worked for the Unisys Corporation, formerly Sperry, for 37 years and made sure he had a good pension when he retired. With Social Security added in, his income totals about $2,000 a month. Because he joined the Navy when he was 17, he also receives a property tax exemption for veterans; along with an exemption because of his age, it lowers his tax bill considerably. "It's not really much of a squeeze," said Mr. Forte, who had just returned from a trip to Atlantic City with the Catholic War Veterans. To his way of thinking, the higher taxes and additional costs that were imposed recently were unavoidable. "It's just one of those things," he said. "I'm not going to alter my life because of that at all." Four doors down 103rd Street, Mrs. Matriciano is anguished by what the higher taxes are doing to her and her family. Her son Frank helped her out for many years by keeping her rent at $500, less than half the market rate for a two-bedroom apartment on the block. Another son lives with her, but they do not expect him to help with the rent because of his personal problems. And recently her sister-in-law moved in upstairs temporarily; she, too, is paying a discounted rent until she can find another apartment. Mrs. Matriciano's English is limited — she came from Naples in 1955 — and so is her income. Besides her $770 Social Security check, $130 a month in food stamps is all she has to live on, she said. The increase in property taxes put added pressure on her whole family. When the new tax bills came in, Frank, a contractor, said he would have trouble affording his own house, on Long Island, and a business along with the house on 103rd Street. Reluctantly, he said she would have to move to a smaller apartment, or pay $600 a month, starting next month. She said there was no way she could afford to pay $1,200 a month for a different apartment in the neighborhood. Cable TV has been too much of a stretch for her, and last month, she could not pay her telephone bill, so Frank took care of it. On a recent afternoon at the Ozone Park Senior Center, she said that all the money she had in the world was $2 in her pocketbook and $125 in the bank. For Mrs. Matriciano, the noon meal at the center is not just the most important of the day. Often, it is stretched into additional meals if she can take home a leftover chicken breast or some soggy string beans. The center asks for a $1.50 contribution, but lately, fewer of its clients have been able to pay even that. "They come to me and ask if they can eat, even though they haven't paid," said Susan Powell, director of the center. No one is turned away, she said, but pride often keeps them from even asking. Between the extremes represented by Mr. Forte and Mrs. Matriciano are several hundred people at the center whose lives have been touched in some way by the city's financial jam. Some have cut back on phone calls or cable TV, and some said they bought only food that was damaged or on sale. All are more concerned about their children and grandchildren than themselves, and they are thankful for the safe shelter of the center. But the center itself has been hurt. Nearly all of its budget comes from the city through a nonsectarian arm of the Diocese of Brooklyn, which, through Catholic Charities, runs the Ozone Park center and 16 others. The city cut $65,000 for a program that helps elderly crime victims in Ozone Park. The rest of the center's budget remains intact, but programs have been squeezed. "Over the last couple of years everyone has had the impression that senior services were relatively inviolable," said Robert Siebel, chief executive of Catholic Charities. "In point of fact, the city didn't cut the budget for senior services. But neither did they add the money the system requires." Cost-of-living increases for workers have not been included in the budgets for any of the centers since 1999. Modest salary increases, along with higher rents, utilities and fees, have been financed with money diverted from other areas. "It's a struggle to provide the richness of the program we have had in the past," said Donna Corrado, director of Catholic Charities' office of government relations and public policy. Arts and crafts programs have been cut, as have some health counseling, music programs and other nonessential activities. But Ozone Park's elderly residents still play cards, and still stand shakily to sing "God Bless America," Mr. Forte near his rumino buddies, Mrs. Matriciano on the other side of the room with her deck of Italian cards. Mr. Forte said he thought Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg did what he had to do to set New York back on firm financial footing. But Mrs. Matriciano has trouble even considering the possibility that, as the mayor has suggested, the worst is over. She says she thinks everyone who is being squeezed by the city's rescue plan should write the mayor to let him know how much they are still hurting. "I haven't done it because I don't know how to write in English," she said. "But if everybody else did it, I'd ask somebody to write it for me. And I'd tell him that I can't live like this." Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
Some
days around midmorning, if it's not too hot, too humid, too wet or too
windy, the front doors of two houses on the same side of 103rd Street in
Ozone Park open and two people in their 70's head down the block and
across 101st Avenue to St. Mary Gate of Heaven Roman Catholic Church.