Counselors help seniors clean up, avoid eviction
There are still a handful of vintage hat boxes in Vera Oliver’s closet. Wrapped in smooth satin and crushed velvet, they sit high on a shelf, stacked one on top of another. The boxes are from a time when Oliver worked as a makeup artist at big department stores. She had a gift for eyes, and with one glance could name someone’s best eye shadow color.
At 80 years old, wearing brightly colored porcelain earrings, Oliver still knows beauty when she sees it. She pulls down a box, rubbing her hand over the white satin. “See the bottom?” she asks, pointing to a cloth label inside the box. “Nordstrom’s 1992. This is a collector’s item.”
Oliver used to have a couple of hundred of those boxes; the white satin is one of the few she has saved. She won them at work and used them as giveaways filled with cosmetics for her private clients. But after a while, she had difficulty parting with them.
“That’s how I got in trouble with collecting,” she said. “They each have a story and a memory.”
Oliver is one of the estimated 12,000 to 25,000 people in San Francisco with hoarding behavior. A stigmatized mental health issue prevalent among older adults, it also can increase risk of eviction. In San Francisco, where the unhoused population is aging, a handful of services are attempting to keep low-income older adults with hoarding behavior out of shelters and off the streets.
“The most frightening noise our participants can hear is the sound of a knock or doorbell,” said Elizabeth Barr, a peer counselor who leads a skills-building and support group for hoarding behavior at the Mental Health Association of San Francisco.
Barr came to the organization more than a decade ago. She and her late husband both had hoarding behavior and they would often fight, yelling at each other: “Your stuff is trash, my stuff is treasure!” Barr was terrified of her landlord discovering their excessive belongings, as she had already been unhoused twice.
Laura Chiera, executive director and managing attorney at Legal Assistance to the Elderly, estimates that about 5% of the 450 or so pro bono eviction lawsuits they defended in 2022 involved hoarding. They receive referrals from the Mental Health Association of San Francisco, the Eviction Defense Collaborative, and the city’s Adult Protective Services department, which provides free short-term case management and crisis intervention for older adults.
“Eviction really is a senior issue,” Chiera said. “It’s a crisis.”
