LEILA FADEL, HOST:
America is aging. In the next decade, older adults will outnumber children in the U.S. And that demographic shift is running headlong into another trend - a warming planet. NPR's climate desk has been looking into the enormous financial challenges that climate change poses for a growing number of older Americans. Lauren Sommer is here to talk about what they found. Hi, Lauren.
LAUREN SOMMER, BYLINE: Hi, Leila.
FADEL: So why focus on financial challenges?
SOMMER: Yeah, well, we know climate change is extremely expensive, right? So, you know, heat waves are getting worse, for example.
FADEL: Right.
SOMMER: That means running your air conditioner more. That means higher utility bills. And I talked to Danielle Arigoni about this. She wrote a book about the intersection of aging and climate change, and she now works for the Environmental Protection Agency.
DANIELLE ARIGONI: It's worrisome that we have these trends where we can see climate is disproportionately impacting older adults, and we can also project that they're going to be a larger and larger share of our communities. But it's kind of like this quiet crisis that I think is confronting a lot of older adults.
SOMMER: Yeah, so older people are hit particularly hard.
FADEL: But why is that? 'Cause I think a lot of people think of older people as often having more savings, more wealth than younger people.
SOMMER: Right. Yeah, and that's generally true. But most retirees also have very little financial flexibility. So tens of millions of older Americans live on a fixed income. You know, that's Social Security or a pension. And that income often isn't enough to cover things like, you know, making your house more resilient to wildfires or paying for expensive flood insurance. These things can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars, and most older people aren't in a position to go back to work to pay for those bills.
FADEL: You mention wildfires, hurricanes that have damaged homes all over the country, right? Why are weather disasters so bad for older Americans?
SOMMER: It's because older people's wealth is often tied up in their home, right? It's their nest egg. A lot of older people spend their entire working lives paying a mortgage and plan to sell their homes eventually to pay for funding their retirement. So when that home is damaged or destroyed, it can delay or, you know, even totally derail those plans.
FADEL: OK, so let's hear from a family who has gone through this. Sophia Schmidt from WHYY in Philadelphia spent time with a retired couple whose home was badly damaged in a recent flood.
SOPHIA SCHMIDT, BYLINE: Sixty-six-year-old Miriam Saladin remembers her old house in Manville, New Jersey, as her dream home.
MIRIAM SALADIN: I had a fireplace. I always wanted a fireplace, and that house had a fireplace. And we wanted a basement, and it had a basement. And it had...
SCHMIDT: The house had a big backyard and a pool. Miriam owned it with her husband, Benny, for more than two decades, and it was the place their eight kids and 15 grandkids would gather every holiday.
M SALADIN: They were always in my house - always.
SCHMIDT: Miriam and Benny, who's 73, scroll through photos on Miriam's phone of kids filling the dining room, carving pumpkins and making gingerbread houses.
M SALADIN: These were birthdays. See? This is Christmas.
SCHMIDT: The couple had hoped to stay in Manville.
BENNY SALADIN: I used to be a baseball coach over there, and they know me - the whole town.
SCHMIDT: They imagined they'd enjoy their retirement with most of their kids and grandkids just a few minutes' drive away. They had savings from Benny's work in the printing department of a financial company and Miriam's work as a foster parent, and they had Social Security payments coming in. They felt they were in good shape. But the neighborhood sits between two rivers, and the house flooded twice in the first decade they owned it.
M SALADIN: But the worst of all - it was Ida.
SCHMIDT: In 2021, as the remnants of the hurricane dumped rain over the Northeast, the rivers in Manville reached record levels. Water gushed into the Saladins' house, trapping the couple upstairs with their three youngest sons. Benny remembers waiting hours to be rescued by boat.
B SALADIN: Calling and screaming for help.
SCHMIDT: The water caused tens of thousands of dollars of damage to the home. They had to replace floors, walls, pipes, electrical wiring, appliances and furniture. Miriam says it took all their savings and then some.
M SALADIN: Our checks from Social Security, our taxes - whatever we had. Everything went into that.
SCHMIDT: They were worried they could drown if the house flooded again. So Miriam and Benny decided to sell their dream home with the help of a government program that buys out and demolishes flood-prone properties.
M SALADIN: We were not going to go through another flood. I was not going to risk his life or mine or my kids anymore. That's it.
SCHMIDT: Miriam and Benny wanted to purchase another home. But after using the buyout money to pay off the rest of their mortgage, they didn't have enough left, so they had to rent. They toured dozens of apartments before they found a landlord who would accept them with their fixed income and the credit card debt they picked up after Ida.
M SALADIN: This is the entrance of the house here, of our new house.
SCHMIDT: The couple now rents a town house in Alburtis, Pennsylvania, an hour and a half away from their old life in New Jersey. It's smaller than the old house, and the rent is much higher than their old monthly mortgage payment. Now nearly all the equity the Saladins spent more than two decades building in their New Jersey home is gone.
M SALADIN: It's still hurting us. We still lay down in bed and we say, we lost our home. We don't have a home. We have to live on giving somebody else our savings.
SCHMIDT: It's not the retirement they pictured. They see less of their grandkids.
M SALADIN: Not like before, they would just drop in. Hi, mama. How you doing? What do you need? Or my daughters - mom, you know, I'm coming over with the kids.
SCHMIDT: And money is tighter than ever. Miriam says the couple has no buffer for surprise expenses, let alone their old retirement dreams.
M SALADIN: I have family in Puerto Rico. I have family in Miami. You know, he has - in Dominican Republic. We would like to travel. That's something that we can't do. OK, I would like to travel, like every retiree does. They go explore the countries, the - you know, we can't do that.
SCHMIDT: And with the house in New Jersey gone, the Saladins have no inheritance to leave their kids. Instead, Miriam says, the couple now leans on them.
FADEL: That's Sophia Schmidt with WHYY in Philadelphia. And Lauren Sommer from NPR's climate desk is still with me. Lauren, how common is this kind of experience for older people in the U.S?
SOMMER: It's increasingly common, unfortunately. And as the Saladins describe, it has this cascading effect for families.
FADEL: Yeah.
SOMMER: Instead of passing down a house to children and grandchildren, older couples are dependent on that next generation to help make ends meet. So the financial burden is passed on.
FADEL: And what can be done to protect older Americans from these kinds of climate-related financial hits?
SOMMER: Yeah, it might mean saving more for retirement or relying less on your house as that nest egg. Experts I spoke with said one thing that would help is if there were more housing that's set up for older people. That's something that would obviously have a lot of benefits for an aging population, but one of the overlooked benefits is that it would help with these big climate change impacts.
FADEL: Lauren Sommer from NPR's climate desk. Thank you, Lauren.
SOMMER: Thanks.
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