Eric Klinenberg - Going solo the extraordinary rise and surprising appeal of living alone [2012]

New York City offers unusually generous public assistance for the elderly and the isolated. Practically every neighborhood has a senior center that serves lunches, organizes social events, and helps senior citizens enroll in public programs. Community groups and neighborhood organizations encourage people to age in naturally occurring retirement communities, which keep them from losing touch with friends, family, and local institutions; rent control policies, while weaker than they once were, allow retired people on fixed incomes to stay in their homes. Volunteer programs connect the retired healthy elderly with their less mobile counterparts, so that the visitors maintain a sense of purpose while the visited get a break from the monotony of long, solitary days. The Office of Emergency Management does special outreach for the elderly when the weather is dangerously hot or cold, and local postal workers check in with residents when mail accumulates in the box of an older person.

But New York City has nearly a million senior citizens—its elderly population alone outnumbers the total population of all but the nine largest U.S. municipalities—along with hundreds of thousands of others who live alone. It is, no doubt, a wealthy place, yet when the economy is sluggish the city government struggles to fund its public programs, and the cutbacks can be painful.

Meals on Wheels is one of the nation’s most popular public service programs. Who, after all, could oppose a policy that delivers hot food to sick or homebound residents? No one ever demanded that New York abandon its commitment to feed the hungry, but in 2004 the city announced that, to save money, it would terminate the contracts of sixteen nonprofit senior centers that handled the delivery program in the Bronx and turn them over to three large contractors who could do it more efficiently. Gaining efficiency required one simple change: Rather than delivering hot meals on a daily basis, the contractors would deliver frozen meals once or twice a week.

News of the plan incensed the city’s old people and their political advocates. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had anticipated that they would be upset about the loss of hot meals. But he failed to recognize that the program delivered human companionship and well-being checks as well as food, and that the coldest consequence of the change would be depriving New York’s most vulnerable residents of the rare occasions when they could see and be seen by another person. The controversy made it into local papers and TV news shows, and it didn’t look good for the Bloomberg administration. Soon the two sides reached a compromise: Residents of the Bronx would be enrolled in a pilot program called Senior Options, which would offer those capable of heating frozen food with a choice to get daily delivery of a hot meal or frozen meals delivered once or twice a week.

COMPARED WITH OTHER CITIES,