A new mural shows the beauty of elderhood in Richmond. But is that still within reach?
Tucked away on an industrial block of West Marshall Street, a new mural imagines the way elderhood should feel: joyful.
For 48 years, Circle Center Adult Day Services has welcomed participants who need supervised care in a safe place outside the home during the day. The center’s new mural is designed to converge art and services in Richmond.
Working from photos of four center participants, artist Nico Cathcart finished the enormous, 75-foot-by-18-foot piece in November.
“Nico will be the first to say, ‘I hadn’t done faces like this before. I’m so excited to do wrinkles,’” said Circle Center CEO Heather Turbyne-Pollard. “It was a great opportunity to reflect what we do inside the walls, outside the walls. Nico started to call it ‘Age and Grace,’ which I just fell in love with, because [the work] represents these beautiful, vibrant faces.”
Inside these walls, elders from across Richmond gather to create art, music, eat and spend time together. Circle Center’s services aim to support an elderhood for participants that is full of beauty – a notion that is held in high regard by Turbyne-Pollard. The care is also critical to allow participants the opportunity to keep living where they want to be: in their communities and their homes.
Turbyne-Pollard says most participants rely on Medicaid funds to participate in the program. And they represent a small fraction of the more than 39,000 older people in the region who live below 200% of the federal poverty threshold.
Increasingly, older people in Richmond struggle to find and keep the care they need, or even stable housing and other necessities. We are leaving people behind, says Turbyne-Pollard.
The trends that service providers like Turbyne-Pollard are seeing in Richmond are also reflected nationally. Census data shows that older Americans are the only age segment experiencing an increase in poverty rates. Wages for older workers have stagnated, and many have been pushed out of the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the decline of pensions, it’s estimated that as many as 25% of older people rely on Social Security completely in later life as their sole income source.
As housing instability has increased and the number of older people experiencing homelessness has risen, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently announced it would begin collecting data on age for the first time as part of its Homeless Management Information System.
Elders being displaced
A recent study in Richmond found that service providers underestimate service gaps experienced by the community here. When asked about the availability of services for housing, case management, chronic health management, disease screening, nutrition and more, “In every situation, providers overestimate the availability of services and resources for older people,” said study author Annie Rhodes, a research scientist at the Virginia Center on Aging at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Rhodes’ study found practitioners were also not aware of the gaps that exist in programs. For instance, an individual cannot receive both Meals on Wheels and a Medicaid home care aide, despite many residents finding themselves in need of both in order to thrive.
Richmond is currently experiencing a high growth rate: The city added more than 8,000 residents in 2022. “The historic and contemporary challenges specific to age and ability are simply not keeping pace,” said Rhodes.
The cost of living adjustment for Social Security was roughly 6% in 2021 and 9% in 2023 – but the average rent is up 22% since 2020, said Rhodes. Housing affordability and access is an issue at all age levels, Rhodes says, but older people often cannot move to cheaper areas easily because of resource needs like transportation and apartment accessibility.
Rhodes notes that elders who have lived in the same neighborhood for years are being displaced, and that trend is unlikely to stop. This is a troubling loss for all of us, she says.
“Aging is the universal human experience,” Rhodes added. “Investment in elders is an investment in all of us, no matter our age.”
Local investment could look like increased enrollment in city or county real estate tax relief programs, Rhodes says. And Turbyne-Pollard hopes that an increase to Virginia’s Medicaid reimbursement rate would help grow services for places like Circle Center.
Sitting in her office, Turbyne-Pollard said those line items are part of a bigger picture: “We’re all connected deeply to one another,” she says. “We really don’t operate in any way independently. We weren’t meant to as a species. We were meant to tend and befriend. That’s how we’ve all survived.“