Healthy, hot-cooked meals, exercise sessions and other services for older adults are on the chopping block in parts of the Bay Area as service providers feel the squeeze of shrinking government budgets.
To save money, the Downtown Oakland Senior Center cut its Friday services and reduced its operations the rest of the work week by two hours a day in April.
Barbara Griffin, 81, an amusement park retiree who’s been coming to the center for the past 20 years, said recent schedule reductions have forced her to choose between her two favorite aerobic dance classes: Zumba and “Keep it Moving.” She said she worries the city is starting to treat seniors like “an afterthought.”
“I feel like some people would rather have us sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons,” Griffin said.
Similar concerns are upsetting older adults in Sunnyvale, where a program that serves healthy meals to residents aged 60 and older, as well as their spouses and disabled dependents, increasingly has to turn people away as demand has outstripped the program’s funding.
“The numbers are climbing,” said Ronald Nathan, who chairs the volunteer committee of the Sunnyvale Senior Nutrition Program. “At this rate, without systems to control overages, we could literally run out of food.”
The challenges the two centers face reflect the broader problem of government budget deficits and rollbacks in the Bay Area. Earlier this month, Contra Costa County eliminated a $277,000 contract with Meals on Wheels Diablo Region due to federal funding cuts, ending weekly “Breakfast Bag” deliveries to hundreds of seniors.
Seniors are the fastest-growing group in the Bay Area, with about 1.2 million residents now over 65, according to the Bay Area Census. Their rising numbers are expected to further strain the region’s already limited resources.
Throughout the Oakland Downtown Senior Center, bright orange flyers neatly placed on tabletops, pinned on bulletin boards and tucked under coffee mugs plead “Save our Senior Centers” in bold font. For Barbara Tengeri, 83, the message feels deeply personal. She has been attending the center for the last 23 years, first learning about it through her late mother, who used to brew coffee in the kitchen. She’s grateful for the hot lunches and friends she’s made, but said recent scheduling changes make her uneasy. To her, the center isn’t just a part of her routine, it’s her legacy.
“Every time I come here I think about my mother,” Tengeri said.
In Oakland, the budget shortfalls are projected to persist into 2030, according to its most recent five-year annual forecast. In Santa Clara County, a similar picture unfolds as costs rise faster than revenues.
Oakland’s senior centers are also facing staffing cuts that have left them dependent on part-time volunteers. Several community members expressed fears that sustained staffing shortages could threaten the social fabric of these welcoming environments.
“A friend I’ve made at this center is sick right now, and I’ve seen her deteriorate because of the lack of social contact,” said 65-year-old Friederike Droegemueller, a yoga enthusiast who participates in activities at the downtown site. “We need our centers.”
Farther south, the concerns are similar. On a recent Thursday morning at the Sunnyvale Senior Nutrition Program, Ginnie Reyes split a palm-sized pumpkin pie with two friends and her husband. Reyes, who discovered the program through a friend, says she and her husband now stop by nearly every day. Aside from the days in which the menu features Chinese chicken salad, Reyes said what she enjoys most are the social connections.
The budget woes are stirring concern among the regulars. For Reyes, and her lunch community at the Sunnyvale United Methodist Church, any further scaling back “would be devastating for a lot of seniors,” she said.
Nathan said demand for meals has outgrown the program’s funding and the number of days when not everyone can be served is rising.
“The days we serve things that people love, like Korean barbecue for example, are when we hit really high numbers,” he said. “We have to turn people away.”
Under the county’s current budget, the program is funded for up to 150 meals a day. Lately, Nathan said, the kitchen has been serving closer to 200. The difference is typically absorbed by the church. But with its own shoestring resources, Nathan says the church can’t shoulder that burden indefinitely as more hungry seniors walk through its doors.
Sourcewise, a social services agency based in Santa Clara County, reported a 10% increase in Meals on Wheels recipients over the past year — a sign that more residents are turning to local agencies to help them access food.
Turning seniors away may be the only way to stretch limited food supplies, but that doesn’t make the job any easier for Nathan or the on-site volunteers. When he has to close the doors, he knows he’s denying them not just a meal, but also a sense of camaraderie.
“If I had a chance to say anything to a county person right now, I would say think about the seniors because the value of this program is beyond food,” he said.