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No Place to Grow Old has screened 92 times since its premiere last fall. The documentary produced by the nonprofit Humans for Housing has most recently been shown to members of an Oregon Senate committee hearing as well as congressional staffers in Washington, D.C. Its next screening will be at the Tomorrow Theater on July 26.
As the film highlights, people over the age of 50 are the fastest growing population entering homelessness in the U.S. With Social Security and other benefits lagging behind inflation and the cost of living, and our aging population of baby boomers (the second-largest living generation), this is becoming an even more pressing and dire issue. Particularly in a city with a large population of unhoused people, the very concept of homelessness is often demonized and misunderstood. No Place to Grow Old aims to change that narrative.
The film provides more than talking points, buzzwords and platitudes as it follows the lives of three Portlanders now over the age of 60, all facing homelessness. When No Place to Grow Old was made, Bronwyn Carver, 60, was a cat-loving eloquent poet; Jerry Vermillion, 60, a joke-telling voracious reader; and Herbert Olive, 72, hardworking and warm, described by his son in one word: “gentle.” These three individuals open up with vulnerability, honesty and strength, pushing the film beyond statistics and numbers, and creating intimacy and trust with the filmmakers and, by association, the viewer.
“For a body beginning to grow older, there is a sense of urgency for a door that locks, a home where one is safe, dry and dreaming,” Carver says in the film.
Documentary director Davey Schaupp made No Place to Grow Old a thoroughly Portland production. He rented equipment from Koerner Camera Systems, and teamed with locally based Digital One Audio Post Production and VIA Films for aerial cinematography. He also commissioned Portland-based musician Jeremy Long to score the film’s soundtrack. Portland musician Jeffrey Martin contributed an original song to close out the movie.
“We built the film to be a tool for organizations and communities to use, to help raise awareness,” says Michael Larson, Humans for Housing’s executive director and the film’s executive producer.
Both Larson and Schaupp are confident that the first step in big systemic change is education, and from there, changing public sentiment. Hosting screenings in collaboration with service-based organizations like Blanchet House is a strategy to inspire audiences to not only tell others about the film but to volunteer time and resources to make a difference.
Larson says Sen. Ron Wyden and Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici became fans of the film after seeing it in D.C. during an event hosted by the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, where Carver testified before Congress.
As a brand-new organization, Humans for Housing and its production team needed to prove its credibility before the film could start production. The nonprofit’s leaders reached out to organizations with similar missions, like Street Roots and Street Books, who introduced them to Carver, Vermillion and Olive. They built trust with the people they interviewed—something that’s important in any journalistic endeavor but crucial with individuals in vulnerable positions.
“We didn’t have a lot of track record, so it really looked like building a relationship first and grabbing coffee or going to Denny’s or walking around the city smoking American Spirits,” says Schaupp.
Schaupp and Larson spoke about what makes homelessness a particularly pernicious problem among older adults in the U.S.: our culture’s relationship with aging. There’s less emphasis on intergenerational homes and communities, and less effort to include the elderly or value their additions to society.
“In this country I think we’re obsessed with productivity, and as you get older and when you retire, you no longer are as productive, so I don’t think we value our elderly,” Larson says.
Housing experts provide additional context to the documentary’s emotional testimony. Dr. Marisa Zapata, director of Portland State University’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative, says in the film that Oregon needs to create more than a half-million new affordable housing units in the next 20 years to deal with both the housing deficit and expected newcomers. Other experts interviewed include John Tapogna, senior policy advisor at ECOnorthwest, who argues for an increase in supportive housing for those who need behavioral health and substance abuse treatment, and rent subsidies as a preventative measure to keep people housed.
Tomorrow Theater’s screening will feature a panel discussion with Larson in tandem with local nonprofit Northwest Pilot Project. Schaupp and Larson see this event as a chance for Portlanders to further their understanding of our housing crisis, learn how to advocate for the unhoused, and team up with individuals and organizations working to distribute resources.
“I do hope the film really troubles people,” Schaupp says. “This amount of suffering is unacceptable. It doesn’t have to be our reality, and for our older adults in one of the wealthiest, most prosperous nations on earth, to be aging into homelessness? For our elders and grandparents to be spending their lives on the streets? I think it’s unacceptable.”
SEE IT: No Place to Grow Old at Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division St., 503-221-1156, tomorrowtheater.org. 7 pm Saturday, July 26. $15.
