June 25, 2000
In San Francisco, More Live Alone, and Die
Alone, Too
By EVELYN NIEVES
Carmen Ramirez knew people. Born and bred in Managua, Nicaragua, she adopted San
Francisco like a doting mother, protecting and fighting for her neighborhood in a way
that captured the ear of City Hall. But she lived alone and died last month the same way.
By the time anyone noticed her absence, she had been dead, at age 54, for at least a week.
Lola McKay knew people too. Ms. McKay, an 83-year-old widow, became a symbol for
tenants' rights when she refused to leave her apartment on 30 days' notice. For eight
years, she was the last tenant in a six-unit building in San Francisco's gentrifying Mission
District. Her case prompted a change in state law, requiring that landlords give elderly
and disabled tenants a year's notice before eviction.
She, too, died as she lived. Her body was discovered in March, weeks after her death.
And so it was with Howard Phillips, who was 50 and known on the streets as Allah, a
man on close terms with the bottle. In March he died in his small housing authority
apartment from complications arising from alcoholism. His body was not discovered until
it was in an advanced state of decomposition.
In San Francisco, the bodies are piling up faster than the city can handle them. More
people are dying alone, with no one to arrange their funerals, settle their estates or mourn
their passing. So far this year, 290 people in the city have died this way, said city
officials, compared with about 300 a year for the last decade.
No one is sure exactly why. Officials here say it is too soon to tell whether this is a sign
of times to come, here and in the rest of the aging nation. (Officials in New York and Los
Angeles report no such increase in the number of people dying alone.)
But census figures reveal part of the story. In San Francisco, 19 percent of the population
is over 65, compared with 14 percent in other major cities. The city has an average
household size of 1.29 people, well below the national average. It also has a high number
of people whose partners have died of AIDS. San Francisco, boomtown that it is, is also a
place where poor, old people are facing what the public administrator, the official
responsible for settling the estates of those who die alone, calls ''urban stress.''
''You have a lot of old people worried that they're going to be evicted from the apartment
they've lived in for 30 years,'' said Ricardo Hernandez, the public administrator. The old
people have heard all the stories of even well-to-do people unable to find an apartment in
the city's surreal, Silicon Valley-fueled housing market. ''We think, that at least in some
cases, this is shortening people's lives,'' Mr. Hernandez said.
The number of people dying alone is climbing when more homeless people have been
dying on the streets of San Francisco over the last five years. Last year, 169 homeless
people died on the streets, and so far this year, 78 of the 290 people who have died alone
were homeless.
City officials say that more people are living, and dying, on the streets, as affordable
housing throughout the San Francisco Bay area becomes harder to find.
When indigent people die alone, the medical examiner arranges for their cremation,
unless the person was known to belong to a religion that dictates that the body be buried.
Basic funerals and a plot in Colma, a town south of San Francisco where many city
residents are buried (the city has no cemeteries), cost $7,000; cremations generally cost
about $700.
When the deceased leaves even minimal assets, the public administrator handles the
funeral arrangements and begins a sometimes long process of searching for next of kin.
Sometimes, bodies lie for months in the city morgue as officials search for heirs.
In the case of Carmen Ramirez, whose cause of death is still being determined, officials
found several relatives in the Bay area, who arranged for her funeral.
That is the exception. The public administrator said his office was often left scrambling
to find a relative -- any relative, no matter how remote -- to decide where and how a
deceased person would be buried and where the person's belongings would go.
''We want to remind everybody to leave a will,'' Mr. Hernandez said, ''if it's just a little
note on a piece of paper that says I want so-and-so to have my china.''
He keeps a room marked ''vault,'' with boxes of personal papers belonging to those whose
families have not yet been found. The boxes, piled floor to ceiling on metal shelves,
contain the sum total of many lives -- diplomas, yearbooks, military certificates, photo
albums, love letters, Christmas cards. The county saves them for five years.
''We hold on to them,'' said John Clark, deputy to the public administrator, as he sighed
over a weathered black-and-white photo, at least 50 years old, of a boy kneeling next to a
wire-haired terrier, ''because maybe some relative somewhere will value the memories.''