Where Your Home is Your Retirement Home

A breast cancer survivor, Booze suffered a stroke a decade ago while playing the slots at an Atlantic City casino, which left her with a pronounced limp and made driving impossible. To monitor her high blood pressure and arthritis, she'll ask a relative to drive her several miles to see doctors. Once in a while, she'll arrange to take a state-run "mobility bus," which delivers people who are older and those with handicaps to medical offices. Some of her neighbors walk several blocks to a subway station to get to downtown hospitals and medical offices.

Baltimore’s Sandtown neighborhood.

Dave Lauridsen

Shopping for food is another challenge. Two Sandtown groceries within walking distance of Booze's house have closed within the last decade. To get the fresh food she needs for herself and the many people she feeds during the week, she asks relatives to drive her to a supermarket two miles away.

The city health department provides 250,000 meals to impoverished older residents each year, and it has also worked with several nonprofits to open pop-up markets—"virtual supermarkets" that make deliveries to older people—and a program geared to improve the offerings in Baltimore's many corner grocery stores, which seem to sell mostly junk food, cigarettes and lottery tickets.

'I'm happy right where I am'

From her front door, Booze sees it all. She was among the eyewitnesses to the arrest of Freddie Gray in April 2015. She shouted at police to take Gray to the hospital instead of putting him in a police van. "She'll yell at the kids in the neighborhood when they're doing wrong, and she'll yell at the police too," says Luther Booze, 55, her oldest son who is a Baltimore superintendent of highways. "She's very tough."

When her mother was ill, Booze cared for her as she lay on a hospital bed in the dining room. When Booze had her stroke, the bed reappeared as family and her neighbors all made sure she had what she needed. "Nobody in my family ends up in a nursing home," Booze says firmly.

Alethea Booze, right, makes dinner for neighbor Patrick Scott in Baltimore’s Sandtown neighborhood.

Gregg Segal

To her family, Booze's caregiving mirrors the cycle-of-help philosophy she has instilled into the family, and her neighborhood.

"I don't want to live beyond my needs. I don't need that stress," she says. "I tell my family, 'I'm happy right where I am.' My father worked so we could have these houses. And there's too much here I'd miss."