Globally, what has happened to elderly and disabled people during war/depression/hyperinflation?

>build your resources (like own a home, if possible), keep some hard currency and don't be afraid to leave. I was young back then, so I might not understand everything people around me were going through. But I would say your advice is, sorry to say, but completely worthless. Social ties sounds nice but most won't have reliable connections. And when everyone is equally screwed, those ties tend to not be worth much. Really close friends and family, sure. But if you a old and alone, you really won't be able to build much in terms of connections to anyone other than equally old people who are as alone as you are. It just doesn't work in practice as you would imagine it in theory. Own a home? Most people "owned" their homes in Russia. Nobody actually owned apartments in the USSR, but afterwards everyone listed in an apartment could privatize it. This process is still ongoing. I know people who still haven't filed the paperwork to this day. And the government keeps extending the deadline. 30 years later. Still pretty much everyone had a home of some kind. Before the collapse of the USSR, homelessness wasn't big thing. And renting wasn't a big thing either. Plenty of gullible, elderly, and unfortunate got conned out of their apartments in schemes by "black realtors". They would sometimes straight up get you drunk, make you sign over the rights to your apartment, their notary would be conveniently present there to make it all official, and then they would pump you even more full of alcohol and leave you in some forest to freeze in the middle of a winter night. Or they would con old people into signing over their rights to privatize their apartment and make them homeless. Or they would stage a car accident, if you owned a car, and then have some local criminal element extort you into signing over your rights to your home. Lots of different ways to do it. Lots of people that "owned a home" ended up homeless. But even those that did maintain possession of their home still ended up malnourished or without adequate medical care. As a matter of fact, homelessness was never a big problem compared to all the other problems that were happening. Owning a home by itself doesn't really do much. Hard currency? OK, but if you are poor to begin with, where would you get the hard currency? By selling your apartment to some shady realtor? Good luck with that. Leave? And go where? Do you have the money to go elsewhere? Will that other place let you in and accept you? If you are a widowed old woman with meager pension that isn't even enough to buy food, forget about getting a travel passport, a visa, a plane ticket, and start-up cash to start a new life. Hard currency and leaving is not for the poor or for the old. What really helped people was some land. Not a lot. Something like 1/8th acre was enough. Those who had it were a lot better off than those who didn't. A patch of land and a small cabin. If you lived in a city, in an apartment, but also had a cabin with some land near the city, you would grow and can tomatoes, grow potatoes, apples, and it really made a difference. There is a huge difference on your immune system between having an apple once in a while and not having one, during a long winter and eating the same diet of pasta and bread (which is really the same thing). Old people that had a patch of land were much-much-much better off than those who didn't. Old people in the city would be going through dumpsters to find something to eat. Or hoping to collect enough empty bottles to bring for recycling to buy some bread. Old people in rural areas would be relying on their canned vegetables instead of dumpster diving. A patch of land is a lot more important than pretty much any other "prep". And you don't need to spend time learning how to farm. If the time comes, you'll learn real quick. And that's something even an old person can do. Plenty of old people with disabilities did just that to get by.