MANDY KARAKAS IS too embarrassed to invite a reporter into her meager studio apartment in the Tenderloin, which she describes as being about 8-by-10 feet in size.

"It looks like an attic," she said. With no room for a bed or a stove, Karakas, who is 79, sleeps on the couch and cooks on an electric hot plate. She pays $625 a month in rent – and another $104 for a storage space where she can keep things like her beloved easel, paints, and music collection.

Until two months ago, Karakas's medical prescriptions ran her another $300 a month – medications she required after undergoing quadruple bypass surgery two years ago, as well as drugs to address her high blood pressure and Type II diabetes.

Yet Karakas receives only $600 a month in Social Security.

A mother of four who was born to Croatian immigrants in a small, northern Minnesota iron ore mining town April 28, 1924, Karakas is no stranger to hardship.

"It reminds me of the depression," she told me, in describing the prevalence of poverty she sees today. "When I see older women sleeping in stairwells, that's when I really get sick."

It's difficult to tell just how many seniors live in poverty in San Francisco, since the statistics are based on federal standards that are not adjusted to account for the cost of living in the city, one of the most expensive in the country. But it's clear that the circumstances Karakas finds herself in during the twilight of her life are pretty typical.

In 2000, the latest year for which such figures are available, more than 10 percent of San Franciscans 65 years old or older (a total of more than 11,000 people) lived below the national poverty line – defined as an annual income of $7,990 for single adults and $10,075 for couples. The adversity they face attests to the failure of both private industry and public social services in ensuring our citizens don't fall into poverty after they reach retirement age.

Karakas has held a variety of jobs throughout her life – as a tracer bullet inspector at a munitions company and, later, as a remedial reading teacher and an activities director at a nursing home, to name a few. None offered a pension plan, so Karakas got her own.

For more than 10 years, she said, she paid $300 a month into a private retirement plan run by Prudential. But when the time came for her to begin collecting on her $100,000 package, Karakas said, Prudential told her she had no policy. (Karakas recuperated at least part of her investment through a successful class-action lawsuit.)

Now she's volunteering half-time at Planning for Elders and searching for paid employment – not an easy task at her age, even in better economic times. She recently got a social worker at St. Anthony's, which signed her up for Medi-Cal and provides her with an additional $600 a month.

Karakas doesn't ask for much. "I wish I had a one-bedroom apartment where I could set up my easel and paint," she said.