Omolade Wey didn’t intend to live with someone from another generation when entering graduate school. When visiting the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she met a student looking for someone to take over her lease. The apartment belonged to an older woman who had regularly rented it out to theater students. Wey had previously rented a room from family friends, but the dynamics were often complicated.
Wey’s experience living with an older adult was more comfortable. Her apartment was in the basement and had its own entry, providing her privacy and freedom. Even with that separation, she and her roommate were able to build a relationship and support each other. “We would interact with each other when we needed to, but sometimes we would check in if we saw each other and catch up,” she said. “She was always asking me about shows, and I would always see her outside gardening and pick her brain about stuff.”
Census data show that the number of people living with multiple generations quadrupled between 1971 and 2021 to 59.7 million. Adults enter multigenerational housing for various reasons, but similar to Wey, many need help finding accommodations due to rising housing costs and volatile inflation.
While many of these arrangements happen within families, especially those who are Asian, Black or Latino, multigenerational communities are cropping up nationwide and are hoping to capture the ethos of authentic community living.
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The desire to cure loneliness while providing people with affordable housing is a key reason home-sharing programs are cropping up across the country. Surging home prices and a drop in supply are squeezing many Americans. Renting is also an issue with average prices rising over 18 percent since 2017—forcing 46 percent of Americans to spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center report.
Two MIT students launched home-sharing platform Nesterly in 2017 to help Greater Bostonians find reasonably priced rooms in the homes of older adults seeking to rent. Prospective renters can look for their ideal living situation based on flexible non-lease arrangements and rates that include utilities and amenities.
The New York Foundation for Senior Citizens offers a similar free home-sharing service, where adults with extra private spaces are matched with a roommate to share their space. Applicants also can request a roommate who can provide household aid. “We had a person that came out of our own homeless shelter that had a license, and the older person who was her sharemate wasn’t able to drive anymore, and she helped her with errands and shopping,” NYFSC president Linda Hoffman said.
When the program began in 1981, at least one “matchmate” had to be older than 60. Nowadays, the leading interest is affordable housing, but successful matches bond over shared interests. “When you have people who have common interests, and you match them, you’ll often find that naturally there is this linkage that occurs, and they enjoy each other’s company,” she said.
Home Sharing is available in New York City, but Hoffman is exploring how to extend the program statewide. The pandemic helped organizations realize they could assess applications and homes to match people virtually. Some of Home Sharing’s more successful matches have been cohabiting for decades.
Fighting loneliness through multigenerational housing
Karin Krause lived in communities where people looked out for one another but witnessed a loved one treated poorly in an assisted living facility. Both experiences inspired her to start Hope and a Future, an intergenerational community focused on caring for seniors. The four-bed adult family home sits on a 5.5-acre property in Madison, Wisc., and is home to older residents, both independent and those who need long-term care. Live-in staff consists of registered medical practitioners and staff members’ children.
“The goal is to fight loneliness in generations and to bring the generations together in a way that helps vulnerable people by viewing each of them as a part of the solution,” Krause said. Hope and a Future relies on the TIIN model, or Therapeutic Interactive Intergenerational Neighborhood, which unites intentional community, professional caregivers and volunteers to live with and work alongside target groups, including people over 55 and families with young children needing affordable housing. Krause believes the model is just as much about being helped as it is about helping. “When people don’t get the opportunity to help each other or feel that they’re contributing to life, we send a pretty sad message to them about their work,” she said.
A study in the International Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease found that older adults living with two or more generations report better psychological well-being than those living independently or without extended family. But, older adults are more likely to live alone as a growing number of adults are without a spouse or child. The Census Bureau reported that the number of people over 65 living alone increased from 9.4 percent to 11.1 percent between 2010 and 2020, and those single households were concentrated in the central Midwest. At this rate, the Census Bureau projects that older adults in the U.S. will outnumber children for the first time by 2034, and one in five adults will be older than 65 by 2040.
Benefits for caregivers
While Home and a Future’s primary target group is older adults, Krause has seen how caregivers and their families have benefited from the living arrangements. Caregivers can live on-site and receive free room and board in exchange for helping residents evenings and weekends.
However, people are attracted to the organization for many reasons, including loneliness, housing insecurity, and significant lifestyle changes such as divorce. Krause has found that with the stress of those factors off people’s shoulders, they can better assess their options and think about their futures. They’re also able to be “mentored by folks they’re working with as well as those they’re taking care of—people who haven’t lost their wisdom just because they’ve become frail,” she said.
When people choose to stay on-site, they can experience strides in their personal lives. Living here “opened up the door for a single mom to have enough money to finish a master’s,” Krause said, and she’s also seen the value in it for all moms’ kids, even if they’re not living there. Their visits are “fun for the seniors—there’s little kids to watch, to talk to, and to play with. And the kids get so much face time with people who are adoring them, and they come out being used to people that don’t look like them,” Krause said. “Kids who have the opportunity to grow up in more intergenerational settings are more inclusive across the board because they’re not used to everybody looking and acting just like they do.”
Renee Moseley has observed similar benefits within the Bridge Meadows communities that house children within the Oregon foster care system, adoptive families, and adults over 55. Their social purpose is to create permanency of home and family for children affected by foster care. By incorporating elders into the fold, Bridge Meadows seeks to create meaning through mentorship and build reciprocal relationships. “We have families that walk their pet if an elder’s sick, if they’ve made dinner, they’ll bring some food to an elder, they’ll take out the trash for elders,” Moseley said. “What ideally happens is you form almost a familial relationship so that it’s not a quid pro quo, where you do for me and I do for you. You are now part of my extended family, so I can call you when I have some challenges.”
While living in a connected community allows for elders to receive some care, Moseley highlighted the importance of formalized caregiving. “We don’t want to assume that a community can replace all of the caregiving needs that an older adult needs because they can’t,” she said. “What we’ve seen is that when you have this ecosystem, people are able to come home from the hospital sooner because there are people who can watch them. There’s a sense of connection that helps them heal in a way that they may not have been able to if they were alone.”
Even health or financial challenges become easier when that ecosystem is in place. Wey developed a deeper relationship with her roommate during the pandemic. At a time when things felt uncertain, they provided care to each other in different ways: Wey consistently checked in on her roommate, who was in her 60s, and she gave Wey a break on rent. They saw each other as an essential part of their combined well-being.
Building community
Community doesn’t just happen by providing people with a place to stay; it requires intentionality. American culture has led people to live independent lives where they immediately close their garages when arriving home to avoid neighbors and don’t know how to interact with the people around them.
“We have to work really hard to build community when we’re living separately,” Moseley said. “The beauty about our model is that we intentionally create, from a physical perspective, a place for people to connect, and then we intentionally lead programming to encourage the community members to share their gifts and talents.”
Both Bridge Meadows and Hope and a Future view activities as a mechanism for people to get to know one another and to play. Krause views the organization’s adult family home as a meeting ground for people to enjoy creative activities such as gardening, dance classes, musical concerts, and dinner parties. She envisions a future where rural and metropolitan neighborhoods have proper housing for seniors, daycare for children and community-centered activities dedicated to connecting people.
While people living outside of intentional neighborhoods may need access to dedicated community space, they regularly seek places to connect. Wey and her roommate used the garden as their meeting grounds, while others living alone look to third places such as co-working spaces, coffee shops, libraries, and local clubs to connect.
As with any living situation multigenerational households can experience stressors, especially when caregiving is involved. However, hyperindividualism does not serve Americans in a way that will benefit them in the long run. The Institute for Family Studies reported that multigenerational living helps adults “experience better family connection, less worry and social isolation, and greater access to respite care.”