Shared Housing : Togetherness Makes Life a Bit Easier
Bill Dafft knew he needed someone in the house. He was 70 and the old war wounds and hip replacement were getting to him. He spent most of his days in a wheelchair, smoking Winstons and watching television.
One thing was certain, though. Dafft didn’t want to go to a nursing home. He could still get around and dress himself. It was the cooking that was tough.
Dorothy Freestone had lived all over, even in Alaska for a few of her 60 years, and had spent much of her professional life working on the society pages of small newspapers. She was in Denver when she had the stroke in 1984. For a while, she lived with her daughter in a Dallas suburb, but, as is often the case when mothers and daughters are under one roof, things just didn’t work out.
Cooking, Errands
Today, Dafft and Freestone share Dafft’s suburban tract house. Instead of paying rent, what Freestone does is cook, the one thing that Dafft could not do by himself. And, she uses Dafft’s car to do the shopping and errands.
Dafft and Freestone’s divergent paths crossed at Dallas’ Shared Housing Center, one of a growing number of organizations around the country that specialize in matching people of compatible needs and keeping them out of nursing homes. For the two of them, the match seems to be working.
“I think it’s a wonderful program,” Dafft said. “Dorothy, she’s lived up to her end of the bargain. It’s hard to find someone you’re compatible with.”
As late as 1980, the National Shared Housing Resource Center in Philadelphia estimates there were only 50 groups scattered throughout the United States that performed the kind of service offered by the Dallas program. Now there are more than 400 in 42 states, with some of the most active and successful programs in California.
Not Just for Elderly
And with that dramatic increase, the scope of service has expanded beyond promoting self-sufficiency for the elderly. It now includes help for younger generations as well, with particular emphasis on single parents unable to afford adequate housing on their own.
Whether home sharing involves pairing two people in a small house or putting together a large group that is essentially a commune, there are a variety of reasons for its rapid expansion. They range from the need for security and companionship to the need for help with difficult tasks. But most prevalent is simply the need to find a place to live--particularly on a fixed income.
That problem is not likely to go away. During the eight years of the Reagan Administration, the amount of federal money devoted to low-income housing has decreased by 80%. In the next 15 years, an estimated 982,000 federally subsidized apartments could be eliminated from the stock of low-income housing as the mortgages are paid off, said Leah Dobkin, a housing expert with the 29-million-member American Assn. of Retired Persons.
The National Institute of Senior Housing estimates that more than 2 million retirees spend more than 35% of their monthly income on housing.
Deborah Cloud, a spokeswoman for the American Assn. of Housing for the Aged--a lobbying group for nonprofit housing for the elderly--said there are already 270,000 elderly people on waiting lists for affordable housing, a number that is sure to increase as the American population ages and the stock of affordable housing shrinks.
Dobkin also said that home sharing is an idea that had proved successful, as well as relatively cheap, despite a lack of government funding. Organizations that match home sharers face the grab-bag approach to finding operating money.
“They have been hopping from grant to grant,” she said. “We really haven’t supported this idea at all.”
Dobkin believes that government on all levels has done little to make shared housing both possible and appealing. Zoning laws often restrict the number of unrelated adults who can live under one roof, she said, and possible participants often fear that such necessities as food stamps may be taken away if they share a home.
But, despite such problems, home sharing is on the rise. A recent random survey by the AARP showed that 15% of the retirees polled were interested in shared housing, more than twice the number in a similar survey taken in 1980. The AARP estimates that about 670,000 unrelated people over 65 are now involved in some form of shared housing.
Mary Gildea of the National Shared Housing Resource Center said many of the inquiries were from children of the elderly. “I think there is this mass guilt out there,” she said. “You’ve got adult parents of aging parents who are at a loss about how to help.”
Home sharing has been around for some time. Britain’s Abbeyfield Society, perhaps the largest collection of communal homes in the world, began in 1956. In the United States, one of the earliest projects to stir the collective American consciousness was begun by Jim Gillies in Winter Park, Fla.
In 1969, Gillies was working as a salesman in the food service industry and a number of nursing homes were among his clients. He did not like what he saw. Specifically, he did not like seeing the able-bodied elderly being shuffled off to nursing homes just because there was nowhere else for them to go.
“Too many people in there were as articulate as you and I, but they were just vegetating,” he said. “Eventually, they would just die because there was nothing to live for.”
Gillies and his wife had $348 in the bank when they leased a 27-room, 10-bath mansion and started the first of their Share A Homes. On Aug. 1, 1969, the first resident moved in.
In the coming years, Gillies would start 35 such homes around the country, five of them in Florida, but that first home was the toughest--he was charged with running a nursing home without a license and served with an eviction notice. In a decision that attracted national press coverage and a spread in Life magazine, a judge ruled that the residents of the mansion were just what Gillies claimed them to be: a family.
Residents of Gillies’ homes pay a fee, which is used to cover bills and maintain a small staff. But they are also free to come and go as they please and all major decisions in the house are made by a vote of the “family members.”
One day recently, Gillies chatted on the front porch of one of his homes, a Tudor-style mansion in Winter Haven, Fla., with 86-year-old Jim Williamson.
“I think it’s wonderful,” Williamson said. “I’ve lived here a little over a year and I’ve not got one complaint. The food is liveable. I’ve got a good bed to sleep on. They do our wash and you don’t have to cook.”
But not everyone was as enthusiastic. Eula May Powell, 87, missed her own home cooking. ‘It’s not like home, but it’s all right,” she said.
Inside, four women were settled on living-room couches watching their soap operas. The volume was loud to accommodate elderly ears. Across the room, Edith Kennedy and Ruth Murphy sat on a couch, talking.
“I spent 50 years as a registered nurse,” said Murphy, 74. “I’ve seen a lot of nursing homes. There are some things I don’t like about being here, but it’s much better than being in a nursing home.”
Gillies thinks the country is just now becoming aware of the need for houses like his.
“I think it’s just now coming into its own because the churches of the land are getting to the point of knowing they are going to have to do something to help their elderly congregation,” he said. “There’s no money in it, so that’s the reason it hasn’t grown any faster than it has. It takes volunteerism, and this country has always been slow with that.”
In some communities, home sharing has had to overcome initial resistance. A program begun in Cincinnati was so reluctantly accepted that it took a foundation-funded advertising campaign just to fill vacancies in eight large old houses sponsored by the city’s nonprofit Better Housing League. But, a year after the campaign, housing league director Bill Stocker said all 115 beds were occupied and two more houses were in the planning stages.
“We found it’s a fact that we have to really sell this concept to communities,” said Alva Finck, a housing specialist with the Texas Department on Aging.
But while other parts of the country may have had program start-up troubles, that is not the case in California, where at last count there were 52 home-sharing projects. Project Match in San Jose places about 1,000 people a year, while a similar program in San Mateo finds homes for another 650. Lois Almen, the director in San Mateo, said her program began in 1980 with a staff of two and a $20,000 budget. Now, an 11-member staff operates on $300,000 a year in funding.
“It is, of course, because of the cost of living, the tremendous cost of housing in the area,” that the project has grown so fast, Almen said. A one-bedroom apartment in her community starts at $600 a month, she said, a figure that is often well beyond the reach of someone living on Social Security, and her organization is also encountering an increasing number of single parents desperate to find a place to live.
“I can’t tell you the number of single parents who would like to live with an elderly person,” she said. “What we really like is a grandparent taking in a single parent and child. You don’t have a latchkey child anymore.”
In Los Angeles, Janet Witkin is the founder and director of a group known as Alternative Living for the Aging. Besides running three large houses for the elderly, her organization also has placed 2,500 people over the last nine years. Witkin, like many others interviewed, stressed that her programs are for the able-bodied, not those who need help to perform the basic functions of day-to-day living.
“We are not a care facility,” she said. “We select people who can take care of themselves.”
Experts in the field also stressed that home sharing is neither a panacea for the nation’s affordable housing shortage--”It’s one option when we need 50,” said Gildea of the National Shared Housing Resource Center--nor the answer for everyone who happens to be older and alone.
“Some people are just not willing to give up their privacy,” said Joyce Mantell, executive director of the National Shared Housing Resource Center. “Some people are not willing to do that, so it is not an option that fits their needs.”
Home sharing can sometimes lead to conflicts. Maria Machado, director of the Dallas program, says she once had to run a strip of red tape down the center of a refrigerator to end the bickering over who was using too much space.
On another occasion, a woman called to complain that her house sharing partner was not bathing often enough. When counselors advised confronting the matter head on, the complaining woman brought her garden hose into the living room and threatened to douse her house mate unless she took a bath immediately. The house mate complied.
