ROOMIES : Mixing and Matching Seniors and Others Under One Roof

Bea Witherell was desperate. She was 88 and in need of housing, but her options were running out. She had been living for two years with her son and his wife, but that had begun to wear on all of them. When the children started talking about finding a retirement home for Witherell--an idea she abhorred--she knew it was time to strike out on her own.

“I lived with my son for two years and I didn’t even have a speaking acquaintance with the next-door neighbor,” Witherell, now 89, said. “I didn’t have a single friend, and I’ve always had friends.”

Witherell knew she couldn’t rent a place by herself--not in a county where one-bedroom apartments tend to start around $600, which is more than many seniors earn in Social Security income. So she placed an ad in the newspaper seeking an apartment to share. Her first callback, Witherell said, came from a man who said he’d give her a rent reduction if she would occasionally let him wear her clothes.

Discouraged and “feeling completely rejected,” Witherell eventually found help in the same place that more than 1,000 other Orange County residents did in the past year--the Shared Housing program. Witherell was led to Mary Morphew, a Fullerton homeowner in her 60s who was willing to take in a roomer to alleviate her house payment. Witherell’s son took her to meet Morphew, and the women hit it off immediately. They now have been roommates for a year, and they even picked up a third roommate, Jean Clark, 72, about two months ago.

Supervised by the county’s Area Agency on Aging, the Shared Housing program has 17 offices throughout Orange County and is designed mainly to help seniors over 55 on fixed incomes find roommates with whom they can share housing costs. But the program also provides a rent break to people regardless of their age, if they are willing to live with a senior citizen and provide services for them.

Under the program, participants who move into someone else’s home pay a maximum of $375 in rent. In cases where younger people provide household or personal services for an elderly roommate, the live-in’s rent contribution is determined by the extent of the service, Chavez said. In cases where the senior citizen doesn’t need any special care, rent and utility arrangements are worked out between the parties.

While the program clearly helps both parties financially, officials say it eases the participants’ minds as much as their pocketbooks.

“The program is one of the only options many seniors have from the financial standpoint because of the high cost of living,” said Susan Gattis, who oversees the program in South County. “The other benefit is just knowing someone is there at night. So many people are frightened at nighttime. It’s so nice to know another person is in the other room. You’d be surprised, even in a community like Leisure World where many people live in apartment buildings, how they feel isolated once they’re in that apartment at night--or even in the daytime.”

The program’s roots go back as far as 1978, when it was sponsored under a different name by Saddleback College and operated largely by volunteers. The county first funded it in 1983, and the Area Agency on Aging assumed its coordinating role in 1984. Now operated by a coalition of nonprofit agencies through various city and county offices, the program will receive about $175,000 for the coming year, according to program coordinator Juan Chavez.

The three women who share Morphew’s four-bedroom home say they have gotten along famously. “Amazingly, I never felt like Mary was a stranger,” Witherell said. The women, all widows, say the companionship has been as important as the financial benefits.

Each of the three has her own bedroom and television set. And while new roommates often have to tread lightly around each other initially, the women say there were no touchy moments. “There’s never been a cross word around here,” Clark said. “We just do our own thing.”

Jokingly, she added: “I’ve never had a writer for a roommate before.”

The joke is directed toward the 89-year-old Bea, who began writing historical novels when she turned 80. She has written eight as-yet unpublished, book-length stories, she said, all in longhand and in a strong, legible handwriting that belies her age.

“I sit for hours at my desk writing, and nobody disturbs me,” Witherell said. “Sometimes I close the door, but if they see me at the desk, they never bother me.”

Noma Green and Pearl Smith, both widows, consider themselves another success story of the program. Paired 15 months ago, Green, 76, moved into Smith’s El Toro home. Smith will be 102 next month. Green said she has enough money to live alone but was hoping to find a roommate, both for company and as a way to pay less rent.

When they set up their first meeting in June, 1988, both women knew they had to be careful. “You have to judge them pretty well the first time, if you’re going to let someone move in with you,” Smith said. “She seemed to be happy and she seemed cheerful. You kind of judge someone by talking to them for a few minutes.”

While it was Smith’s daughter who insisted that she needed a roommate, Smith also welcomed some new company after two previous roomers had come and gone. “I get lonely when I’m by myself too much,” Smith said. “I’ve always had people around me. I worked until I was 85. I drove my car until I was 88.” But when leg and hip problems slowed her down, Smith resigned herself to the likelihood of needing a living companion.

Green said she had no preconceived thoughts about living with a centenarian. “I was looking for a place where I could pay part of the rent, buy my own groceries, pay my phone bill and have a room. I said I’d come down here (to Smith’s home in El Toro) and give it a whirl. I’m a positive person. I could live on my own but I didn’t want to. I felt real good about Pearl, right from the start. Our personalities are alike, our temperaments are alike. I’m a loving person, and she’s a loving person.”

In many cases, the junior member of the pairing provides care for the older person, but that isn’t the case with Smith and Green. Because of a lung ailment that slows her down, the younger Green jests that Smith is the spunkier of the two.

As the homeowner, Smith was the one who was taking in the roomer, but she said she didn’t lord that over Green. “Whoever came in, I wanted them to feel like family. We have to get along to live together.”

Shared Housing officials emphasize that same point with potential roommates, according to Chavez. “Our philosophy is that you’re sharing your whole house, that there shouldn’t be any restrictions on anybody there,” he said. “That’s why we tell them to take the time to interview them (prospective roommates), follow up on references, etc. We also tell them to take them for a day or weekend or maybe a week or month, with no strings attached. If it works out, fine; if it doesn’t, they’re not going to be matched.”

The program helps participants screen potential roommates by holding social gatherings that bring together those looking for housing and those making their homes available. Program officials also visit homes and conduct follow-up interviews with participants. Unlike lengthy waits usually facing people seeking public housing, the only wait usually involved for people in the Shared Housing program stems from the time it takes potential roommates to see if they are compatible. Typically, Chavez said, a person can be paired up within a month.

Fortunately, Chavez said, the program has been nicely balanced between those seeking homes and those offering to take in roomers. In the past year, he said, 51% were looking for a home, and 49% were offering. During that period, 1,019 people were matched, compared to 783 in 1984, when the Area Agency on Aging began keeping records.

People in their 20s have been matched with seniors, but most of those who sign up to help the seniors are between 48 and 58, Chavez said.

The pairings have averaged between four and five months. While conceding that that is a brief stint, Chavez said that is the national average for such programs.

The average duration of the roommate arrangements is short, Chavez said, for several reasons. Among them:

An older person is more likely to get sick and require professional care.

They may decide to move in with a relative.

They may get stabilized financially after a few months of rent-sharing and get their own residence.

They may be on waiting lists for subsidized housing.

Their mortality rates are higher than for the average population.

When Barbara Roy, 62, and Laurie Frankhouser, 35, were paired last October, both told the other that it wasn’t necessarily a long-term thing. Both had been married before and had hopes of perhaps marrying again, and Roy, especially, made it clear that she wanted her own home.

After a shaky start, both women say they are happy with their arrangement, in which Roy pays $350 a month toward Frankhouser’s $1,025-a-month mortgage on her Mission Viejo home.

Frankhouser laughs as she recalls their first weeks together, which were dotted with disagreements over such things as Roy’s fair share of utility bills and the usual problems of two strangers learning to get along. Complicating the equation somewhat was that Frankhouser has a son, Brandon, now 5.

“Barbara is very spunky and blunt and honest, so we did have our run-ins,” Frankhouser said.

Roy took a room that Brandon had been using--a decision he agreed to, Frankhouser said. But his territorial sense was slow to fade.

“In the beginning, Brandon would go into her room until he learned it was off-limits,” Frankhouser said. “He broke a couple of Barbara’s things. I thought I was going to die. It was just stuff he had to learn not to touch.” Laughing about it now, Frankhouser added: “He’d yell at her, and she’d yell at him, but after a certain period of time, she got to where she loved Brandon.”

Brandon also came around, now referring to Roy as his “pretend Grandma,” Frankhouser said. And while Roy sometimes baby-sits Brandon, that isn’t part of their agreement.

Although many in the Shared Housing program sign up for care or companionship, neither Roy nor Frankhouser did. Their motives for matching up were strictly economics: Roy wanted affordable rent, and Frankhouser wanted some relief from her mortgage.

“Laurie’s doing what I used to do--the rat race from 9 to 5,” Roy said. “I’m retired from that. She’s gone during the day, and I’m here. I go out at night, because I’m active in square dancing and Mary Kay cosmetics (as a consultant).”

As a result, Roy said, the women are not running into each other around the house. “I respect her privacy and she respects mine,” Roy said. “As we’ve gotten to know each other, we’ve talked more and more and gotten better acquainted. Now we’re at the point where we discuss our problems and tell each other what’s happening in our lives.”

Roy moved in with the Frankhousers after a previous shared-housing experiment failed. “To be honest, this situation is working out better than I anticipated,” Roy said. “With the previous people, when it got down to the nitty-gritty, they had no warm feelings for me like Laurie and I have going.”

Both program officials and participants concede that not all match-ups are made in heaven. “It’s a tricky program,” Gattis said. “When you’re working with relationships and people, to find someone who is compatible and to meet someone and try to communicate with a new person is quite a challenge at times. It takes a lot of courage in many ways, and yet, it’s something they’re willing to try.”