Common Bond Brings Strangers Together : Lifestyles: Program has matched 100 people with rooms to spare with others who need a place to live.
They are unions of housing necessity:
* Anna, widowed for nine years, needed to be needed again. She found Dan, a sad-faced painter stricken with multiple sclerosis, who moved into a room in her Van Nuys house to escape a prison-like apartment.
* Lena’s elegantly furnished Encino condominium had a two-story glass wall, a loft and a patio “you could make a wedding on.” But Lena was 80, nearly blind, and unable to live alone. She found Veronica, a refugee from Missouri who wasn’t ready to put down roots but wanted a place both cheap and safe.
* Sam and Gabe are widowers. Amazingly, each had been married 53 years before their wives passed away. Gabe needed a place to hang his hat; Sam had a big apartment in Sherman Oaks. Gabe is now hanging his hat at Sam’s.
Necessary or not, none of these matches would have occurred without the Shared Housing Program for Seniors, which is sponsored in the San Fernando Valley by Jewish Family Services of Los Angeles. The program helps pair up mostly elderly people who want to save money, find companionship, feel secure or stay out of nursing homes.
The Valley program and several others in the state started only two years ago with the help of $50,000 grants from the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
Those grants, however, have run out and the Valley program has managed to continue operating only because Jewish Family Services has absorbed the costs since state funding dried up in July.
During the past two years, the Valley program made 100 matches--80% involving senior citizens--but Joan Bauer, who heads the program, said it has been unable to expand to meet the growing demand.
Bauer said 140 people wanting to share their homes and 98 people looking for homes to share are on the program’s waiting lists. Some are still waiting for a compatible match; others are waiting for the program’s small staff to evaluate their applications.
“I only see the need increasing over time rather than lessening,” she said. “The population is growing older and shared housing is a very viable way of utilizing the homes well.”
People seeking housing through the program must be employed or have a steady source of income, such as Social Security or other government benefits, that will allow them to pay between $300 and $450 a month in rent. They also must supply references.
“We interview the seekers and try to determine if they are appropriate, but we still advise the providers to check their references,” Bauer said.
Although many older people make house-sharing arrangements on their own, many others are wary of doing so, especially if it would mean linking up with a stranger, Bauer said.
“Many of them have never shared housing before and are very leery,” Bauer said. “A lot of my providers will not go into the newspaper to advertise. They want to feel there is a screening process involved.”
After interviewing both parties, Bauer attempts to make lasting matches, based on each party’s habits, personality, needs and desires.
Bauer said the easiest people to find homes for are older women, the most difficult single women with children. “If they are working women offering a room, they don’t want their house messed up and if they are seniors, they’ve raised their children and they don’t want the noise,” Bauer said.
When matches do fail, differing standards of cleanliness are a typical cause of the breakup. Financial need is often the strongest glue keeping matches together, she said. Some are purely business transactions; others blossom into friendship.
Some examples:
When Gabe Tiefer’s wife died 18 months ago, he was left “alone in an apartment which I didn’t want or need.”
His wife’s illness had come as a surprise and the medical and other bills had added up to a considerable sum. Her death also meant a loss of income, and he began looking for a way to live more cheaply.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Tiefer, 81, said.
What he did was sign up with the shared-housing program, which has twice set him up with a place to stay. The first came to an end when he got a 30-hour-a-week job as outreach coordinator with a meals program for homebound senior citizens--the woman he shared that apartment with needed more of his time than he could give.
Now he rents a room at Sam Garber’s Sherman Oaks apartment for $350. “Sam had a room for rent, I needed a room, and I thought we would get along and we do,” Tiefer said.
Tiefer, a former gas station owner and helicopter dispatcher, said he and Garber “sometimes don’t see eye-to-eye on TV programs, but he’s got his room and I’ve got mine.”
Lena Tepper had “worked hard and lived well” over the years, moving an average of once every three years and hiring a decorator for each new residence. When she bought a condo in Encino--to be closer to her siblings, grandchildren and great-grandchildren--she gave most everything away and kept the leftover odds and ends. “When you have something, share it,” she said.
She began sharing her home over a year ago, when failing hearing and eyesight, along with arthritis and heart disease, left her unable to continue living alone.
Veronica Hammond, the second roommate Tepper found through Jewish Family Services’ shared housing program, moved in this past April. Hammond, who could be in her late 40s but who won’t reveal her age, has worked as a live-in companion, a movie extra, a baby-sitter and a hairdresser since coming to Los Angeles from Missouri two years ago.
Hammond said she was married for a long time and owned a beauty shop for 20 years and needed a safe, convenient, inexpensive place to stay that wouldn’t tie her down. She pays Tepper $300 a month and also drives her to doctor’s appointments, does shopping, laundry and some cooking.
“If I do the cooking three or four days a week, she buys all the food, which works great for me,” said Hammond, who is Catholic. “I’m not destitute, but I’m not rich either.”
Tepper, who is Jewish, appreciates the arrangement. “I just enjoy having her here,” Tepper said. “I’m teaching her to be Jewish and she’s teaching me to be considerate. She’s very good to me.”
Anna Starforth, 74, said she decided to look for someone to move into her 2,000-square-foot home in a quiet Van Nuys neighborhood to increase her income. But, Starforth said, she also was tired of living alone with her dog, Muffy, a bichon frise , and she wanted to be needed.
“I like to help people,” she said.
She met Dan Balkin, also 74, at a monthly get-acquainted meeting for the shared housing program. Balkin, whose multiple sclerosis had caused him to move first to a $1,000-a-month retirement home, then to a dreary, noisy apartment, moved in this past April.
A former professional baseball player, he has a room with a bed, a desk where he can paint scenes of Western life and a television set where he watches mostly sports. A bathroom is attached.
“I come butting in here once in a while, but I always figure Dan more or less wanted his privacy,” Starforth said.
Starforth said Balkin “has a sense of humor that just won’t stop and I try to match it.”
Some people question whether it’s proper for a woman to have a man as a housemate, Starforth said. But she dismisses such talk out of hand. “I just more or less treat him like he’s a brother or something,” she said.
Balkin pays Starforth $400 a month. In return, she does Balkin’s shopping, laundry and dishes. “She does many little favors for me and every once in a while I will send out and have dinner brought in,” Balkin said.
Respecting Starforth’s dieting, however, Balkin is careful about what he orders. Starforth, meanwhile, is mindful of Balkin’s love of sports.
They subscribe to different daily newspapers and each day she takes the sports section out of hers and tucks it into his before putting it at his door. Said Balkin: “It’s the next best thing to living at home.”
BACKGROUND
Shared housing programs such as the one operated in the San Fernando Valley by Jewish Family Services of Los Angeles have been in existence for more than a decade. Dozens of such programs got started in California and hundreds more nationally in the 1980s as the elderly population burgeoned and the supply of affordable housing plunged. In 1986, the state of California began a $500,000 grant program to support such efforts, and the number of shared housing programs grew to more than 50. The only such program in the Valley, Shared Housing Program for Seniors, based at Jewish Family Services’ Valley Storefront office in Van Nuys, opened two years ago with a $50,000 state grant. The state grant was not renewed, and housing advocates say many local programs are now struggling.
