Roommates Can Offer Seniors a Brighter World : Housing: Home-sharing program’s director screens applicants and introduces compatible souls. Arrangement can be a blessing, with some risk.

At age 85, Lois Dawley feared the night.

She dreaded sleeping alone in a too-big house on a too-quiet street. She was sad. She was lonely. She was scared.

Then someone mentioned Senior Home Sharing. And Dawley’s world brightened.

For nearly a decade, Senior Home Sharing has matched elderly Ventura County residents with roommates. Director Muriel Steiger screens all applicants, checks their backgrounds and visits their homes. She then finds compatible souls and introduces them to one another.

That’s how Dawley met a much younger Eileen Rust nearly two years ago. The two women hit it off and agreed to share Dawley’s three-bedroom tract home in Camarillo. They have been roommates--and friends--ever since.

“I certainly am pleased,” Dawley said, watching with a grin as her shaggy white dog, Li’l Bit, played on Rust’s lap. “We haven’t had any problems.”

Funded by the Area Housing Authority on a tight annual budget of $50,000, Senior Home Sharing matches about 100 pairs of roommates each year.

Many of the renters are lower-income residents who take rooms while they wait for scarce subsidized housing.

At first, they may be reluctant to move into a stranger’s house.

“But on second thought, a lot of them say it’s better than staying in a really run-down place or living out of a car or camping out,” said Caroline Briggs, executive director of the Area Housing Authority. “It’s a safe, fairly comfortable and inexpensive option.”

Laura Dailey realized those benefits soon after she moved into Bernice Cangelosi’s house in Thousand Oaks. In her mid-20s, she wanted independence from her family but could not afford her own apartment. She found Home Sharing a perfect solution.

Simply put, Dailey said: “Everything’s just great here.”

Home sharing can also be a blessing for the hosts.

Some senior citizens need younger, stronger roommates to help with the housework. Others rely on monthly rent checks to meet their mortgage payments. Still others depend on companionship to keep them lively and alert.

“If they get a good roommate, it can keep them in their homes a lot longer,” Steiger said. “Otherwise, they would just wind up in nursing homes.”

Of course, home sharing does carry a measure of risk as well. College students may be willing to step over a roommate’s dirty socks or devour cold pizza for breakfast, but senior citizens may not be that flexible.

“If you’re moving into someone’s home, it’s their territory, and the whole arrangement can turn out to be awkward,” said Jon Pynoos, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California. “I’m married with three kids and I know it’s hard enough to live with someone you’ve made a commitment to.”

Partly because of such stresses, up to half of all home-sharing arrangements break up within the first eight months, Pynoos said.

And in Ventura County, Steiger has seen her share of disastrous--and short-lived--matches.

Like the time she unknowingly sent an alcoholic man to room with another alcoholic man. “They drank themselves into insensibility,” Steiger recalled. Since then, she has tightened her screening process and now interviews friends and relatives of each client.

Even with the more intense scrutiny, some of her matches suffer, due to personality clashes or territorial spats: fights over who drank the last glass of milk or who should take out the garbage.

Both Dawley and Rust worried about such quarrels when they agreed to share the Camarillo home. As a former boardinghouse owner, Dawley knew that tenants could look perfectly nice and then steal jewelry, or seem wonderfully conscientious and then stumble in rip-roaring drunk.

“I wasn’t reluctant to share my house with someone--I was just nervous about who it might be,” Dawley said.

“I didn’t know either,” Rust added. “It’s scary for both people.”

But now, the two women have become so comfortable together that Rust boasts about Dawley’s grandchildren. They watched the Camarillo Christmas parade together, and they delight in the musical doorbell that plinks out “Silent Night.”

And Dawley no longer fears the night.