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Denise Poirier was facing a pivotal moment. After teaching in Maine public schools for more than three decades, she was preparing to leave her career for what would likely be a lower-paying job, while also navigating other major changes: adjusting to life after the end of a 28-year marriage, downsizing from a house to a condo, and her third son moving out.
One afternoon, as Poirier listened to local news, she learned about Nesterly, an online platform matching older homeowners with younger renters seeking affordable housing. The company had just launched a statewide partnership and pitched a simple concept: In exchange for below-market rent, some tenants could help with light chores around the house.
“I’m a natural worrier about money; I just am that type of person,” Poirier told Vox. “With my youngest son moving out, I thought, ‘Hm, I have a little extra room.’ I’ve always liked young people — I taught high school and underresourced youth — and I thought maybe this could be a good way to supplement my income.”
Soon, she matched with Joseph Anzalone, a 20-year-old student at Southern Maine Community College who also juggled a full-time job at the Hyatt hotel in Portland. Poirier wasn’t looking for help with mowing or shoveling, just someone to keep their space clean and handle their own dishes. Anzalone was drawn to the idea of a quieter, off-campus space that, at $850 a month, cost hundreds less than a typical apartment in the area.
After signing a Nesterly agreement, which is like a rental lease but also includes expectations around shared spaces, quiet hours, guests, chores, and smoking, he moved in last August. “We got pretty close,” Anzalone told Vox. “We had fun watching the presidential debate, played debate bingo, and since my family lives in Florida, she invited me to Thanksgiving with hers.”
Poirier and Anzalone’s arrangement highlights a trend emerging across the country, one that harnesses changing demographics and an acute housing shortage. When Noelle Marcus, who would go on to found Nesterly, was studying urban planning at MIT, one statistic caught her attention: 54 million spare bedrooms sat empty each night in American homes. “And that’s using a very conservative methodology, only counting occupied housing units,” said Marcus. “That’s a lot of real estate.”
According to ApartmentList, about 60 percent of homes in the US now have at least one spare bedroom. The opportunity is particularly notable among “empty nest households” — Zillow reports roughly 21 million such homes where older residents living with no children have at least two extra bedrooms. And with baby boomers retiring and birth rates declining, census data projects that by 2030, adults over 65 will outnumber children under 18 for the first time in US history.
With a nationwide housing shortage and developers having largely abandoned building new entry-level homes, the idea of “unlocking” millions of unused bedrooms — through intergenerational home-sharing — is gaining traction. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of families sharing living spaces with non-relatives increased by more than 500,000, suggesting growing acceptance of the practice.
But the benefits can extend beyond just aiding young renters or seniors on fixed incomes: Advocates see intergenerational living as a powerful tool against social isolation. Studies examining the outcomes of such households are limited, but existing research finds that seniors often report feeling more connected and in better health than those living alone. For younger residents, particularly students from disadvantaged backgrounds, research suggests that their academic performance improves when living in mixed-age communities.
“I’ve seen situations where an 18-year-old kid is good friends with the 73-year-old retired Marine Corps sergeant, and you never would have predicted that but they’ve lived together for five to six years,” said Atticus LeBlanc, the CEO of Padsplit, another company founded to facilitate home-sharing arrangements.
Many home-sharing programs now actively encourage these cross-generational connections. “It’s really a win-win for everyone,” said Marci Alboher, a leader with CoGenerate, a nonprofit focused on bridging age differences. “It’s not just one generation showing up to serve and rescue another.”
Reviving an older idea
While multigenerational living among relatives has long offered a way for families to share resources and manage caregiving, intentional home-sharing between unrelated people traces its modern American roots to Philadelphia in the early 1970s.
That’s when Maggie Kuhn, forced to retire at age 65 from a job she loved at the Presbyterian Church, founded the Gray Panthers. The organization advocated for Social Security, Medicare, and against workplace age discrimination, and grew into a movement with 100,000 members across 30 states within its first decade.
As part of this work, Kuhn opened her Philadelphia home to “panther cubs” (younger activists), an experience that led her to establish the National Shared Housing Resource Center in 1980. That organization would go on to help establish hundreds of home-sharing programs across the US, fielding thousands of inquiries annually by the late 1980s. Kuhn viewed home-sharing as both a form of affordable housing and a way to combat social isolation.
Kuhn’s ideas about intergenerational housing have found new urgency in West Philadelphia. The city’s historically Black neighborhood of Mantua is seeing more longtime residents pushed out as Drexel University expands nearby. Over the past decade, the area’s white population has increased by 73 percent, while rents have risen by 44 percent. Most concerning, there’s been a startling 454 percent increase in the number of households that spend more than half their incomes on rent.
In response, leaders, through the Mantua Civic Association, are partnering with Drexel to match students with older residents in the area. Again, the goal is twofold: helping longtime residents maintain or achieve homeownership while providing more affordable rental options for students.
This vision gained traction in 2021 when leaders received state and philanthropic funding to help existing Mantua residents make repairs on their duplexes so homeowners could start home-sharing. Now, leaders are partnering with a local developer to build a $60 million mixed-use project that will include 18 duplexes and triplexes specifically meant for intergenerational home-sharing. Older Mantua residents will buy the properties, and rent out some units to help cover their mortgages.
These home-sharing programs will recruit renters from Drexel’s longstanding community-based writing workshop, a free arts program for students and local Philadelphians. Leaders plan to incorporate journaling and storytelling sessions into their home-sharing model — called Second Story Collective — and already have their sights on expanding to university-adjacent areas beyond Philadelphia. In 2022, they received a $1 million National Science Foundation grant to explore replicating this model nationwide.
“Higher education is in crisis, and students and faculty are craving a new way of being more impactful,” said Rachel Wenrick, executive director for arts and civic innovation at Drexel’s community partnerships office. “This offers that, while bringing university resources to bear on solutions the neighborhood itself has identified.”
While such institutional partnerships show promise, sustaining intergenerational housing can be difficult. The model pioneered by Kuhn often struggled with sustainability and hundreds of home shares ultimately shut down after just a few years. Finding reliable renters that homeowners trusted, handling legal and administrative tasks, and collecting payments proved overwhelming. “The Gray Panthers had popularized intergenerational home-sharing with these same values of helping people age in place and creating more affordable housing options,” said Marcus of Nesterly. “But they were very labor intensive and paper-driven.”
Today, automated background checks and payments, secure messaging, and video call portals are supposed to modernize the process and make it more convenient than it was in the ’80s and ’90s. Yet technology itself can present new barriers, particularly for seniors who may struggle with both awareness of and access to online platforms.
Growth constraints
Savenia Falquist sees these challenges firsthand. As executive director of HomeShare Oregon — founded in 2021 to address the state’s housing crisis — she’s realized that digital solutions aren’t enough. “What I feel and where we’re going is we need to build capacity across the state to have coordinators in regions that go work directly with folks,” she told Vox. “They need help putting photos on their pages, and support to match those folks with renters.”
The barriers extend beyond technology. Alfa Hernandez, who directs a home-share program through the Homeless Intervention Services of Orange County, California, points to deeper concerns about safety. “Seniors like the idea of companionship, but even though we’re there to facilitate and do monthly check-ins and screenings, they’re more prone to identity theft and falling for scams, so I think that’s why there’s more fear to participate,” she told Vox.
Many still view sharing their private living space with strangers as a last resort. Just as ride-sharing in Uber or Lyft had to overcome being seen as weird or risky before becoming mainstream, home-sharing faces similar cultural barriers. Local regulation compounds these challenges — some communities still have outdated laws that enforce traditional nuclear family living arrangements. Their zoning codes define “family” as those related by blood, marriage, or adoption, with occasional exceptions for “domestic servants.” These restrictive rules can be wielded against not just home-sharing programs, but also larger, often immigrant, intergenerational families living together.
“The laws are enforced when people want them to be,” said LeBlanc of Padsplit. “If you have a neighbor who doesn’t want affordable housing in their neighborhood … then you absolutely see an issue with it.”
Advancing the future of home-sharing
Despite these barriers, several states have begun updating their housing policies. Over the past few years, Colorado, Iowa, Oregon, and Washington have all passed laws banning or restricting family-based occupancy limits. At the federal level, the Department of Housing and Urban Development took a step in 2021 by allowing housing vouchers to be used for shared housing arrangements.
The conversation is expanding beyond just policy changes. Last spring, leaders in housing, finance, and social services convened for a Harvard University symposium on the future of intergenerational housing. Their October report emphasized design choices that could foster connection — even spaces as mundane as lobbies and stairwells are being reconsidered. In one New York City housing complex, the laundry room was placed next to the rooftop garden so that parents and grandparents could play with children, practice tai chi, or tend to gardening projects while washing their clothes.
Some jurisdictions are learning from parallel efforts. After California eased restrictions on accessory dwelling units in 2016, developers built over 80,000 new housing units over the next six years, providing a model that states like Massachusetts, Oregon, and Vermont have since followed. Marcus, of Nesterly, sees potential for similar momentum in home-sharing if more local governments create supportive policies. She points to the UK’s Rent a Room Scheme, where homeowners can earn tax-free rental income by renting rooms in their primary residence.
In Tampa, Florida, 61-year-old Quantia Hollowell shares a six-bedroom Padsplit home with five people. Though initially drawn to the more affordable rent, she’s formed an unexpected bond with Bennie, a housemate two decades her junior. Her “adopted son” drives her to medical appointments and helps with errands. “Bennie, he loves me and I love him,” she said. “Every day we hug each other.”
What started as a practical solution became something neither of them expected.
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