Excerpt: Older Coloradans turn to “Golden Girls” housing model to fight costs, loneliness

This article was first published in the Colorado Sun.

The six-bedroom home on a shady southwest Denver street was built in the 1960s, a ranch-style with a series of connecting rooms, a kitchen skylight, and a serving window to pass food to the living room. The art covering nearly every wall falls mostly into two categories: the Old West or dogs.

Piles of books are stacked by the recliners in the living and family rooms, on the dining room table and various places on the floor. In the backyard, there's a barbecue grill and an informal garden of peppers and pumpkins.

Glenn Little, who turns 70 soon, loves his home that's a short walk to the path along Bear Creek. He loves that his neighbors feed his loveable lab, Huck, sliced turkey over the fence when the dog trots out to say his hellos. Little, who is divorced and retired from his career at Mission Foods, doesn't want to sell the place. He also doesn't want to live there alone.

"It's a big ole house for just one person," he said, sitting in a hefty living room chair, not far from a hutch that holds his cookie jar collection.

Which is why Little started collecting roommates. He has turned his home into something resembling life on the 1980s-'90s sitcom "The Golden Girls," only more like an older-man fraternity house.

"We don't have bong parties or anything," said Bruce Novak, 68, one of Little's newest roommates and a philosopher. "Not yet anyway. We could if it appeals to us."

Truthfully, the men are much more likely these days to talk about bad hips and bouts of gout. Novak is having hip surgery this summer, and Little offered to drive him to the hospital and make him sandwiches afterward.

Little and Novak were matched up through an agency called Sunshine Home Share, which pairs aging Coloradans who own homes with people looking for a bedroom to rent. Tenants get a break on rent in exchange for doing household chores, like taking out the trash or mowing the lawn. It helps older people who can no longer handle the upkeep of their homes, or who are lonely, and at the same time, offers a solution for people who can't afford Colorado's rising rent costs. Bedrooms rented through Sunshine are $700-$800 per month on average, far below Denver's near-$2,000 for a small apartment.

It's a service that's growing more popular as Colorado continues to get older. The state is the third fastest aging in the nation, with more than 25% of Colorado's population projected to hit age 60 and older by 2050.

Besides Novak, Little has three other roommates renting bedrooms. Not all of them are through Sunshine. Others came through Craigslist or word of mouth. Some have worked out their own rent-for-chores arrangements with Little.

Novak does some of the cooking, most recently whipping up sauteed turkey fillets with prosciutto and mushrooms for the whole household. David takes care of the yard and is the one who tends the peppers and pumpkins. Victor cleans the house, and joins Little every week on his trip to Costco, where the highlight is eating hot dogs for lunch. The only woman in the house is Karen, who heard about Little's home share through a friend at King Soopers, where she works. Victor is the young one at 28, while the rest of the roommates are in their upper 50s to about 70.

The first time Little took in a roommate, it happened by chance. The man, Robert "Coop" Cooper, was an artist who died last year at age 90 and had lived with Little for seven years, until he had a stroke and needed more care than Little could manage.

"I joke I got Coop at a garage sale," Little said, while proudly showing off Cooper's wagon wheel sketches and the paintings Cooper made of Little's previous dogs.

It's more true than a joke, though. A friend of Cooper's came to Little's garage sale, and the two got to talking, and the friend mentioned that Cooper needed a place to live. It was the beginning of a deep friendship, the tangible remains of which are the boxes upon boxes of Cooper's art left behind in Little's basement.

That's the pitfall of so many roommates. With every one that comes and goes, Little's house gets even more full.

Each housing match takes about 30 hours, $7,000

Sunshine Home Share Colorado made 30 matches last year - each one taking 30 or 40 hours of interviews and home visits. The nonprofit has made about 20 matches so far this year and has at least that many homeowners on the list looking for roommates.

"Older adults, 55 and older, come to us for a zillion different reasons - 'I'm lonely. I could use help around the house,'" said Sunshine's executive director, Alison Joucovsky. Sunshine's social workers spend hours talking to homeowners, who start off by describing the most important things about their daily life: "I've got a dog. I'm not a smoker." They visit their homes to make sure they meet the criteria, checking the extra bedrooms and making sure all the appliances are working.

"On the other end, you have people who are younger, sometimes students," Joucovsky said, and social workers start with those big questions - if they have a dog, if they like dogs, if they smoke, if church is important to them.

"Our role is to safely and thoroughly help people find the right housemate," Joucovsky said. "If you are 85 years old and you are sharing your home, we want to be sure to be there every step of the way."

So far, the matches are handled by humans, on paper, but the hope is that within a year or so, Sunshine will have an online platform where people who are Internet savvy can look for matches that way.

Increasingly, the clients who come to Sunshine are in their 60s or 70s, and don't need a lot of care or help. They just need the extra money, Joucovsky said. "We had the busiest year ever," she said. "The need is huge, as things get more expensive and it gets harder and harder to maintain a home by yourself."

Sunshine, which began making matches in 2018, is funded mainly by a grant from the Next50 Foundation, which focuses on helping older Coloradans. It also receives money from United Way, a handful of cities and counties, and state funds from the Colorado Disability Funding Committee. The nonprofit has made 138 matches in the past eight years, 40 of them ongoing. The longest match has lasted eight years and counting, while the average length is just longer than a year.

The matching service is free to the homeowner. But the rent amounts that homeowners are requesting have been climbing, which led to a recent policy change. If homeowners want to charge more than $800 per month, Sunshine is charging a match fee equivalent to a half-month's rent.

The change is necessary because Sunshine is struggling to find a sustainable business model. It costs about $7,000 to make one match, mostly in staff time put in by the agency's one social worker and three graduate student interns. Besides spending hours on interviews to find a match, they visit every home share once a quarter to make sure the roommates are compatible. Another goal is to build a volunteer program to help with the match check-ins.

"We are fighting for scraps to stay afloat," Joucovsky said, noting that while the number of older people requesting services is growing, state funding is not. "It's so woefully underfunded. It's a fraction of what it needs to be."

She questions why Colorado hasn't planned better for this population swell. "Why is this a surprise when people continue to age and age and age?" she asked.

Sunshine is the only roommate-matching service in Colorado focused solely on older people, and matches people in Denver, Broomfield, Jefferson, Arapahoe and Adams counties. A housemate matching service in Fort Collins, Neighbor to Neighbor, is working on building a homeshare program for older adults.

Most Sunshine matches include a rent reduction in exchange for tenants putting in five or 10 hours a week on things like shoveling snow, housekeeping or driving homeowners to appointments or the grocery store. Sunshine isn't a home health agency, so the arrangements cannot include dressing or bathing or any other personal care.

Companionship is part of the deal, though.

The matches begin as a trial, and either side can back out after a few weeks. One was on the rocks during a recent trial because the homeowner returned from out of town and found that their new tenant had invited a friend to stay, Joucovsky said.

"Our job is to teach people how to communicate," she said. "Matches fall apart over really dumb things. We do a home share agreement. All the expectations are clear. Go back and talk. They are falling apart a lot less, because we are focusing on communication."

Read the full article for free at ColoradoSun.com.