It’s getting more difficult for seniors to stay in their larger homes as they age, and younger people are navigating an increasingly unaffordable rental market.
So Maine is starting a pilot program that seeks to house those generations together.
MaineHousing, the state’s housing authority, recently signed a nearly $200,000 contract with Nesterly, a platform that allows homeowners — mostly retirees and empty nesters — to list extra rooms online. Like a dating service, those homeowners are matched with renters, who are often students looking for an affordable living space for 30 days or longer.
Key details, such as exactly where the pilot will be rolled out in Maine and how soon, are still being worked out. But the bill that established this initiative last year called for MaineHousing to submit a report on the program’s effectiveness by early 2025. Its sponsor, Rep. Maggie O’Neil, D-Saco, said the service could be available statewide if the pilot is successful.
The hope is that the measure will be a cheap way to put more affordable rentals on the market, help older Mainers age in place and make more use of Maine’s existing housing stock. The state needs to construct at least 76,000 homes to meet current and future needs. At the same time, there are also at least 500,000 bedrooms empty in homes here, O’Neil said.
“If we opened up nearly 1,000 or 2,000 units with that small investment, that’d be really amazing,” she said. “You can’t even build one house for $200,000.”
Maine will be the first entire state Nesterly is contracted to work with. The platform is currently active only in Boston, Louisville, Kentucky, and Columbus, Ohio. In Boston, the area where Nesterly originated as a startup begun by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology students, the company partnered with the city in 2017 to first run a pilot program.
At the very beginning, the platform matched eight pairs with “no issue,” according to a city report. The average rent per room was $700, which was lessened by up to $150 in some cases in which students volunteered to perform household tasks for a discounted rent.
“The pilot project exceeded our expectations,” the report read. “It showed that homesharing is a valuable and viable option for increasing affordability and social connectedness.”
By mid-2020, Boston hoped to have paired 1,000 people through Nesterly. Today, there are only 22 active listings on Nesterly in the greater Boston area. A city spokesperson was unavailable to comment on the platform’s progress there.
In the five years Nesterly has been active in Columbus, the average stay has been around six months, and the rent per room was $500, Frances Krumholtz, who coordinates the program through the Central Ohio Area Agency on Aging, said. A third of homeowners chose to discount rent in exchange for some household tasks being performed, Krumholtz said.
“The host is seeing hundreds of dollars each month that they had not been receiving before, and for the guest, they’re getting a place to live that is much more affordable than the market value.”
Encouraged by examples in other states, many nonprofits and social agencies that work with older Mainers have been advocating for a home share program to come here for years.
Age-Friendly Saco, a nonprofit that supports local seniors, and Tom Meuser, a gerontology professor at the University of New England, tried coordinating a home share program for graduate students back in 2019, but the groups didn’t have the technological infrastructure to follow through.
“We ran into all kinds of issues around liability,” said Jean Saunders, the executive director of Age-Friendly Saco. “Nesterly provides all of that infrastructure.”
The platform performs a background check on renters and homeowners and helps to coordinate a first meeting between those parties and draft a lease agreement. Nesterly also collects rent payments and can dispatch trained staff to help with conflict resolution.
“It has supports in place to make sure that there’s safety involved,” said Erik Jorgensen, MaineHousing’s director of government relations. “There’s screenings that happen and social workers that make sure everything is going well.”
That emphasis on safety and security will be key in getting older Mainers onboard with the service, Saunders said. While 40 percent of older adults want to rent a room, only 2 percent are doing it, according to an AARP National Community Survey. The barrier is often fear, she said.
“People worry about if someone’s going to come live in my home, are they going to disturb my way of living in my home?” said Donna Beveridge, 81, of Saco, who gave feedback to Meuser and Saunders on their 2019 program. “If there’s an organization that kind of manages that, that’s helpful.”
Beveridge is married and downsized to a Saco apartment two years ago, so she wouldn’t share her home. But she knows of people who might for companionship, or having someone to help with odd jobs around the house that become more difficult with age or the opportunity to make supplemental income.
The latter might be the program’s most attractive proposition. There are around 125,000 cost-burdened senior households in Maine, Jorgensen said. That can be partially because they are living in homes with so much extra space.
“If we even captured 1 percent of that, we could generate a lot of affordable housing for the state,” he said.
