Shirley Jennett, a retired nurse, loves her spacious ranch-style house in Denver, with its big backyard and gazebo.
“I want to stay here,” she vowed. “And die here.”
She might pull that off. In relatively good health, Ms. Jennett still drives to lunch with friends, does her own housekeeping and grocery shopping, and plows through a book a day, usually a mystery. But her children worry about her living alone at 89, especially after she has had a couple of falls.
Enter her new housemate, Susan Beese. Despite working four days a week in retail, Ms. Beese could no longer afford her nearby one-bedroom apartment as the rent topped $1,500 a month. She moved out, first staying with friends and then in what she delicately called “a senior women’s facility.”
Now Ms. Beese, who is 79, pays Ms. Jennett $800 monthly for a bright two-bedroom space, with a bath and a kitchen, on the lower level of her house. As part of the agreement the housemates worked out, she helps plant and water Ms. Jennett’s garden, takes out the trash and cooks occasional meals.
Meet the real-life Golden Girls. In the much-loved 1980s sitcom, still in perpetual reruns, the four wisecracking women who share a house in Miami met through an ad on a supermarket bulletin board.
In Denver, the housing matchmaker was Sunshine Home Share Colorado, a local nonprofit that Alison Joucovsky, a senior services administrator, founded in 2016 when the problem became urgent. “My phone was ringing off the hook,” she said, recalling anxious pleas from older residents spending most of their Social Security checks on rising rent or facing years-long waiting lists for subsidized senior housing.
Home sharing “is a really efficient way to create affordable housing and to support older people who want to age in place,” Ms. Joucovsky said. Carefully vetting both “home providers,” who may be rattling around in family houses now too big and too empty, and “home sharers” seeking reasonable rents, Sunshine facilitated 31 shares last year, a record for the nonprofit.
About 55 organizations around the country offer these services — and demand is growing, driven by housing shortages, rising rents and sales prices that affect both the old and the young. Legislators in several states are working to promote home sharing as an option. (Personal care is not part of these arrangements.)
The need is acute. About a third of households headed by someone 65 or older were “cost-burdened” in 2024, according to an analysis by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. That means they spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing.
Although nearly 80 percent of those people were homeowners, the center found, an increasing proportion are still paying off mortgages or home equity loans, and most contend with higher taxes, utility and maintenance costs and insurance premiums.
Yet most don’t want to relocate. Even if they do, many older adults will find that downsizing has also become prohibitively expensive, as home prices rise and very low interest rates become a memory.
Younger people are similarly cost burdened, including 37 percent of those aged 25 to 34, and 31 percent of those 35 to 44, the Joint Center has reported. Home sharing can benefit both older homeowners who need income and people of any age in search of lower-cost housing.
Further support has come from the city of Portland, which this year announced a pilot program to pay $1,000 to homeowners who make a spare room available (or $1,500 for two rooms) through qualified home-share programs.
In addition, legislators in several states have introduced or passed bills that prohibit municipalities from unduly restricting homeowners who want to rent spare rooms to nonfamily members. Sponsors in Pennsylvania and Connecticut actually call them Golden Girls bills, and they’ve drawn bipartisan support.
In Pennsylvania, State Representative Tarik Khan steered a similar bill through the House in June; it awaits a Senate vote. “It doesn’t make sense that your cousin can move in but someone unrelated to you can’t,” said Mr. Khan, a Democrat.
The Pennsylvania bill caps the number of nonfamily occupants in a home at five; Connecticut’s limit would be three. That bill passed the Senate in April, and then died without a vote in the House. But the bill sponsors plan to reintroduce it next session.
Admittedly, matching homeowners with those who want to rent a room becomes a delicate process. Home-share staff members typically interview the individual parties, run background checks, verify incomes, coordinate initial phone calls and meetings and mediate if problems later arise.
For more information see Paula Span “Older Adults Turn to ‘Golden Girls’ Housing” The New York Times, June 27, 2026.