Who says that being roommates with someone from a completely generation has to be weird? Lately, more and more Americans are becoming intergenerational roommates, and they’re changing the way people think they should be living.
Explained as those that are separated by at least one generation living together, there has been a major increase in intergenerational roommate arrangements within the United States since 1971. In fact, statistics show that this number has actually quadrupled since then.
There are a ton of factors that come into play for these types of arrangements. For some, it’s because of the increase in the average life-expectancy age, the growing isolation happening amongst the elderly, a decreased birth rate, a rise in college tuition, the ever rising rentals occurring in almost every single coastal city, and more. But if anything, many claim that one main reason behind the rise is due to older people having space to rent out and that having younger folk around just makes them happier.
In a Pew Research Center article, it shared that by March 2021, there were at least 59.7 million U.S. residents that had multiple generations living underneath one roof.
According to 25-year old robotics student living in Massachusetts, Nadia Abdullah, who moved in with her 64-year old attorney roommate Judith in 2019, “It was perfect – Judith has become like my family.”
Their arrangement was $700 a month from Nadia, plus the promise of her doing some help around the house. This also allowed Nadia to live just 6-miles from Boston and 30-minutes from her robotics job located in Beverly Mass.
The website that matched Nadia and Judith together is called Nesterly. It’s a renting hub that was specifically created to find intergenerational roommates.
Another young Nesterly reviewer, Kaplan, also gave some insight into the service and why it’s so special, saying, “Through Nesterly, I lived with Sarah while attending Harvard. She provided the type of repository of knowledge you just can’t Google – showing me how to garden, to gut a fish, and inject French Romanticism into life.”
Meanwhile, The Washington Post also wrote about an opera singer and other types of musicians that were in training, and how they managed to live rent-free in a retirement community on the arrangement that they would perform concerts for the residents of the community every so often.
However, Nesterly isn’t the only site where people can find this type of agreement. Canada HomeShare is another similar type of service that helped Michael Wortis, an 85-year old retired physics professor from Burnaby, B.C. pair with 27-year old Siobhan Ennis, a health sciences graduate student. Because of their so-called agreement, Ennis was able to get out of a shared home that would have given him 3 extra roommates. Moreover, this type of arrangement between Ennis and Wortis, biologically-speaking, is considered the kind of natural state of humanity really.
Unlike animals that tend to rapidly die off once they reach an age that’s too old to procreate, humans can survive for decades and way beyond the point of infertility. Many scholars believe that it’s because people possess intelligence and tons of life experiences which they impart onto the next generation. These things act as a secondary way to ensure that human genetics are also passed on, such as what food is okay to eat, what animals are dangerous, etc. this also ensures that their offspring will also have a better chance at survival as well, especially compared to those that lose their parents at an early age.
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