If you work at an Area Agency on Aging, you already know the conversation. It rarely starts with housing. It starts with a question about meals, or a utility shutoff notice, or help with a Medicare plan, or a daughter calling from another state. Somewhere in the middle of it, the real subject comes out: the money does not stretch the way it used to, and the person you are talking to is starting to wonder whether they can keep the house.

You are the front line, and you are working the cost side

There are more than 600 Area Agencies on Aging in the country. Under the Older Americans Act, you run or connect people to information and referral, meals, in-home services, transportation, caregiver support and much more. Add the benefits your staff help people find, energy assistance, property tax relief, help with Medicare costs, food assistance, and a pattern shows up.

Almost everything in the toolkit makes a cost smaller. That is valuable work, and for many households it is enough.

For a great many it is not, because the gap is bigger than any single cost you can trim. Our new research, Staying Home, measured that gap for every state.

What the gap looks like now

Staying Home compares the income of every household headed by someone 62 or older who owns their home with the Elder Index, the measure of what an older adult needs each month for basic costs in their state. It is a measure many of you already use.

For a typical older homeowner who cannot cover basic costs and has a room to share, the shortfall runs to about $13,000 a year. No single benefit closes that. Several together sometimes can. Often they cannot.

Why the people you serve move, and where they go

Financial pressure drives about 120,000 moves by older homeowners every year. Almost none are foreclosures. They show up in your data, if at all, as a closed file: the client moved to be near family, or into an apartment, or somewhere cheaper out of the service area.

The research followed where they go. More than half buy somewhere cheaper. About a quarter rent at market rate. About one in six move into someone else's home, and about 3 percent into subsidized housing.

And it modeled what the sale does. For homeowners who cannot cover their basic costs and who sell and rent, almost six in ten run through the money, typically in under six years, around age 78. The crisis comes back, and it comes back to you, with the house gone.

The one thing that adds income

Home sharing works on the other side of the budget. An older homeowner with a spare bedroom rents it to a home seeker who needs an affordable place to live. The rent arrives every month, in the home and the neighborhood the person already knows.

Staying Home measured how often that is enough. Of the 13.5 million older homeowners at risk, about 11.9 million have a spare room. With a room renting for about $500 a month at an affordable rent, about 3.1 million could cover their basic costs and stay. At a market rent, about 4.2 million. Where one room is not quite enough, the benefits your staff already know how to find can often close the rest.

Trimming costs and adding income are not competing strategies. For the household that is $13,000 short, they are the same plan: the room brings in most of it, and the benefits you already help people find close what is left.

And it works in both directions. About one in six older homeowners who move for cost end up living in someone else's home. Some of the people calling your line are the home seeker in this arrangement, not the home provider.

What it asks of your staff

Very little, and that is deliberate. HomeShare Online is self-directed. A referral does not become a case for your agency or for ours. The platform verifies identity, runs background checks in both directions, introduces people on how they actually live, and provides a written agreement built for shared homes. The process takes about three months, and the home provider decides who moves in.

Two boundaries your staff should be able to state plainly.

Home sharing is a housing arrangement, not a care arrangement. Household tasks can be part of an agreement if both people write them down. Personal care belongs to a trained, paid caregiver arranged through the right program. The two fit together well. For many of the people you serve, the barrier is not that they cannot manage at home. It is that they cannot manage the cost of the home.

It is not moving in with a stranger. That is the first worry, and the adult children will raise it. By the time anyone moves in, both people have been verified, screened and introduced, and have talked it through over weeks.

Three places to start

Put home sharing in your information and referral resources. Alongside energy assistance and property tax relief, under the heading your callers are actually asking about: help staying in the home.

Ask one more question. When a homeowner calls about a cost, ask whether they have a spare room. It takes ten seconds, and nobody minds being asked.

Use your state's numbers in your planning. Staying Home has figures for every state: how many older homeowners are at risk, how many moves financial pressure drives each year, how many could stay by sharing a room, and the help available with housing costs in that state. When your agency writes its next area plan, those are numbers you can cite.

You are already the place people call when the money stops stretching. Home sharing gives you one more answer, and it is the one that adds to the budget instead of cutting it.

Read next

Staying Home has the figures for your state, side by side with every other.

How to Refer Your Members to Home Sharing, Without Adding to Your Workload covers what a referral looks like in practice.

Becoming the Front Door to Home Sharing in Your State is for agencies ready to lead a local initiative.

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