The Value of a Match: The State Math

Definitions

Cost-burdened. Paying more than 30 percent of household income for housing, the federal threshold. Renter and homeowner counts are households with a householder aged 65 or older (ACS 2023 1-Year PUMS and Table B25093, via The Rooms Already Exist).

The Elder Index. The Elder Economic Security Standard Index (Gerontology Institute, University of Massachusetts Boston): the income a one-person older-adult household needs to meet basic needs, priced per state for renters, homeowners with a mortgage, and homeowners without. 2025 values, good health, retrieved from elderindex.org July 2026 and used with attribution.

Method

Match rate slider. Capped at 10 percent deliberately. Measured penetration of home sharing programs runs from a fraction of one percent (platform enrollment nationally) to the low single digits (HIP Housing in San Mateo County completes roughly 150 matches a year; the UK's national Homeshare sector at its peak matched about 1,000 people a year), and the mature programs behind those figures are case-managed services whose staffing costs run to thousands of dollars per completed match. HomeShare Online is different infrastructure: a self-directed platform a state implements turnkey, with support handled by the case managers and programs it already funds. The default of 2 percent is ambitious because home sharing is not so much new as returning. Taking in a boarder was once common in America, roughly one household in ten in the early twentieth century, before the practice all but disappeared; today it is small and growing quickly, with about 879,000 adults 65 and older sharing a home with someone unrelated to them in 2016, up 88 percent over the prior decade and far outpacing growth of the older population itself (National Shared Housing Resource Center; AARP). It takes time for sharing a home to become a first instinct again instead of a last resort; treat the top of the slider as aspirational.

Rental assistance. The 1-in-4 coverage figure is federal rental assistance specifically (CBPP). Several states fund additional rental assistance of their own; no comparable 51-state coverage figure exists, so this page cites the federal figure and labels it as such.

Development timeline. Affordable development typically takes 3 to 5 years from concept to occupancy by HUD Exchange's development guide; LISC's guide puts it at 4 to 7. This page shows the combined range.

Homeowner supports. What states offer older homeowners varies: property tax deferrals and exemptions (Oregon's Property Tax Deferral for Disabled and Senior Homeowners, for example, pays the county and records a lien repaid when the home sells), home repair and weatherization funds, and foreclosure counseling. HomeShare Online maintains a per-state inventory of these programs, linked from the toolkit above. None of these programs adds monthly income.

Social Security reliance. Nationally, 4 in 10 retirees rely on Social Security for at least half of their income, and 1 in 7 rely on it for 90 percent or more (SSA research combining survey and administrative data, via CBPP). State-level shares are not published on a comparable basis; this page uses the national figures and says so.

Match economics. Each match prices a room the way HUD prices shared housing: one bedroom in a two-bedroom home is half the unit, so the room rent is 50 percent of the state's two-bedroom Fair Market Rent (HUD's pro-ration rule, 24 CFR 982.617; FMRs from NLIHC Out of Reach 2025), rounded to $25. In Oregon that is $850 a month, and the City of Portland Home Sharing Pilot's affordability cap of $200 a week including utilities and fees, about $870 a month (HomeShare Oregon is a Qualified Home Sharing Provider in that program), lands within 2 percent of it, corroborating the benchmark. The home seeker side is the state's one-bedroom FMR minus that room rent. The combined-value figure adds those two sides of the same matches; they accrue to different households and are never claimed as public savings. "Housed without a voucher" counts matches directly; the voucher comparison values them at HUD's roughly $14,000 average annual subsidy as an illustration of scale, not a claimed budget saving.

Construction comparison. Recent, credible per-unit affordable development costs exist only where housing finance agencies publish cost certifications: about $708,000 per unit in California (Terner Center, 2024), $406,000 in Washington (WSHFC, FY2024-25), and $490,000 for Portland bond projects (City Budget Office, 2022). Elsewhere the page cites the national median of $164,757 from NCSHA/Abt (2018, projects placed in service 2011-2016) with its vintage stated, because construction costs have risen substantially since.

Waitlist context. Nationally, only about 1 in 4 income-eligible renter households receives federal rental assistance (CBPP), and households that received Housing Choice Vouchers in 2020 had waited an average of 28 months (CBPP analysis of HUD data). More than half of voucher waitlists were closed to new applicants when last surveyed nationally (NLIHC). Per-state waitlist headcounts are not reliably publishable; this page uses national figures and says so.

License economics. HomeShare Online's nonprofit license is estimated at $7,000 per year per distribution site. The recommended delivery network is the state's Area Agencies on Aging (counts from USAging and the Administration for Community Living, compiled July 2026), or equivalent regional housing partners. Cost per resident uses Census Vintage 2025 population estimates.

Sources

Companion research: The Rooms Already Exist (the supply data behind this page) and Home Sharing: The Missing Link Between Aging and Housing Policy (the policy argument).