A Tradition Remembered

We publish this because the three questions underneath it matter: why people shared their rooms, why the practice faded, and why it is coming back. The answers bear directly on what is about to be asked of American housing.

A note on how to read the rooms. An empty bedroom in an older adult's home is not a room being withheld. Moving is expensive, and for most older homeowners there is nowhere smaller to move to that costs less than staying. The rooms are an opportunity precisely because the people who hold them intend to stay, and sharing one is the only option on this list that does not ask them to leave.

People in a home sharing arrangementper 100 owner-occupied homes, 1880 to today

Counting both sides: the homeowner providing the room, and each person from outside the family living in one.

Why this chart matters

Home sharing is growing because of older adults

Counted as people, because a room is measured by who is living in it, and because home sharing has two sides.

Which sample these figures come from, and why it matters if you are holding an older number. Every modern figure on this page comes from the 2020-2024 five-year American Community Survey sample, which is the only basis on which all 51 states can be set beside one another. Single-year samples run higher and are noisier. Oregon on the 2024 one-year sample reads 18,526 homes and 4.58 percent, against the 15,079 homes and 3.88 percent behind the figures above. Both are correct measurements of slightly different things. The five-year figure is the one HomeShare Oregon now quotes, so a reader holding the older number is not looking at a fall of 19 percent. Nothing fell.

The idea is oldthe method is not

For most of the century above, sharing a home meant advertising a room and trusting your read of whoever answered. The choice was governed by convenience: who turned up, who could pay, who seemed all right. Compatibility was something you found out afterwards. Two things have changed since, and between them they explain why the line is turning back up.

The economics came back first

In 1900 an older homeowner who ran short had two things in front of them: the house and what was inside it, or the county poorhouse. There was no federal housing program of any kind, and none would exist until 1937. The almshouse was the institution that took in the aged poor, and by the turn of the century it was mostly older people who lived there. It was widely feared and it was nobody's plan. Letting a room was how a household stayed out of it.

Everything built since was built to put something better between those two options: public housing in 1937, housing for older adults specifically in 1959, Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, the tax credit that funds most Affordable Housing today in 1986.

For a great many older adults it has not gone far enough. Affordable Housing and income-restricted housing are scarce, and the income rules that govern them place a two-bedroom out of reach in every area in the country. Downsizing assumes something smaller and cheaper to move into, which in most markets does not exist. A care community costs more than the house does. The average Social Security retirement benefit is roughly $2,071 a month, against mortgages, taxes, utilities and groceries that have not held still.

Which leaves the same asset that was there in 1900. For an older homeowner today, the spare room is often the most proven path to economic stability available to them, exactly as it was for the household that let a room to stay out of the poorhouse. The institutions in between were built, and for a great many people they are still out of reach. That is what the right-hand end of the chart is.

And the risks became easier to manage

Worry usually leads the conversation, and it tends to arrive as "moving in with a stranger". That is not what this is. A stranger is someone you know nothing about. HomeShare Online introduces two people who have not met but who the platform has reason to believe fit each other on values, preferences and habits. It is a different proposition from moving in with a friend, where you already like the person and find out later whether you can live with them.

The process averages three months and is entirely self-directed: no case manager, no matchmaker. By the time anyone moves in, they are not strangers. The risks do not vanish, but each one has something standing against it.

Home sharing was never a programit was the obvious answer to an affordability problem

Nobody set up home sharing in 1900. There was no agency, no waiting list and no eligibility test. A household that needed money and had a spare room let it out. Roughly one household in ten did exactly that. It was not a social service and it was not a last resort. It was arithmetic, ordinary enough that James Beard grew up in a Portland house full of boarders without anyone thinking it remarkable.

What ended it was not a loss of appetite. It was that the country built other answers: steady retirement income, federally funded hospitals and nursing homes, mortgage programs that put a private house within reach, and zoning in many cities that restricted boarding houses outright. Average household size fell from about 5.5 people in 1850 to roughly 2.6 today. Sharing stopped being the obvious answer and became the thing you did if you had no better option.

The affordability problem it solved has not gone away. It has moved.

One of those changes is still in force

Zoning is the part of that list that did not lapse. Many cities wrote rules restricting boarding houses, and a great many of those rules are still on the books, written in terms of how many unrelated people may live together or how many bedrooms may be let separately. A homeowner sharing a room today can meet a definition drafted for a rooming house a century ago, and whether they do depends on the city, the zoning district, and whether they live in the home themselves.

That question is a piece of research in its own right and is not settled here. It is jurisdiction by jurisdiction, it turns on definitions rather than principles, and there is no national list. What matters for this page is narrower: the rooms counted in the chart above are rooms already being shared, so they are not hypothetical. What the legal picture governs is how much further the line can go.

Rooms in use, and rooms standing emptyin homes owned by older adults

A home sharing arrangement is a homeowner 65 or older providing a room and each person from outside the family living in one. The first column puts that on a common footing across states; the next two give the raw counts. Click a column to re-sort. Click a row to pin it, and it stays in view when the list is collapsed.

The spare-bedroom count comes from The Rooms Already Exist, a different survey year, and is here for scale rather than to be divided into the column beside it.