Rachel Cohen

Higher education is in crisis, and students and faculty are craving a new way of being more impactful, said Rachel Wenrich, executive director for arts and civic innovation at Drexel's Community Partnerships Office.

This offers that, while bringing university resources to bear on solutions the neighborhood itself has identified.

While such institutional partnerships show promise, sustaining intergenerational housing can be difficult.

The model pioneered by Kuhn often struggled with sustainability, and hundreds of home shares ultimately shut down after just a few years.

Finding reliable renters that homeowners trusted, handling legal and administrative tasks, and collecting payments proved overwhelming.

The Gray Panthers had popularized intergenerational home sharing with these same values of helping people age in place and creating more affordable housing options, said Marcus of Nesterly.

But they were very labor-intensive and paper-driven.

Today, automated background checks and payments, secure messaging, and video call portals are supposed to modernize the process and make it more convenient than it was in the 80s and 90s.

Yet technology itself can present new barriers, particularly for seniors who may struggle with both awareness of and access to online platforms.

Growth Constraints

Savina Falkwist sees these challenges firsthand.

As executive director of HomeShare Oregon, founded in 2021 to address the state's housing crisis, she's realized that digital solutions aren't enough.

What I feel and where we're going is we need to build capacity across the state to have coordinators in regions that go work directly with folks, she told Vox.

They need help putting photos on their pages and support to match those folks with renters.

The barriers extend beyond technology.

Alpha Hernandez, who directs a home share program through the Homeless Intervention Services of Orange County, California, points to deeper concerns about safety.

Seniors like the idea of companionship, but even though we're there to facilitate and do monthly check-ins and screenings, they're more prone to identity theft and falling for scams.

So I think that's why there's more fear to participate, she told Vox.

Many still view sharing their private living space with strangers as a last resort.

Just as ride-sharing in Uber or Lyft had to overcome being seen as weird or risky before becoming mainstream, home-sharing faces similar cultural barriers.