The six-bedroom home on a shady southwest Denver street was built in the 1960s, a ranch-style with a series of connecting rooms, a kitchen skylight, and a serving window to pass food to the living room. The art covering nearly every wall falls mostly into two categories: the Old West or dogs.
Piles of books are stacked by the recliners in the living and family rooms, on the dining room table and various places on the floor. In the backyard, there’s a barbecue grill and an informal garden of peppers and pumpkins.
A Colorado Sun series. Read more.Colorado is getting older, rapidly. Are we prepared? We’re taking a look at how these shifting demographics are affecting housing, the workforce and quality of life, and whether Colorado has the services needed for people to age in place.
Follow alongGlenn Little, who turns 70 soon, loves his home that’s a short walk to the path along Bear Creek. He loves that his neighbors feed his loveable lab, Huck, sliced turkey over the fence when the dog trots out to say his hellos. Little, who is divorced and retired from his career at Mission Foods, doesn’t want to sell the place. He also doesn’t want to live there alone.
“It’s a big ole house for just one person,” he said, sitting in a hefty living room chair, not far from a hutch that holds his cookie jar collection.
Which is why Little started collecting roommates. He has turned his home into something resembling life on the 1980s-’90s sitcom “The Golden Girls,” only more like an older-man fraternity house.
“We don’t have bong parties or anything,” said Bruce Novak, 68, one of Little’s newest roommates and a philosopher. “Not yet anyway. We could if it appeals to us.”
Truthfully, the men are much more likely these days to talk about bad hips and bouts of gout. Novak is having hip surgery this summer, and Little offered to drive him to the hospital and make him sandwiches afterward.
Little and Novak were matched up through an agency called Sunshine Home Share, which pairs aging Coloradans who own homes with people looking for a bedroom to rent. Tenants get a break on rent in exchange for doing household chores, like taking out the trash or mowing the lawn. It helps older people who can no longer handle the upkeep of their homes, or who are lonely, and at the same time, offers a solution for people who can’t afford Colorado’s rising rent costs. Bedrooms rented through Sunshine are $700-$800 per month on average, far below Denver’s near-$2,000 for a small apartment.
It’s a service that’s growing more popular as Colorado continues to get older. The state is the third fastest aging in the nation, with more than 25% of Colorado’s population projected to hit age 60 and older by 2050.
Besides Novak, Little has three other roommates renting bedrooms. Not all of them are through Sunshine. Others came through Craigslist or word of mouth. Some have worked out their own rent-for-chores arrangements with Little.
Bruce Novak, one of Glenn Little’s housemates, sits in front of a wall featuring the artwork of a former housemate. Bruce has lived with people most of his life, and said that this has been the most comfortable and peaceful of all his experiences living with roommates. (Claudia A. Garcia, Special to The Colorado Sun)Novak does some of the cooking, most recently whipping up sauteed turkey fillets with prosciutto and mushrooms for the whole household. David takes care of the yard and is the one who tends the peppers and pumpkins. Victor cleans the house, and joins Little every week on his trip to Costco, where the highlight is eating hot dogs for lunch. The only woman in the house is Karen, who heard about Little’s home share through a friend at King Soopers, where she works. Victor is the young one at 28, while the rest of the roommates are in their upper 50s to about 70.
The first time Little took in a roommate, it happened by chance. The man, Robert “Coop” Cooper, was an artist who died last year at age 90 and had lived with Little for seven years, until he had a stroke and needed more care than Little could manage.
“I joke I got Coop at a garage sale,” Little said, while proudly showing off Cooper’s wagon wheel sketches and the paintings Cooper made of Little’s previous dogs.
It’s more true than a joke, though. A friend of Cooper’s came to Little’s garage sale, and the two got to talking, and the friend mentioned that Cooper needed a place to live. It was the beginning of a deep friendship, the tangible remains of which are the boxes upon boxes of Cooper’s art left behind in Little’s basement.
That’s the pitfall of so many roommates. With every one that comes and goes, Little’s house gets even more full.
If you are 85 years old and you are sharing your home, we want to be sure to be there every step of the way.
— Alison Joucovsky, Sunshine’s executive director
Each housing match takes about 30 hours, $7,000
Sunshine Home Share Colorado made 30 matches last year — each one taking 30 or 40 hours of interviews and home visits. The nonprofit has made about 20 matches so far this year and has at least that many homeowners on the list looking for roommates.
“Older adults, 55 and older, come to us for a zillion different reasons — ‘I’m lonely. I could use help around the house,’” said Sunshine’s executive director, Alison Joucovsky. Sunshine’s social workers spend hours talking to homeowners, who start off by describing the most important things about their daily life: “I’ve got a dog. I’m not a smoker.” They visit their homes to make sure they meet the criteria, checking the extra bedrooms and making sure all the appliances are working.
“On the other end, you have people who are younger, sometimes students,” Joucovsky said, and social workers start with those big questions — if they have a dog, if they like dogs, if they smoke, if church is important to them.
“Our role is to safely and thoroughly help people find the right housemate,” Joucovsky said. “If you are 85 years old and you are sharing your home, we want to be sure to be there every step of the way.”
So far, the matches are handled by humans, on paper, but the hope is that within a year or so, Sunshine will have an online platform where people who are Internet savvy can look for matches that way.
Increasingly, the clients who come to Sunshine are in their 60s or 70s, and don’t need a lot of care or help. They just need the extra money, Joucovsky said. “We had the busiest year ever,” she said. “The need is huge, as things get more expensive and it gets harder and harder to maintain a home by yourself.”
Sunshine, which began making matches in 2018, is funded mainly by a grant from the Next50 Foundation, which focuses on helping older Coloradans. It also receives money from United Way, a handful of cities and counties, and state funds from the Colorado Disability Funding Committee. The nonprofit has made 138 matches in the past eight years, 40 of them ongoing. The longest match has lasted eight years and counting, while the average length is just longer than a year.
The matching service is free to the homeowner. But the rent amounts that homeowners are requesting have been climbing, which led to a recent policy change. If homeowners want to charge more than $800 per month, Sunshine is charging a match fee equivalent to a half-month’s rent.
Because he grew up in a large family, Glenn Little said he would rather have company than live alone. (Claudia A. Garcia, Special to The Colorado Sun)The change is necessary because Sunshine is struggling to find a sustainable business model. It costs about $7,000 to make one match, mostly in staff time put in by the agency’s one social worker and three graduate student interns. Besides spending hours on interviews to find a match, they visit every home share once a quarter to make sure the roommates are compatible. Another goal is to build a volunteer program to help with the match check-ins.
“We are fighting for scraps to stay afloat,” Joucovsky said, noting that as a growing number of older people are requesting services, state funding is not. “It’s so woefully underfunded. It’s a fraction of what it needs to be.”
She questions why Colorado hasn’t planned better for this population swell. “Why is this a surprise when people continue to age and age and age?” she asked.
Sunshine is the only roommate-matching service in Colorado focused solely on older people, and matches people in Denver, Broomfield, Jefferson, Arapahoe and Adams counties. A housemate matching service in Fort Collins, Neighbor to Neighbor, is working on building a homeshare program for older adults.
Most Sunshine matches include a rent reduction in exchange for tenants putting in five or 10 hours a week on things like shoveling snow, housekeeping or driving homeowners to appointments or the grocery store. Sunshine isn’t a home health agency, so the arrangements cannot include dressing or bathing or any other personal care.
Companionship is part of the deal, though.
A lot of people who come to our program will say they haven’t had a roommate since college.
— Alison Joucovsky, Sunshine’s executive director
Matches are usually one homeowner and one roommate, though “a woman called yesterday with a five-bedroom house and wants to rent all the rooms,” Joucovsky said. The agency will work on filling the rooms one at a time. Matches also are usually between an older person and a younger person, but that isn’t always the case. One Sunshine home has two 80-somethings living together. Another has a 90-year-old and a 60-year-old.
The matches begin as a trial, and either side can back out after a few weeks. One was on the rocks during a recent trial because the homeowner returned from out of town and found that their new tenant had invited a friend to stay, Joucovsky said.
“Our job is to teach people how to communicate,” she said. “Matches fall apart over really dumb things. We do a home share agreement. All the expectations are clear. Go back and talk. They are falling apart a lot less, because we are focusing on communication.”
It’s not surprising, considering many homeowners haven’t had a roommate they weren’t related to in the past 50 or 60 years.
“A lot of people who come to our program will say they haven’t had a roommate since college,” Joucovsky said.
“When you get the right fit and really help people find the right housemate and find this friendship that they never expected, it’s awesome. It’s frickin’ amazing.”
A “congenial” house where everyone pitches in
Little didn’t have many stipulations about roommates, save one. You have to like his dogs.
There’s the friendly black lab, Huck, who strolls through the neighborhood looking for treats. And there’s the shy golden retriever, Holly, who doesn’t like to go outside.
“If the dogs like you, I probably like you,” Little said. And the dogs like Novak, who learned about Sunshine after a series of bad rental situations and moved in with Little in February.
Huck, the black lab, and Holly, the golden retriever, are part of the deal when being roommates with Glenn Little. (Claudia A. Garcia, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Both men love to read, though Novak, the philosopher, reads headier books than Little. Novak loves to cook; Little does not, at all. Novak keeps later hours, as he’s out planning lectures, swimming laps or visiting his mom who is in declining health and has full-time care.
Novak has lived with roommates most of his life, often near universities where he taught philosophy. But the past few years, he has had a series of bad living situations, where the landlord acted more like a “king” or where he ended up calling the police because of a roommate’s mental health issues. One place was the size “of an old hot tub,” he said.
“This is the first place I’ve lived out of maybe five that is not an ego-driven place,” he said. “This is the first peaceful place I’ve lived in that time. Everybody’s kind and easygoing, which is new. It’s affordable. It’s congenial.”
The lease is month-to-month, he pays $650 a month, and is supposed to do five hours of chores each week, though he and Little aren’t sticklers about that. “My job has sort of become the dishwasher,” Novak said. “I take the trash out. I will make dinner for people.”
Little spotted the house on a drive-by and bought it 16 years ago while he was living in a nearby apartment. He’s a laid-back guy who can let annoyances slide and focuses instead on seeing people’s “individual talents.” He sees what his roommates are good at and offers them rent-reducing jobs.
“Victor, I’ve hired him to help me keep the house clean, and he’s very tidy,” Little said. “David loves to work in the yard. The yard work was what was really getting to me, because I’m 69 and I’m really not even interested in working in the yard too much, but David enjoys it. They have both made it much more livable. With Bruce, the kitchen is clean all the time. He does the dishes. Everybody kind of helps out with the garbage, although that really wasn’t too much of an issue. They all make my life easier.”
Little deducts the work from each man’s rent, and in Victor’s case, adds back in what Little bought for him during their weekly Costco run. Little puts some of the rent money into home improvements, such as new tile in the bathroom. “It helps,” he said. “It’s not like I’m going to Vegas every weekend.”
Like many older people, Little wants to “age in place,” to stay in his own home until the very end.
“My goal is to die here in this house,” he said. “Not tomorrow, but you know, in 20 years. I just want to stay right here because I don’t want to pick anything up and move. I’ve got too much junk.”
Little started his career with Mission Foods as a delivery driver, bringing tortillas to stores in Parker. Over the years, he became a distributor and bought multiple delivery routes, then hired his own drivers. He lived in Parker when he was married and raised two children, who are now in their 30s.
Little has a 2-year-old grandson, whose photo is on his mantle, and he has a family dinner with his daughter and grandson every week. On holidays, he goes to his daughter’s house, and last Thanksgiving and Christmas, he brought his youngest roommate Victor, who is originally from Hong Kong and wanted to see presents under a tree.
Glenn Little and roommate Victor depart for their weekly Costco trip. Victor is the youngest housemate at 28. Most of the housemates are in their 50s and 60s. (Claudia A. Garcia, Special to The Colorado Sun)They brought home a plate of food for their roommate Karen, who was pulling a holiday shift at King Soopers.
“I’ve been blessed by a lot of good people,” Little said.
Little found his first Sunshine roommate three years ago. Dan Johnson, 70, was going through a rough few years, including a stay in a homeless shelter that he hated followed by a stretch in motels, when he heard about Sunshine through his church. He and Little were matched, and Johnson lived with Little until recently moving in with his girlfriend.
“It was a nice house, with friendly dogs, and people with different backgrounds living together,” said Johnson, who is known for remembering everyone’s birthday, more than even their name or their face. So when it was Johnson’s big 70th two weeks ago, Little attended the birthday bash at the Black Bear Diner in Aurora, and roommates Novak and Victor tagged along.
Little grew up with five brothers, then spent two decades raising kids, so living alone isn’t something he’s accustomed to doing. He doesn’t watch television. And even though he doesn’t consider himself particularly outgoing or sociable, he enjoys the camaraderie of roommates. He’s amused by their oddities and appreciates their talents.
“Dan’s gift was remembering birthdays. Coop’s gift was painting. Bruce’s gift is that he’s a philosopher and an intellectual,” Little said.
“I think if I was here by myself, I wouldn’t like it.”
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Older Coloradans are turning to the “Golden Girls” housing model to fight costs, loneliness )
Also on site :