The students living with retirees
Frankie Adkins/ BBC:
When 23-year-old Poppy Jenkinson got home in the evening, she would sit around the dinner table with her two housemates and discuss her day – sharing work news, friendship dramas, and, on occasion, relationship problems.
Often, her housemates would give her a fresh perspective. “They’re both in their 70s and have been married for almost 40 years. They were always sharing nuggets of wisdom,” she says.
After graduating from Falmouth University last year – a small, creative university in Cornwall in the South West of England – Jenkinson struggled to find a house in Falmouth’s competitive rental market. She met Pete and Lee King, 70, through the university, and moved into their thre cbedroom cottage on the outskirts of town.
While their arrangement was private, it reflects a broader trend in multi-generational housing: students and senior citizens living together.
In recent years, projects that encourage distant generations to share a home have surfaced all over the world, including on university campuses in Canada, California and the Netherlands.
But not all experiments in multi-generational living end as happily as Jenkinson’s. The reality can be more complicated, research shows.
In theory, multi-generational living cleverly solves two pressing modern problems: a shortage of affordable housing for young people and a rise in loneliness among older people.
“The loneliness epidemic is a global trend, especially in countries where there’s an aging population,” says Patricia Collins, an associate professor in the department of geography and planning at Queen’s University, Canada.
Studies indicate that severe loneliness can lead to depression and suicidal ideation, poor cardiovascular or heart health, and even increased risk of premature death. “This was exacerbated recently by [the Covid-19 pandemic] and stay-at-home orders,” she adds.
Meanwhile, a slew of research from around the world has highlighted young people’s growing struggles to find affordable housing. In the US, the average rent has risen 18% over the last five years, outpacing inflation, and the situation is similar in other countries. Since younger adults are more likely to rent rather than own a home, they are especially vulnerable to such rent rises. Research has also shown the wide-ranging impact of scarce and poor-quality housing on young people’s lives, including the impact on their health.
Collins wanted to better understand if multi-generational housing was really easing accommodation shortages and social problems.
She mapped the demand for co-living schemes in Kingston, Ontario, by surveying graduate students’ interest to “room” with a senior citizen.
In Canada, adults aged 65 years and older are the fastest-growing age group – and are projected to reach 23% of the population by 2030. Added to this, many Canadians seniors are living alone.
With waterfront views and plenty of green space, Kingston is the second most popular city to retire to in Canada, says Collins. But it is also home to a handful of secondary institutions, with students competing for rentals in an overstretched property market.
“Historically [Kingston] has had very substandard housing conditions for students,” says Collins. “Now we’re seeing this coupled with rising rental rates.”
At first glance, the students she surveyed seemed to like the idea of different generations sharing homes. Out of 3,800 graduate students polled, more than half the students said that the university should support this kind of housing model.
However, when it came to whether they would personally want to live that way, the results were strikingly different. Only 13% of the students polled were “extremely” or “very” interested in living with seniors. Students’ reservations included feeling awkward, not being allowed guests over and a general lack of privacy.
It appeared that many liked the idea in the abstract, but didn’t quite see it as a workable option for themselves.
Collins points out that “as a society we’re not that accustomed to interacting with people outside of our generation, unless they’re within our immediate family”.
One exception is young people who volunteer with seniors – and the data suggests these people may also be more open to living with seniors too. Of the students who were attracted to the idea of co-living, 56% had work experience with seniors, and 60% had volunteer experience with seniors.
However, schemes that make volunteering part of the package can also run into difficulties.
Humanitas Deventer, a co-housing project in the Netherlands, is often used as a prime example for multi-generational harmony. It has seen many students integrate into retirement homes. In place of paying rent, the students spend 30 hours a month interacting with elderly residents, and teaching them skills such as using email or social media.
But adding a social contract to a co-living dynamic can trigger certain problems, says Gemma Burgess, director of the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Burgess carried out an evaluation of a reciprocal co-living programme in Cambridge called LinkAges, which took its first cohort of post-graduate students in 2017. A student or key worker looking for cheaper rent was matched with an older person in supported housing who needed assistance. The expectation of the students was to give “light touch engagement”, such as supporting residents with shopping, helping them around the house or simply providing some company.
The project offered important lessons, Burgess says. One was that supporting another person might look simple in theory, but can require more time and effort than students expect. At busy and stressful times, such as exam periods or when writing up a thesis, it can be hard for students to fit another person’s needs into their own schedule.
“It took a lot of intervention to support relationships,” Burgess says.
Multi-generational households, she says, can be complex. “It’s somewhat idealised to say: ‘You’re going to play the role of a jolly grandparent, and a younger person is going to play the role of a doting grandchild’. People are much more complicated than that.”
One way of learning from past mistakes is to incorporate multi-generational living into a university’s design, but add a bit more distance. Seniors and students may not be living in the same household, but the principles of skill-sharing and social interaction remain.
In recent years an estimated 100 US colleges have developed retirement communities on or near their campuses, including facilities such as golf courses, clubhouses and assisted living units. Typically, it’s retired college alumni who apply to become neighbours with their present-day counterparts.