Background and Objectives
Homesharing provides a strategy for addressing housing insecurity by pairing home providers, often older adults, with an extra room in their house with home seekers needing housing. Despite five decades of use, research on this intervention remains limited. This study aims to build on this sparse scholarship to provide insight into the motivations for participating as either home seekers or home providers.
Research Design and Methods
This community-engaged qualitative project includes data from 24 in-depth interviews and short demographic surveys with a diverse group of home providers (n = 13) and home-seekers (n = 11) recruited from two nonprofit homesharing organizations. Interviews were recorded and professionally transcribed. The researchers used constant comparison techniques to identify patterns and unique perspectives in the transcripts.
Results
Home providers and home seekers had a mean age of 67.92 (SD = 9.39) and 52.09 (SD = 19.03), respectively, and were racially/ethnically diverse. The overall sample was primarily female (71%), though more home providers were female (85%) than home seekers (55%). Participants described a range of motivations for participating in homesharing, including financial motivations, the desire for companionship, the result of a disaster or life change, the desire for a task exchange arrangement, the need for administrative/third-party support for housing (including a need for safety and security), and altruistic reasons.
Discussion and Implications
This article provides important new data in a vastly understudied area that can inform policy and practice to support affordable housing options for older adults–particularly through nonprofit homesharing programs. // (2025)