The Monadnock Resource Alliance, a coalition of area organizations working for housing stability, held an event focused on house-sharing in early December. (Courtesy of Lillian Chase, Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship)
A local housing coalition believes it’s identified a way to immediately add housing stock to the limited supply in the Monadnock Region, without requiring new infrastructure, building permits or dramatic changes to zoning regulations: housemates.
The Monadnock Resource Alliance isn’t just suggesting groups of 20-somethings moving in together could alleviate some of the need for housing in New Hampshire. They say if older adults with empty bedrooms to spare can adopt “house-sharing,” it could add tens of thousands of spaces to the New Hampshire market.
“It’s taking advantage of infrastructure that we already have in place,” said J.B. Mack, assistant director of the Southwest Region Planning Commission, an alliance member. “And when we looked at our housing stock in this region, it’s actually, it’s quite old. A lot of housing [was] built before the 1940s and households were much larger back then than they are today. So we have a lot of housing out there that has extra bedrooms.”
With this setup, advocates say, homeowners can save money on their mortgage, and tenants on rent. Other benefits include having help around the house, somebody to share a meal with and increased human connection.
Some organizations have seen modest success with the concept, such as a Keene property management company that rents by the bedroom and says it has strong demand for co-living units, and a pilot program in Maine that matches homeowners with housemates has added more rooms to the stock there.
But trying to convert people to consider house-sharing could be an uphill battle.
The problem with housing
The Monadnock Resource Alliance, a coalition of area organizations working for housing stability, made a pitch for house-sharing to residents at an event in early December. The talk came as renting and owning a home remains difficult for many Granite Staters.
In New Hampshire this year, the median rent for any size apartment exceeded $1,200, according to an August 2024 report from N.H. Housing, which supports, finances and promotes housing solutions. And in 2021, just under a third of New Hampshire households spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing, a 2023 housing needs assessment conducted for the city of Keene found. Limited housing stock is also a problem.
Roughly 1,400 more housing units need to be built in the next decade to keep up with demand in the Elm City, the 2023 needs assessment shows. Across the state, there was a shortage of 23,670 units at the time N.H. Housing issued a report in 2023.
“When we’re giving you the statistics of how many people [are] living alone now, even if we can just get a fraction of those people to think about [house-sharing], we’re really going to make some serious impact on our housing challenge,” Mack said of the concept.
House-sharing could be helpful for people looking to rent, too. Across the state in 2023, the vacancy rate was only 0.8 percent and the rate in Cheshire County 1.8 percent, according to a report by N.H. Housing. A healthy rate is considered roughly 5 percent. In fact, there hasn’t been a healthy rate in New Hampshire in about 15 years, according the N.H. Housing report and Keene’s hasn’t risen above 4 percent in over a decade, the city’s needs assessment said.
These prices and shortages have serious implications for families on the margins. Hundred Nights shelter Executive Director Becky Beaton told The Sentinel in September that the rising cost of housing is a key factor driving homelessness. In June, the organization reported a growing number of unhoused families.
In the annual point-in-time count of people who are unhoused in New Hampshire, the numbers rose 52.1 percent between 2022 and 2023, the highest increase in the past five years, according to the NH Coalition to End Homelessness.
A potential solution
With 47,000 New Hampshire residents living alone in two-plus bedroom houses, according to a handout from the Monadnock Resource Alliance, at least that many more spaces could be added if every household decided to rent out a room.
House-sharing can add to the stock immediately, whereas development projects take time and can be expensive.
While a number of development projects, like the transformation of a former school in Keene to affordable housing units, an affordable housing project in Peterborough and the completion of new workforce housing on Perry Lane in Swanzey, over the past two years are adding additional units, they make only a dent in the roughly 1,400 needed in Keene in the next decade. N.H. Housing said in a 2023 report that the state was short 23,670 units.
These types of projects are also subject to lengthy permitting processes and unpredictable issues during construction. Mack said house-sharing is a unique solution. “This seems to be … the easiest way to really make an impact in an immediate way.”
Although this wouldn’t generate the needed single- and multi-family homes, if more individuals moved into these rooms, it could free up larger spaces for people who need them, said Chris Freeman. Freeman, the executive manager of Belltower Property Management in Keene, helps manage the business’s eight “co-living” buildings it rents. Rather than rent the whole house, Belltower individually leases the roughly 30 bedrooms across the eight buildings, and the tenants share the rest of the living spaces.
“Each individual that we place into a bedroom is removing demand for a bedroom or studio apartment, and then that bedroom or studio apartment could become available” to a small family, for example, Freeman said.
He’s witnessed the demand for spaces like these. “Demand fluctuates seasonally, peaking in summer, but it remains steady enough for us to expand this model. Challenges, like room listing constraints on platforms such as Zillow and Facebook, have impacted our reach, but we continue to adapt,” he said. The business had 350 people request tours for these spaces last year.
Julianna Dodson, executive director of the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship, noted that this solution doesn’t make new housing development any less important. “What we are saying is that shared housing needs to be a part of every housing conversation,” Dodson said. Hannah Grimes is also part of the Monadnock Resource Alliance.
“Just because it’s not [a] new shiny something,” she said of house-sharing, “it’s not less valuable.”
Challenges to encouraging house-sharing
Although the solution sounds simple enough, it could be challenging to convince homeowners to rent spare rooms, Dodson said.
“It’s not new,” she said. “But it is newly coming up in our more modern vernacular as a very appropriate and even preferred solution.”
The hard part could be getting people to look past western social norms about housing, she said.
“I think the biggest barrier to shared housing is this obsession that western communities typically have with privacy and hyper-individualism.”
Annamarie Pluhar of Dummerston, Vt., has lived with housemates for most of her adulthood and wrote a book about house-sharing called “Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates.” She also runs a nonprofit, Sharing Housing, Inc., out of Dummerston that helps people interested in shared housing transition to this kind of living. She was a speaker at the recent talk on shared housing put on by the Monadnock Resource Alliance.
“The more people think shared housing is a reasonable solution, the more likely it is that people are going to do it,” she said. “At the moment, it feels sort of countercultural and a little risky … I can’t tell them it’s not risky, but I can tell them that you minimize your risk by having a good selection process,” something her organization helps with.
Pluhar, a self-proclaimed extrovert, believes it goes against human nature to live alone.
“A lot of people live alone and we never question it. So I think that … I will have done my job right if we change as a culture, so that you look at something and go, ‘well, why do you live alone?’”
Innovations in policy
Dodson believes that in addition to cultural shifts, policy changes are needed.
“The scale at which we need to normalize this, we do need innovation in policy there right now,” she said.
One example she gave of the “soft infrastructure” she’d like to see implemented to encourage shared housing is a formal matching program to help people find housemates, something another New England state recently put in place.
MaineHousing adopted a pilot program for house-sharing in April, which helps to match people with extra space in their homes with housemates.
Currently, there are 24 spaces available in Maine due to the program, according to a MaineHousing spokesperson.
The program is the result of state legislation to support home-sharing for senior citizens, and the housing authority rolled it out by hiring a third-party platform that specializes in matching housemates. This platform also features listings in six other locations outside of Maine.
Nesterly, the third-party platform, completes background checks on each host and renter, requires references and requires renters prove they are employed or in school as part of their screening process.
“We know there have been several good matches in Maine and that there are now two dozen or so listings … for hosts in Maine,” MaineHousing spokesperson Scott Thistle said. Although not feasible for everyone, he said, it can be helpful where it works.
“We believe that as people become more aware of the program it will grow in popularity, but again it may not be the solution for all housing needs,” he said.
“This is a small pilot program, and while it’s a helpful tool, we don’t see this as creating a significant difference in the state’s housing stock,” he noted.
“Like all pilot programs, we are using this one to gather a better understanding of what works best and what might be improved upon.”
This article is being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.
