Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Dean Kaplan and Sarah Heintz chatted in the apartment they share in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Empty nesters are faced with a challenge: they hate to leave their home, but maybe it would be practical to get a smaller, cheaper place with more people around and less snow shoveling in winter. Meanwhile, grad students have a different conundrum: their university may be in a high-rent area, but they don’t have much money.

Idea!

Dugan Arnett at the Boston Globe describes one creative solution that is working out for both empty-nesters and young adults.

“After living with more than a dozen different roommates in his young life, most of them strangers, Dean Kaplan is well-versed in the particulars of those first meetings — the short introductions, the perfunctory pleasantries, and then the quick getting on with life. …

“In late August, though, as he stood on the front porch of a sizable multistory house in Cambridge ready to meet his newest roommate, he found himself uncharacteristically nervous and eager to make a good first impression.

“Of all the roommates he’d had in the previous few years, Sarah Heintz would be the first septuagenarian. In fact, Kaplan, a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and Heintz, a 77-year-old whose grown daughter now lives across town, are part of an experiment in connecting young people in need of cheap rent with older residents who wouldn’t mind a little extra companionship and an occasional hand around the house.

“The notion is driven by the Boston area’s housing crisis, which has propelled rents through the stratosphere [while] some 90,000 spare bedrooms are going unused in the homes of aging empty-nesters.

“That got a pair of MIT urban-planning graduate students thinking: Those rooms might be valuable to young people, especially students. And they might also provide a way for older people, who increasingly are living alone, to stay in their homes as they age.

“ ‘They get helped around the house, doing everyday sorts of things — walking the dogs, going grocery shopping, technology tutoring, and feeling that they can help a young person get started in their life,’ said one of the students, Noelle Marcus.

“To match these odd couples, Marcus and classmate Rachel Goor last year launched a startup called Nesterly, which works roughly on the principles of a dating app, with searchable online profiles and features that help work out details of a lease. …

“That day in August when Kaplan showed up on Heintz’s porch, he came with his mother and some luggage stuffed with clothes. Heintz invited them in and gave them a tour.

“At first glance, they would seem an unlikely pairing. … But as Heintz led Kaplan and his mother through the house, his nerves started to ease.

“ ‘The walls are covered in books,’ Kaplan said later. ‘And that made me feel at home immediately.’ …

“Under the terms of their lease agreement, rent is $800 a month (about half the cost of apartments Kaplan had been looking at before the arrangement with Heintz), knocked down to $700 if he devotes eight hours each month to helping Heintz with a range of chores.

“But even without that incentive, they said, they’ve discovered they like doing favors for one another. He helps in the garden and gives her a hand logging into her e-mail account; she offers him rides to Market Basket and recently taught him the proper way to gut a fish.” Read more here.

I love this idea, but I just have to say one thing. There are plenty of septuagenarians who don’t need help logging on to their email accounts. It’s a lazy journalistic assumption that is really starting to grate.