Single Women Living Together: Taking the future of housing into your own hands

Because guess who's not providing housing?

Feb 05, 2024

This is part one of a series looking at solutions that focus on solving or mitigating issues that affect single people of all ages.

two woman standing beside woman sitting in front of table — Photo by Kelsey Chance on Unsplash

Hi, I’m Renée, a finance and business journalist, writer, and content strategist. The Budgette is a chill newsletter about single finances and is published twice a month to more than 2,000 subscribers, some paid - thank you. I prefer to write when I have something to say and it gives me time to speak to financial, legal, and other experts. When I’m not here, I work on content strategy and execution for Canadian and U.S. publications and brands. If you want to work together, message me or you can find me on LinkedIn.

Some housekeeping notes: I’m in the process of moving the newsletter to Buttondown, so this will be the last newsletter here on Substack (you can read the FAQ here). Please note there will be technical hiccups, as I’m experiencing already. Thank you for your patience.

Housing seems to be top of mind for… everyone. Either you have it, you don’t or you’re thinking about having it when you’re older, on a fixed income, can’t afford rent and you don’t want to go to a long-term care home.

I’m currently comfortable but there is a major REIT company who has their eye on my building. At least that’s what their submitted architectural plan said a few years ago. Currently, money is fairly expensive to borrow, so they’re not going to do anything in the immediate future but in the far(ish) future, they just might. By then, I’ll be of an age where I don’t want to attempt a mortgage, and finding a place to rent that doesn’t require me to sell body parts or open an OnlyFans account seems impossible.

For some, it’s too late to wait for the various levels of government to do something, so when Pat Dunn, 74, and founder of Ontario-based Senior Women Living Together, (SWLT) found herself struggling after the death of her husband a decade ago, and was living in her car, she knew she had to do something.

“I had a good job. I had spent some time early in my career with my kids,” Dunn says. “But as soon as they went to school, I worked, so I contributed to [the Canadian Pension Plan], have a partial pension and I haven't been frivolous with my money. So how come I was poor?”

It is a concern as Sarah Kaplan, the director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy at the Rothman School of Management said in a Canadian Press interview. She said that older women have faced economic struggles for years due to the gender pay gap and being caregivers to children and parents. Then there are subsets within this group such as Indigenous, racialized, non-binary, persons with disabilities, and transgendered people who make even less income throughout their lifetimes.

Plus, women live longer, according to Statistics Canada. In 2020, life expectancy at birth was 81.7 years overall with males’ and females’ life expectancy at 79.5 and 84.0 years, respectively. Plus, Canadians are expected to spend 71.3 years in good health.

This means that a combination of age, health, and a higher risk of poverty means that senior women can find themselves struggling to find adequate housing just at the time they may not be in the best of health, and may not have money to age in place or afford long-term care (LTC) fees. That’s if they want to go into an LTC. (Spoiler, a lot don’t, especially since the pandemic.)

Dunn created a Facebook group in 2019 looking for other older women who might be interested in living together and sharing rent. To her surprise, she got hundreds of responses.

“When I started [the Facebook group], I thought I’d be lucky to get 10 women in my local area to chat about living together,” Dunn says. “The first week I opened [it] up, I had 50 members. By the end of the month, I had 200. I was just dumbfounded. I didn't know what to do with that.” The group currently has 700 members.

Dunn says that since 2019, rents have doubled. Rentals.ca’s January 2024 report found that over the last two years, asking rents in Canada have increased by a total of 22 per cent or an average of $390 per month. The average rent as of December 2023 is $2,178.

If you’re living solely on CPP, you could get anywhere between $760 and $1,079 per month. If you add in Old Age Security (OAS), you could receive a maximum of $785 a month.

The math isn’t mathing.

“So you're stuck with where you are, if you're lucky enough to not be evicted by the corporation that owns your building,” she says, explaining that this situation has happened over and over again to the women who are on her Facebook group. This means they can’t build any savings as they’re dealing with rental increases so they often can’t pay for a move, which can cost up to $1,000.

“And unless you have a great big family who can help you move, they end up in shelters or living in their car as I did or until they hopefully save enough to [move to a new place] but by then they might have lost all their furniture.”

How does SWLT work?

SWLT is open to single people who identify as a woman, 55 years and older, and living in Ontario. What you do is sign up to the platform, create your profile and search the member directory.

From there, you join groups to find compatible homemates. Dunn says that the platform provides tips and checklists on how to choose your potential future homemates. Once you have your group, you create your homemate agreement and begin looking for a place.

Sometimes that means moving into a home that another member already owns, or SWLT will work with a confirmed group to find a home. Dunn says another option is for the group to work with a real estate investor associated with SWLT who will purchase the home and become your landlord.

Speaking of landlords, Dunn says private landlords are eager to work with SWLT because they know senior women are great tenants. The issue that comes up is affordability.

“Some of them are kind of neat and they really do want to help. But [they’ll say] it's only $1,000 for each person but some [SWLT] members can't afford $1,000, but the landlords can’t do it for less because their mortgage rates are so high.”

One example is a conversation Dunn had with two brothers who were renovating their mother’s house. "They were sweet men whose mother had gone into a seniors’ residence, and they thought it would be really fun to fill it with senior women.”

When they talked about money, the landlords couldn't meet the affordability threshold because the rent from the house was going to help fund their mother's rent in the seniors’ residence. “They were really disappointed.”

For now, SWLT operates solely in Ontario but Dunn gets messages from across Canada and the U.S., showing that there is a need for housing for senior women.

“We get a lot of U.S. women trying to join our Facebook group and I turned them all down,” she says., “Because we can't serve people when we don't even understand the rental culture where they live.”

For requests from across Canada, Dunn keeps a list for each province for now. There are plans to look into how to maintain brand consistency and create sister groups, plus ways to increase funding that is more than Dunn putting in her own money. Right now, the SWLT has a board of directors and other volunteers in place. “It's on our strategic plan to start considering that in 2025.”

This is part one of a series looking at solutions that focus on solving or mitigating issues that affect single people of all ages. Next issue: More with Pat Dunn on why you can’t just move in with family or friends, and about looking for someone who is like-minded or ‘shares the same values.’

Teaser for the next issue:

“The phrase, ‘like-minded women’ comes up a lot in the Facebook group and I think to myself, ‘well, like-minded about living together or like-minded about the other 100,000 things that you can talk about when you're living together?” says Dunn.

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