UNC placed 900 students on a waitlist for on-campus housing for fall 2024. In that same year, more than one in three older adults reported feeling a lack of companionship. What do these two situations have in common? They can be resolved simultaneously through intergenerational housing.
Despite ongoing renovations to Avery Residence Hall and UNC's plans to admit 500 additional first-years during this admissions cycle, demand for on-campus housing continues to outpace supply. For students who venture off campus to find housing, they'll discover that the average monthly rent for a Chapel Hill apartment is $1,500, far greater than the cost to live on campus.
Housing has been a problem at UNC for years and will continue to be under current proposals. UNC has plans to renovate six more residence halls in the next five years. Until 2030, we will continue to see fewer beds and more housing lottery panic for UNC students.
To manage a similar crisis, universities in Canada have begun adopting a Tinder-like housing system. SpacesShared is a company pairing elderly people who have additional rooms in their homes with university students looking for housing. They perform background checks on all individuals before move-in day, and they allow prospective matches to converse virtually to decide if they're compatible. The company even officially partners with universities to increase student confidence in the program. The best part of this arrangement? The average rent is between $345 to $590 a month.
UNC should consider adopting a similar program as a temporary solution to the housing crisis. While this solution isn't an end-state fix, it would allow instantaneous improvement to a problem which requires massive amounts of investment and construction to solve. A temporary, imperfect solution is better than being stuck in the status quo for another five years.
Elderly people are facing the opposite problem to undergraduate students. Their homes are too empty. My mom works as a geriatric psychiatrist and mentions that while her patients face a whole host of conditions, they all have one thing in common: they're extremely lonely.
After their children move out of their households, elderly people often find fewer reasons to immerse themselves in their communities and slowly retreat indoors. In 2023, 33 percent of older adults reported interacting with people outside of their homes once or less per week.
Intergenerational housing would enable socializing to become an everyday activity for elderly people. Homeshare programs like SpacesShared do not mandate that the elderly host and the student spend any time together, but by allowing the prospective pair to interview one another before move-in day, they aim to find individuals who are as compatible as possible and are more likely to socialize.
Of Chapel Hill's population, 12.5 percent are 65 years or older. Out of 60,000 Chapel Hill residents, this leaves a potential 7,500 residents willing to share their homes. Even if the real number is a fraction of that, it's still a signficant solution.
