Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates - Softcover

Shared housing-- It s not just for graduate students anymore. In fact, as the book, Sharing Housing, notes, these days all kinds and all ages of people are coming together to form alternative households. It makes sense in terms of environmental sustainability, it makes sense in terms of the economy, and it makes sense in terms of personal well-being. Consider, for instance, that three people sharing one house use about the same amount of heating fuel as would one person. Think about homeowners with rooms to spare but incomes that won t cover their expenses. Think about an elderly widow who longs for day-to-day companionship, or a single renter who d rather not or can t afford to live alone. It s no surprise, then, as National Public Radio recently reported, that 15.4 million Americans lived in multi-family households last year, an increase of 11.6 percent since 2008. But while finding roommates or finding established households to move into is easy for graduate students, the process can be daunting for others. Where do you advertise rooms for rent? What questions should you ask a potential housemate? How will you share household chores? What do you do if a living situation isn t working out? Annamarie Pluhar s book provides a practical how-to for retiring boomers, millionaires, single parents, senior citizens, twentysomethings and professionals in every walk of life who can benefit from sharing the cost of a roof. At the same time, they can live a more sustainable lifestyle through shared resources. While most people choose to share housing for economic reasons, Pluhar says, I hope that by following the process laid out in the book, readers will find the comfort, health, and safety that having a good housemate can provide.

For the past sixty years, Americans have concentrated on building bigger houses farther apart from each other. It's been environmentally ruinous, and it's made us kind of lonely. Here's a good practical antidote! —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth This book is great! Full of commonsense advice and great tips, relevant for people of any age seeking to take on a housemate.—Elizabeth Mills, OBE Hon. Director, Homeshare International, Oxford, England This book is incredibly helpful to anyone thinking of living with housemates. [It] makes clear what works. Pluhar has the experience to make her teaching points in a completely practical and gentle way. She has taken a topic, which has great relevance in our world where sharing will have to become more usual, and made it lucid and readable. Bravo on a job well done! —Jacqueline Olds, MD Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School Co-author of The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the 21st Century I think this book will become a “must have‚” in the years ahead as people want to or are forced to find ways to conserve resources, space, and emotional energy! —Annette Leahy Maggitti Program Director, St. Ambrose Homesharing The time for shared housing has come. Those of us who work with women interested in building community through sharing housing resources are thrilled to see a book such as this to guide our work and also to make available to women such as those joining Golden Girl Homes. Annamarie has brought together wonderful stories and a terrific framework for building rental income while sharing lives. I highly recommend it to anyone looking at this option.—Connie Skillingstad, President, Golden Girl Homes, Inc.