EPISODE 32 — Sharing Home Spaces: How to Make a Profile & Get Started Today!

EPISODE 32 — Sharing Home Spaces: How to Make a Profile & Get Started Today!

For many seniors, the cost of housing has become the biggest barrier to aging safely and independently. Too often, people fall into the gap of earning too much for Medicaid but not enough to afford living alone.

In this episode, Jamie sits down with Toni Wallick, Program Coordinator for Home Share Oregon, to discuss a practical, affordable solution: home sharing.

Home Share Oregon helps homeowners rent out unused rooms and connects renters to safe, affordable housing—using a simple online matching platform (yes, almost like a “dating app” for roommates). It’s a powerful way to prevent homelessness, create companionship, and make staying in your home financially possible.

Toni walks us through:
 • How the platform works
 • How to create a profile—even if you're not tech-savvy
 • Background checks, agreements, and safety steps
 • What renters and homeowners see during the matching process
 • Real success stories from right here in Oregon

If you're struggling with housing—or want to help someone who is—this episode is full of practical guidance and real hope.

🌐 Home Share Oregon: https://homeshareoregon.org

📞 Toni Wallick: 541-414-3156
📞 Team Senior: 541-295-8230

At Team Senior™, our mission is to guide you and support you through the maze of Southern Oregon Long-Term Care.

📞 For Team Senior resources, call: 541-295-8230

Or visit our website for more information: https://www.teamsenior.org/

Transcript

EPISODE 32: Sharing Home spaces- how to make a profile and get started today!

Host: Jamie Callahan
Guest: Toni Wallick, Program Coordinator, HomeShare Oregon

JAMIE CALLAHAN: Hi, this is Jamie Callahan with the Team Senior Podcast. Our goal is to simplify aging. Society grooms us to plan for retirement, but what about life beyond retirement, where the rubber meets the road? Perhaps you've had a stroke, or you've been diagnosed with cancer, or maybe you're forgetting things and now you have dementia. That's our area of expertise, and we are here to share our insight.

And now, the Team Senior Podcast.

Hi, this is Jamie Callahan, and I am in the studio today with Toni Wallick, who is the program coordinator for HomeShare Oregon. Toni, I want you to introduce yourself and tell us all about this amazing program.

TONI WALLICK: Thank you so much for having us, Jamie. I am really excited. I love talking about HomeShare. I think about—in 2016, our founder Homer Williams, who's a developer in Portland, looked around and thought, "There's a lot of soon-to-be elderly people that do not have a plan," and saw the senior tsunami coming and wanted to do something about it. He has a nonprofit called Harbor of Hope and started thinking, "What on earth could we do that's not building? We don't have time to build." And just thought, "Hey, we all had roommates in our life. Why not?"

JAMIE: So HomeShare Oregon is this program where a homeowner can list rooms for rent, and folks that need a place to live can look at those and also create a profile where they can find rooms for rent. Tell us about how that works.

TONI: Okay, so we have a website, which is homeshareoregon.org. And it just basically functions like a dating app. People think that's funny when I say that, but it's a relationship-building thing. You decide to participate, and then it'll ask you whether you're a provider or a home sharer, and then it leads you to our online platform that just gives you a lot of user-friendly questions. What's your ideal roommate? What are you looking for? How much can you pay? Things like that.

JAMIE: Do you have pets? All the things.

TONI: Yes, all that.

JAMIE: All the things. So one of the reasons why I was so interested in featuring HomeShare Oregon on this podcast is because Team Senior works with seniors that are looking for housing all day, every day. One of the biggest challenges that we face is the fact that Social Security, more often than not, is not nearly enough money to pay for independent living or assisted living. So when you fall in that gap where you don't have enough money to pay for your own housing in independent living—which typically in Southern Oregon starts at a minimum of $2,500 a month—but you also do not yet qualify for needing Medicaid, because Medicaid is not just based on your income, it's also based on what your care needs are.

If you do not need assistance with several of the ADLs that are identified by the Department of Human Services, like dressing, bathing, toileting, you have to be deficient in many of those areas to get qualified for Medicaid, where then Medicaid in Oregon will actually pay for you to live in assisted living. But let's say you don't need assisted living. You're in that gap. Your Social Security is $1,400 a month. You cannot afford your own apartment. You don't have a massive down payment. And you definitely don't qualify for Medicaid. Where are you going to live? So when I met Toni, she called me and she explained this program to me. Immediately, I wanted to feature her on the podcast because this is a way for seniors to be able to afford to have a place, not be homeless, and to be able to afford it. That's such a big piece.

TONI: Yeah. And we're really trying to prevent women from ending up on the street because we know they will be assaulted and they will be traumatized, and you don't ever get over that. We're hoping that we can work with DHS and several other organizations to have people think about it before they're in that situation. What am I going to need going forward? And maybe HomeShare can hold you up until you find your forever home.

JAMIE: So walk us through what the matching process looks like. So let's look at it first from the homeowner's perspective. So I am a homeowner. I've created a profile, I've described my home. I don't have any pets. I have this bedroom where it's a shared bathroom, and I'm going to charge $750 a month for that. Explain to me what someone would do to go in and have visibility to that to decide whether or not they're interested. And then what does the homeowner do to initiate the process of interviewing that person to be a candidate?

TONI: So, like I said, they end up being matched from whatever criteria they put in—the renters and the home providers. And so they will get emails of each other, like the home providers can look, "Here's all your tentative renters," and then the renters can look, "Here's all your tentative homes that might be interested." And then either way, they can email each other and decide if they're interested. We really wanted to make it self-sufficient because we know that there are other home share programs that are heavily case-managed, and they can only house like 30 people a year. We wanted to put this on steroids so that people could just make their own decisions, because there's all kinds of different families, and we don't want to dictate how they're going to live together.

JAMIE: Yeah. I really love this entire platform. I've been on your website several times, and I've directed a lot of people to go there and fill out a profile, because again, I get those phone calls all day, every day, from people that are looking for housing. And some of our very first questions are: What is your financial situation, which immediately leads to what are your care needs? Because if you don't have enough money and you don't have the care needs to warrant Medicaid, we have to figure out how to help you. This has been an absolutely brilliant solution for us in terms of a place where we can share with people that they can go and perhaps afford a place in their own neighborhood.

What are some of the greatest challenges? How involved are you, Toni? Do you know—are you meeting regularly and do you know what the greatest challenges or barriers are that people are facing with HomeShare?

TONI: Oh yeah. We do have a couple pushbacks. First of all, in dealing—like our biggest demographic is elderly women over the age of 55. Some of them are very tech-savvy, but there are some people, when you get into the seventies and eighties, who—"I'm not, I just have a flip phone. I'm not doing this." We're hoping we can actually—our tech can actually help them through the process, or we can help them with the process. Our lofty goal is that we would have navigators in every county so that they could go to the person and help them.

JAMIE: That is such a great point that I didn't really consider, but it makes perfect sense. So yes, when we look at women predominantly over the age of 50, some are tech-savvy, some—even if you have a smartphone, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have the ability to go in and develop a profile with pictures and all the things. So let's take that exact scenario. In today's world, what is available then to them today? Let's say I have a gal that has a house, and I know she has two empty bedrooms. One, she could use the supplemental income from renting out those bedrooms, and two, someone could really benefit from living there. But the gal that owns a home does not have the ability to make a profile. How are you going to help her?

TONI: We would ask her if she had any friends or relatives or anything that could help her establish, make her profile, and because it's open to anybody 18 or over that has an email address—or agencies can help people. That's why we're trying to develop relationships with government agencies so that they can sit down—case managers can sit down with their people and help them through it also. Or I could, if they're in Jackson County.

JAMIE: How is that going so far? How is that relationship-building going? Do you—are you getting assistance right now from DHS and the ADRC or the Rogue Valley Council of Governments? You can access all of those organizations that help people with housing? Are they helping these people get connected to you?

TONI: Yes, I think they are. I think they are. It's—you start small, and you have to build these relationships. We're hoping that they would support us monetarily, and because there's so many great things we could do with more funding.

JAMIE: Oh, sure. I mean, and what a massive solution this is. They would be foolish not to get completely behind your program, especially because it's not a program where you are trying to pull the strings or make connections or whatever. It's largely on the families to do it themselves, which I love. What types of support or training or mediation does HomeShare offer to someone when they are initially considering renting out rooms in their home?

TONI: We have, on our website, we have tons of blogs on all kinds of different things, like how to take great pictures, how to interview someone, what—just all the information you need. And then there's all of us. You can always call anytime. In fact, now people will get our number from 211 or whatever, or 211, and they'll get 20 people to call, and they call all those people, and by the time they get to us, they say, "Gosh, you're the only people that call us back."

JAMIE: I hear that all the time also. So I understand it's—when you're small business and you're truly built on the mission of assisting people, then you are always really on top of that.

TONI: Right.

JAMIE: I'm curious to know, you've been doing this for a while now, and surely you have come across some really incredible success stories. Share a couple of those with us.

TONI: Yeah, so I was asking my executive director, and she said—she came up with this one. We just did an interview—not a podcast. I guess it was an interview—with, it's called Empowered from Meg Ryan, and it's going to go out to 80 million people in the United States. So we're super excited about that.

JAMIE: Wow.

TONI: Starting in January. They interviewed Homer Williams, and they interviewed our executive director, and we're really super excited about that and bracing ourselves for the upheaval. But Savina came up with one of a story that she shared in that documentary. And it was someone who just wanted someone to stay in their house while they were in Ecuador over the winter, so she got somebody, and that worked out. And they were friends, but they were not really connected. And then this woman broke her hand, and she could do nothing—her right hand. So she could not write, she could not do anything. And her roommate was immeasurably helpful to her. And so that just bonded them. And now they are just—I'm sure.

JAMIE: Yeah. That's a great story. That's a great story. And I talk with a lot of women who have lost their spouses. And some of them definitely want to remarry and reengage in the world of developing a spousal relationship. But so many women really, when you ask them what will you do, they will say, "I just want to get a roommate." And so this is a tremendous way for folks to meet people and to some extent be able to pre-qualify. Talking about pre-qualifying people, does your website provide an opportunity for people to run background checks?

TONI: Oh yeah. We have—so everything, since we're a nonprofit, everything is free. We have free background checks for both parties. We have a rental agreement that—I tell people, like the last 10 pages of it is just questions where you're meant to, like, sit around a coffee table, drinking—just having a conversation about, "Okay, what's the laundry schedule? What's quiet hours? How do you feel about cooking together?" So you get all those things out in the open before they actually become annoyances or something you just didn't even think about.

JAMIE: If you've ever been a roommate, then you know that is a brilliant strategy, because I've been a roommate all through college, and I had some really fabulous experiences, and I have had some others that were not so great. And it's all communication, really. I love that. What are the goals—what are the goals for HomeShare Oregon over the next five years?

TONI: Our executive director definitely wants to have at least a thousand people a month coming and going. And we did find, when we first started, that people would get on the system and then they would just languish there and they'd forget about it or whatever, find somebody somewhere else and not—so we decided that we were going to—if you don't sign in once every 30 days, we unlist you.

JAMIE: Oh, okay.

TONI: Because we want it to be vital, and it works so much better where people are actually looking that are on there right now.

JAMIE: That's such a great point. You don't want to be the person who wants to rent a room looking at places where that person that has the room for rent hasn't even been on the website for 18 months. That makes no sense at all.

TONI: No sense at all.

JAMIE: Yeah. Yeah. Toni, tell us how we get in touch with you.

TONI: You can email me at toni, T-O-N-I, @homeshareoregon.org, or my phone number is 541-414-3156.

JAMIE: So that is how you reach Toni specifically. If you want to reach out to HomeShare, they have a brilliant website, which we've talked a little bit about today. It is homeshareoregon.org—homeshareoregon.org. There's also a phone number that's available to, I guess, everybody as a whole. And that number is 503-515-2397. Again, 503-515-2397. You're lucky to have Toni right here in your backyard. She lives here in Southern Oregon, and she has attended several events that Team Senior has been involved in, and we are such big cheerleaders for this program because we desperately need it. Toni, is there anything else you want to share with people?

TONI: Oh, I was just going to say about the phone number. So the 503 number is our main office in Portland, and you'll either get a phone call back from our executive director, me, or another part-time person. We just want to stress that we're really trying to get funding from cities and counties and stuff because we are so much cheaper than anything else, like shelters or transitional living or anything.

JAMIE: Well, and you're legitimately solving a problem that is a crisis nationwide. Housing—low-income housing—is a nationwide crisis, so this is a genuine solution. And I can't imagine that these organizations will not get behind you. Thank you so much for having us.

TONI: You're so welcome.

JAMIE: Thank you guys for being here. We are very grateful. We will do everything in our power to promote your program, and we look forward to having you back someday. Thank you so much.

TONI: Thanks, Jamie.

JAMIE: Thank you for listening to the Team Senior Podcast. We're here every week sharing new and relevant information. Remember that we're just a phone call away. Team Senior can be reached at 541-295-8230. Again, 541-295-8230. Until next time, this is Jamie Callahan.