A Part of the Group

Seeking a Bargain in a Shared House And Finding a Little Bit of Community

In the evening, when they're home from work and need to unwind, Anita Randall, 59, and Lois Magee, 51, sit together in their kitchen to do a crossword puzzle. The two roommates, who live in Friendship Heights, fill in what they can, then take wild guesses, laughing as they scribble in whatever word will fit.

Sometimes their younger roommates will drop in to forage in the fridge. When one of the two 25-year-old women meanders by, she'll stop and chat, then head back to her room.

"In some ways, it's like a family," Randall said. "It's like having kids there. They have a sense of what's going on."

Group houses are knitted into Washington's fabric like pinstripes into a suit. But while multiple roommates have long been part of life for the young and underpaid, people like Randall and Magee are also finding appeal in these setups -- and not just as a way to save rent. They can also create community, particularly at a time when adult life is becoming less stable.

Overall, group houses make up a relatively small sliver of U.S. homes. The last American Housing Survey, released in 2005, found that out of 108 million households, there were just 711,000 composed of three to eight unrelated people. Most of those were renter-occupied, and a little less than half were made up of people who had moved in the past year. The survey doesn't break down these households by age, except to note that 32,000 include people 65 and older.

In Washington, it isn't hard to find middle-aged adults sharing a home. On Roommates.com, a search for housemates 40 and up returns dozens of hits. Craigslist has plenty of ads like this one, from early September: "$495 Male to Share 5 bedroom 2 bath Single Family House: The current tenants are 4 guys, ages 30-50. One works at Bullis School, one has his own business, one works at radio stations and takes classes and one works at Starbucks."

Angelique Shofar, who rents two extra bedrooms in her Capitol Hill home, is in her 40s. Her son, 10, splits time between her house and his father's, so when it comes time to pick roommates, she tries to include the boy in the process. In some ways, he's better at it than she is, she said.

Children "are not in a position to intellectualize and rationalize everything," she said. "They respond from their instinctiveness."

Then there is Mike Smith, 45, who owns a seven-bedroom Victorian off 14th Street NW but chooses to live in the one-room basement. He rents the rest to five young men, most of whom are just out of graduate school. It isn't a big moneymaker, he said, but he sees it as a kind of service to the housing-strapped community.

"It was built to house people, and that's what I'm doing," he said.

For many, living in a group house is simply a matter of economics, said Jack Demick, a psychologist who studies adult development at Brown University. But people are also taking longer to reach the traditional milestones of adulthood, he said, and it shouldn't be surprising to see people living with roommates later in life.

In the 1970s, Demick said, about three-quarters of women and two-thirds of men under 30 had finished school, moved from home, gotten married, started a career and had children. Now, just 45 percent of women and 31 percent of men hit those benchmarks that early.