FRESNO, CALIF. — The share of adults 65 and older looking to rent with a roommate has tripled in the past decade, according to SpareRoom listings data. David West, a 72-year-old former Hollywood cinematographer who raised four children in Los Angeles, is among them — he moved to Fresno, Calif., and began renting a room in the home of a stranger.

West looked into a housing subsidy but found his income was just over the limit. Under his current arrangement, his roommate covers Wi-Fi, utilities and cable. West volunteers his photography skills at a church and shares his Costco membership with his roommate.

SpareRoom, a roommate-matching platform, finds that roommates overall are skewing older, while more adults in their 50s and older cannot afford to rent alone. "They're not the biggest group of roommates, but they're by far the fastest growing," said Matt Hutchinson, communications director of SpareRoom.

"Maybe 10 years ago they'd have looked at a one-bed or a studio and thought, 'Well, I'll rent that.' Now they're looking at prices and going, 'There's no way I could afford that,'" Hutchinson said.

In 2023, more than a third of households headed by adults 65 and over struggled to pay housing costs, according to researchers at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. The share was higher among women living alone, the researchers found.

"Older adults are more likely to be housing-cost burdened than working-age adults, and that gets more severe with age. It's climbed up the income scale, so more and more middle-income people are struggling with housing costs than ever before," said Jennifer Molinsky, a researcher at the Joint Center.

Older adults experiencing chronic disease or the loss of a spouse were more likely to fall behind in debt payments, see their credit score drop, file for bankruptcy and face foreclosure, according to Caezilia Loibl, chair of the Consumer Sciences Program at Ohio State University. "The shock is enormous, and we see it very clearly in our data how the debt burden goes up and financial vulnerability goes up," Loibl said.

According to SpareRoom, young people are living with their parents longer because they cannot afford to move out or are trying to save money. The platform said the trend has coincided with the overall aging of the roommate-seeking population.