When Gary Calhoun got a call from his caseworker late in 2023, telling him she’d found a program that could set him up with a room to rent, he was skeptical, to say the least.
By then, Calhoun had reached a stage in his homelessness where he wasn’t sure he’d ever live inside again—or live much longer at all.
“I’d basically given up,” he told The Oaklandside. “People who I’ve trusted, they broke my heart.”
Calhoun became homeless after multiple family members died in quick succession and a leg injury made it difficult for him to work. For months he slept outside in Richmond, later upgrading to a friend’s van. He hadn’t showered in weeks when he heard about the opportunity from his Journey Health caseworker. He thought she was joking.
But a week later he got another phone call, this time from a program called Home Match. They connected Calhoun with Deborah Zike, an Oakland homeowner who had an extra room in her large Eastlake house, just a couple blocks away from Lake Merritt.
Zike stumbled on the Home Match program by chance, glimpsing a flier at Studio One, the city’s arts education center. She’d been thinking of renting a room to a tenant, something she’d done before, both with her late husband and on her own. The flier said the program helped pair prospective renters with homeowners who had extra space. Zike decided to sign up on a whim.
“Why not just try something different?” she remembers thinking. “Then I met Gary and he told me about his circumstances. I thought he’s probably had a lot of people say no to him before, and everybody deserves a second chance.”
Calhoun moved in on New Year’s Day. When he first saw Zike’s house, “I was overwhelmed, looking around like a 5-year-old kid,” he said. “I started living my life all over again.”
A match to meet the unique needs of renters and homeowners
Home Match was founded in Marin County in 2012, later expanding to San Francisco, and then parts of Alameda and Contra Costa counties. It’s run and funded by the nonprofit Front Porch Community Services, receiving additional support through contracts with local agencies in some of the places it operates. The Alameda County arm is more nascent, starting in 2019 and funded by a state grant but not through local cities.
Home Match tries to take some of the risk and anonymity out of renting independently or through a platform like Craigslist. The free service vets both tenants and landlords, facilitates meetings between them, and helps them draw up a personalized lease agreement.
Many, though not all, of the homeowner participants are older residents, a majority women, who are either struggling to pay their property taxes and mortgage with their Social Security checks or are feeling concerned about continuing to live alone.
“I would say there’s two major motivations for joining the program,” said Luke Barnesmoore, director of strategy at Front Porch Community Services. “One is the increased income.” Older people are the fastest-growing segment of California’s homeless population, with many of them becoming unhoused for the first time late in life.
“The other is a good number of folks in their 70s and 80s living at home alone, maybe struggling with social isolation, or maybe just at risk of a fall—but otherwise really able to happily and safely age in their home if someone else is living there,” Barnesmoore said.
Home Match staff checks out their property, making sure the rental room is in good condition, and they get to know the landlord-to-be and what they’re looking for. The “home-seekers” provide similar information about themselves. The renters are typically people who can’t afford the cost of renting an entire apartment in the costly Bay Area and are facing displacement or stuck commuting hours to work. Sometimes they too just want companionship.
The “home provider” doesn’t need to own their place; primary tenants can use the program to find a roommate, too.
Throughout the 29 currently active Home Match households in Alameda County, the average income of home providers is $52,000 and $40,000 for tenants, according to Barnesmoore. The pairs can also come up with a work-trade agreement, exchanging reduced rent for up to 10 hours per week of tasks like grocery shopping or yard maintenance.
The handful of rooms currently available to rent through Home Match in Alameda County come with a range of amenities, conditions, and prices, from $800 to $1,500 a month.
Home Match facilitates intake interviews, runs background checks on the participants, and verifies their income. In addition to drafting a standard lease, the program helps the new roommates come up with a detailed agreement around sharing their space, ensuring they’re on the same page about aspects like guests, kitchen use, alcohol, and TV time. Temperature is a big one, Barnesmoore said. It won’t work out if one person likes to blast the heat and the other wants to keep it cool, but those questions don’t always come up in typical rental processes.
“We want to make sure we’re putting folks together who are socially compatible and have some shared communication patterns, so they have the tools they need to get over those little things that come up in living with somebody else,” Barnesmoore said.
In one case, an older homeowner clearly had some qualms about sharing her bathroom, said Rachel Matthews, associate director of Home Match Alameda County. So Matthews ended up pairing her with another woman her age, easing some of the discomfort.
The program wants the landlords to grapple with the meaning of sharing their personal space, sometimes for the first time in decades or since a spouse died.
Before pursuing a roommate for a homeowner, Home Match susses out, “Are you really comfortable with this scenario?” said Matthews. “Because if you aren’t, this might not really be a good fit for you.”
Zike showed her space to two other home-seekers before meeting and deciding to rent to Calhoun, she said. The two connected quickly.
“Gary has a really good rapport with my dog—he’s just really great with animals,” raved Zike. Calhoun also helps maintain Zike’s lawn, and they watch TV together—“FBI” and “The Equalizer” are the current lineup. Calhoun likes living in Oakland, which he notes has gained quite a few new buildings since he grew up in the city decades ago. He likes to take his motorcycle down to the lake, riding around and blasting Michael Jackson from speakers.
“Everybody in this world needs someone else”
In Alameda County, Home Match started strong in 2019 until the pandemic hit and participation plummeted. It didn’t pick back up until this past year, evolving from one new match in the 2022 fiscal year to 16 in 2023, Home Match said. Staff attributed this to Alameda County’s COVID-19 ban on evictions, which was in effect from March 2020 until April 2023.
“The eviction moratorium created a really heightened degree of fear among potential home providers in Alameda County, who were saying, ‘Hey, this is my home. I can’t have somebody move in if I have no recourse if it doesn’t work out,’” Barnesmoore said.
According to Matthews, the program saw no evictions in any of its households over the past four years and “less than a handful” in the over 400 matches made since the service started in Marin in 2012.
Home Match pairings offer more control to the homeowners than typical landlord-tenant scenarios. Some tenant protection laws don’t apply when you’re renting out a room in a property where you live. Take Oakland’s Fair Chance Access to Housing Ordinance, which prohibits most landlords from asking prospective renters about their criminal history or using it to make a decision about whether or not to rent to someone. One of Home Match’s selling points, on the other hand, is the background checks it conducts on both homeowners and home-seekers.
But these “Fair chance” laws are passed for a reason—in recognition of the difficulty faced by people trying to re-enter society after incarceration and secure a stable home and job. The ordinances and other tenant protection laws are intended to prevent homelessness.
Barnesmoore said the Home Match background check is not a “blanket ban” on any type of previous conviction. Rather, it is meant to provide the “exceptionally vulnerable” older population that tends to find tenants through Home Match with the ability to make an informed decision about who lives in their home.
Home Match also watches out for relationships that could veer into caretaking territory. Staff is clear with homeowners that the task exchanges that are part of many of the rental agreements are designed for handiwork around the house, not healthcare or other professional caregiving.
If a particular match stops serving the needs of one of the participants, the program assists with the transition into caregiving or in finding another match and can help pay a departing tenant’s new security deposit.
“We want to make sure that folks are not only finding housing stability in our program but that they’re leaving the program into some degree of housing stability too,” Barnesmoore said.
Zike and Calhoun were so pleased with their match that they decided to bring in a second tenant through Home Match just a few weeks ago—a Modesto resident who’d gotten a job in Oakland but couldn’t afford his own place here. Calhoun said he’s hit it off with his new housemate.
“We talk a lot,” said Calhoun, who’s dealt with loneliness and grief after the recent losses of his sisters. “When he’s got problems, he can pull me to the side, and the same thing with me. Everybody in this world needs someone else.”
