Roommate Wanted

Living with roommates is a quintessential college experience for most people: get assigned to a stranger, move in with them, and learn to mesh your lifestyle, personality and habits with another’s. After college, though, more young people than ever before are choosing to move into living spaces with a group of roommates rather than seek out their own spaces.

According to a piece published in Forbes, young adults living with roommates in 2005 constituted 5.7% of all young people from ages 25 to 34. By 2015, that number had risen to 7.4%.

The reasons for this can be attributed to a variety of factors. Forbes states the Great Recession as the genesis for the shift, pointing to fewer rentals on the market after the housing bubble burst, and also to lower-paying jobs for young people. However, two Rhode Island residents gave more personal reasons why one might choose to live with roommates as a young person.

Alexis Henry, a 23-year-old living on the East Side, explained that costs were certainly a factor in her decision to live with two others when she moved to Providence last year. Splitting costs between three people allows her to have more disposable income, she said, and makes sense on her stipend-based budget while she’s working a post-graduate internship at Rhode Island Hospital.

“It worked out really well,” she said, of the past year with her two roommates. “We didn’t know each other.”

Things are cheaper for 24-year-old Julia Coache as well, who currently lives in Newport but is moving to the Federal Hill area of Providence in September to live with two roommates she does not know. She stated that while cost was a factor, it was not her primary motivation for deciding to live with others.

“I don’t think I could ever live alone,” Coache, a pediatric speech therapist at an ear, nose and throat doctor’s office, said. “It seems scary to me.”

Coache explained that roommates provides a sense of security in having another person living in the same space as her. Her roommates have looked out for each other in the past, she told Motif, and have developed close bonds.

“We end up kind of taking care of each other,” she said.

Those bonds have often developed into real friendships, which in turn can lead to a bigger circle of friends. Henry said her circle of friends expanded as the roommates she was living with this year introduced her to their friends and she was able to go out with them and do other things with them. It was also a benefit to be around people she didn’t spend her days with at work.

“For me, personally, it was nice coming home to two people I didn’t work with,” she said, noting that many of her coworkers were not her age and since she was new to the Providence area, her roommates helped her to meet a lot of new people.

Henry is currently in the process of moving to a new place on the East Side, near Fox Point. She is moving in with two new roommates, none of whom know much about each other. She connected with them through work and through mutual friends.

“Over the past year, I had a really good experience with them [my last roommates] and Providence,” Henry said.

Friendship is a big benefit to having roommates for Coache as well. “I’ve always ended up becoming really good friends with my roommates,” she said, explaining that she has lived with roommates during her undergraduate and graduate careers.

“I love living with roommates,” she said.

There also have been unexpected benefits to living with others for Coache. Living with roommates has allowed her to learn new things from them, she said.

“With every roommate I’ve ever lived with, my cooking skills have improved,” Coache said. Picking up on their methods and adopting them into her own life has allowed her to improve over time and learn about different types of food, she said.

“Anytime you form a relationship with someone else, you learn more about yourself through that,” she said.

However, living with other people is not without challenges. “You kind of have to be on the same page [regarding schedules],” Henry said. She pointed out that in adult life, most people are working similar schedules and she has not had any problem with her roommates’ lifestyles mixing with her own.

When she first moved in with her first roommate, before a third roommate moved into the apartment, Henry said one of the reasons living together worked for them was their similar living arrangements.

“We were both kind of looking for the same thing,” she said.

Looking to the future, both plan to continue rooming with others for the time being. Henry said she was independent right now and was enjoying living with others. “In a few years … I could definitely see myself living alone,” she said.

This was not the case for Coache, though, who said she would not like to live alone and did not see herself doing it in the foreseeable future.

“I think even if I had less debt, I think I would still pick living with roommates,” Coache said.