This fall, international students have been dealing with enormous housing challenges: a vast influx of students from all over the world arrive, then can’t find anywhere affordable to live. Meanwhile, the country is filled with aging empty-nesters who have more bedrooms than they know what to do with. (Younger generations derisively refer to them as the “overhoused.”)
Goodness Ade, a 20-year-old student from Nigeria studying mobile application design and development at Algonquin College in Ottawa, was looking for a place to live when he stumbled upon a social enterprise startup called Sparrow that connects renters with homeowners looking for lodgers. (It is heavily government funded in an effort to address the housing crisis.) The platform introduced him to a retired government worker and her husband, who had two spare bedrooms in their home in Ottawa. They still have a mortgage and wanted tenants to help them with monthly expenses.
So far, it’s been a successful match. Ade is paying rent he can afford, the homeowners have increased income, and everyone is getting along. In this Maclean’s story, Goodness and his new landlords outline the surprise perks of the arrangement—a model that might, by necessity, become much more common in the years to come.
—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief
