Fed up with living alone, Germany's elders get roommates

Anita Schmidt loves her apartment balcony. It gives her a great view of this city. And it lets her keep an eye on her roommates. If they stay out too late, they know they might have to reckon with her.

"She sometimes asks us the next morning what we're doing out at that hour," says roommate Karl-Heinz Röttjer.

Mr. Röttjer is not exactly a greenhorn, living in a big city for the first time. Far from it. In fact, none of the five roommates who share this apartment is younger than 57. Ms. Schmidt's teasing about breaking curfew is a reassuring reminder that they are looking out for one another.

"We always check in on one another," says Röttjer, a divorced watchmaker.

The five have been living together in a renovated flat in this Communist-style building for more than a year. They've spurned the regimented, sometimes isolated, life of a nursing home for the shared living of their salad days.

Their successful experiment is being copied in more than 200 other homes across Germany. Experts expect that number to increase as the swelling ranks of elderly Germans decide where they want to spend the rest of their lives.

"There is a long time between the end of family and career, and really getting old," says Holger Stolarz, who wrote a series of studies on housing and aging for the German senior foundation KDA. "That is a big time period and there is a need to find alternative ways of living."

The primary options until now have been either alone at home, or in assisted-living facilities. But senior home costs are becoming prohibitively high, and the German government is less and less willing to pay the difference when pension plans don't cover the cost.

"There is the question whether we can continue to finance this in the future," says Hanno Schaefer, spokesman for the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth. "Flat-sharing by seniors is a way to house people in the way they'd like and ... it's also affordable."

Like many social movements in Europe, this trend has its roots in northern Europe. In Switzerland and Sweden, advocates and officials have begun phasing out nursing homes in favor of specified care facilities. The Netherlands, says Stolarz, boasts five times as many house-sharing projects as Germany.

"The cities and developers support it much better," he says. "There is also federal support in the form of an organization that offers advice."

Indeed, most European countries, which are struggling to cope with aging populations, have been slow to support such endeavors. But the emergence of arrangements like the one in Dresden suggest the idea is going mainstream.

The movement in Germany is still in its early stages. Many who are now in their 60s and 70s have never shared an apartment with anyone but their families, says Dorothea Nagel, a Dresden roommate who has become the group's unofficial spokesman.

"Many think they are too young for something, which is ridiculous, and many just don't think it's for them," says Ms. Nagel, who fields questions from curious seniors when presenting the idea at health fairs. "I just tell them to come over and see for themselves."

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