David West raised four kids in Los Angeles working as a Hollywood cinematographer — no mean feat in such a pricey city. But a few years ago, his life took a hard turn.

“Everything went south. Divorce. My brother died,” he said. “My dog died.” On top of that, a string of clients who’d hired him for decades also passed away.

Before long, he’d burned through cash and damaged his credit. He moved to Fresno, Calif., and now, at 72, West is in a situation he never imagined at this stage of life but one that more and more older people are facing: renting a room in the home of a complete stranger.

“I tried to move, like, an apartment’s worth of stuff into a room,” he said with a laugh at how impossible it seemed. “You know, how do you do that? I still haven’t figured it out.”

West looked into a housing subsidy, but his income is just over the limit, so he’s grateful for the cost savings of a house share. His roommate, also an older man, covers Wi-Fi, utilities and cable. West volunteers his photography skills at the church where the man is involved and shares his Costco membership.

“It’s that give-and-take thing,” he said. “It’s trying to help each other out as much as possible.”

David West while working on a documentary in Brazil.

David West

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Roommates are skewing older

The high cost of housing means more people are being priced out of not only owning a home but also renting alone. The share of adults 65 and over looking to rent with a roommate has tripled in the past decade, according to the listings site SpareRoom.

“They’re not the biggest group of roommates, but they’re by far the fastest growing,” said the site’s communications director, Matt Hutchinson.

SpareRoom finds that roommates in general are skewing older. Young people are living with their parents longer, unable to afford moving out or simply trying to save up. Meanwhile, more people in their 50s, 60s and older are unable to make it on their own.

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

Baby boomers have been aging as housing costs across the U.S. have spiked. In 2023, more than a third of households headed by adults 65 and over struggled to pay housing costs, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, and the share is even bigger for women living alone.

“Older adults are more likely to be housing-cost burdened than working-age adults, and that gets more severe with age,” said Jennifer Molinsky, who researches aging and housing at the center. “It’s climbed up the income scale. So more and more, you know, middle-income people are struggling with housing costs than ever before.”

Older adults are also more likely to face major life events that can lead to financial strain. Caezilia Loibl, chair of the Consumer Sciences Program at Ohio State University, has researched the financial toll of chronic disease and the loss of a spouse at an older age.

“The shock is enormous,” she said, “and we see it very clearly in our data how the debt burden goes up and financial vulnerability goes up.” People were more likely to fall behind in debt payments, for example, see their credit score drop, file for bankruptcy and face foreclosure.

The upside of learning to live with less

Darla Desautel at an arboretum in Arizona. She appreciates not only the cost savings of a shared rental but also the flexibility to move to other places when she wants.

Darla Desautel

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Saving money may be the top reason that more older people are house-sharing. But some see other benefits.

“Oh, I think it’s wonderful. Maybe more of the way people used to live,” said Darla Desautel, who’s 74 and has rented with roommates for years, though she’s currently house-sitting in Minnesota.

She loves the flexibility of not being tied down and being able to move where she wants, and she thinks not living alone is healthier. She got along especially well with one roommate who also was an older woman.

“We had a lot in common, and that’s pretty special when that works out,” she said.

To be sure, there can be annoyances. One place was kept too cold in winter and too hot in summer. There can be smelly cat litter boxes or a roommate who talks on speakerphone in a common area. “Noise is huge. A lot of people think they’re quiet when they’re really not,” she said.

If she could afford it, Desautel said, she would rent solo, though “with a short-term lease.” But that would eat up more than half her income. In addition to receiving Social Security, she still works occasionally as a leadership consultant and coach, and she is a licensed secondhand dealer selling “other people’s junk.”

Desautel is proud that she has learned to whittle down possessions and live with less. “Right now I can move across country with 10 boxes shipped USPS and take a plane,” she said.

For now, that’s her plan, driving this time, to continue her house-sitting gig in Arizona for the summer. And when that ends, she’ll find her next roommate.

President Trump’s dreams of a White House ballroom have highlighted what was once a relative secret: the construction of a military bunker beneath the now-demolished East Wing.

The administration started knocking down the East Wing in October to make way for Trump’s long-desired White House ballroom, a project that will cost at least $300 million. The plan has drawn disapproval from members of the public and ire from architectural and conservation groups, one of which sued to block it back in December.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon sided with the National Trust for Historic Preservation this week, when he ruled that construction of the ballroom “must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.”

Yet, as the White House appeals the decision, Leon is allowing construction to continue for “the safety and security of the White House” — a nod to the administration’s argument that the renovation is about more than aesthetics.

That’s backed up in court filings from the case, as well as Trump’s own public comments.

A snapshot of the construction in February, after the East Wing was demolished to make room for a ballroom.

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“The military is building a big complex under the ballroom, which has come out recently because of a stupid lawsuit that was filed,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One over the weekend.

He said the proposed 90,000 square-foot ballroom “essentially becomes a shed for what’s being built under,” adding that the “high-grade bulletproof glass” windows would protect the facility below “from drones and … from any other thing.”

The existence of a World War II-era facility — called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) — has been an open secret for decades, especially after the government released photos in 2015 of White House officials sheltering inside on Sept. 11, 2001.

But little is known about the current status of the bunker, which CNN reported in January had been dismantled in the renovations, or what kind of structure might come to replace it. When asked on Monday to share more about the underground complex, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stayed tight-lipped.

“The military is making some upgrades to their facilities here at the White House, and I’m not privy to provide any more details on that at this time,” she said.

Trump was more forthcoming with reporters that same day, as he signed executive orders in the Oval Office, reiterating that the judge’s decision allows him to “continue building as necessary … to cover the safety and security of the White House and its grounds.”

Trump read through a handwritten note listing off the permitted upgrades.

“The roof is droneproof. We have secure air-handling systems,” Trump said. “We have bio-defense all over. We have secure telecommunications and communications all over. We have bomb shelters that we’re building. We have a hospital and very major medical facilities that we’re building … So on that we’re okay.”

For decades, little was known about the FDR-era bunker

The White House built the East Wing with an underground bomb shelter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, over concerns that the building could become the target of an aerial attack.

“This secret space featured thick concrete walls and steel-sheathed ceilings with a small presidential bedroom and bath inside,” the White House Historical Association wrote on social media in 2024. “Nearby rooms provided ventilation masks, food storage, and communications equipment.”

It has been upgraded in the decades since. On the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a number of White House officials under George W. Bush — who was in Florida at the time — took shelter there.

Former First Lady Laura Bush recounted the experience in her 2010 memoir, in which she wrote about being “hustled downstairs through a pair of big steel doors that closed behind me with a loud hiss, forming an airtight seal.”

President George W. Bush talks with Vice President Dick Cheney in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Eric Draper/The White House/Associated Press

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“I was now in one of the unfinished subterranean hallways underneath the White House, heading for the PEOC,” she wrote. “We walked along old tile floors with pipes hanging from the ceiling and all kinds of mechanical equipment. The PEOC is designed to be a command center during emergencies, with televisions, phones, and communications facilities.”

Key administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, were also there, seated at a long conference table in a small room. The government released hundreds of photos of that day — showing officials talking on landline phones and videoconferencing on large screens — in response to a Freedom of Information Act request in 2015.

Bush wrote that the Secret Service suggested the couple spend the night in the bunker: “They showed us the bed, a foldout that looked like it had been installed when FDR was president … we both said no.”

A decade later, when Barack Obama was president, the White House undertook a major, multi-year renovation project that involved digging a massive hole beneath the Oval Office, exposing what appeared to be a tunnel underneath. The General Services Administration (GSA) denied it was bunker-related, calling it a standard revamp of the air-conditioning and electrical systems.

A digging project near the West Wing, pictured in Jan. 2011, looked to many like bunker business.

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“However, what reporters and photographers saw during the construction appeared to go well beyond that: a sprawling, multistory structure whose underground assembly required truckload after truckload of heavy-duty concrete and steel beams,” the Associated Press wrote towards the end of the project in 2012.

It noted that the White House had tried to keep that work hidden by putting up a fence around the excavation site and “ordering subcontractors not to talk to anyone and to tape over company info on trucks pulling into the White House gates.”

Many people didn’t buy the official explanation for what some media outlets came to call “The White House Big Dig.”

A 2011 New York Times report cited unnamed administration officials speculating that the effort was actually “security-related.” People did not take the GSA’s story at face value, the article added, “despite the size of the hole, the controlled silence of the construction workers and the fact that funds were allocated after Sept. 11, 2001.” A 2011 Washington Post piece put it more bluntly: “It’s a bunker, right?”

Questions about the bunker surfaced again during Trump’s first term, after the New York Times and CNN reported that the Secret Service had rushed him inside and kept him there briefly during a night of Black Lives Matter protests outside the White House in May 2020. Trump later confirmed that he had spent time in the PEOC, but denied that he’d been rushed inside — told Fox News he had gone in briefly during daytime hours “more for an inspection.”

What we know about the new construction 

Still, the existence of a bunker — and plans to construct a new one — were not necessarily top of mind for people when Trump began demolishing the East Wing last fall.

Critics were quicker to call out the lack of public input and congressional authorization, the sheer scale of the proposed ballroom and concerns about environmental impact and historical preservation.

In January, as the legal battle unfolded, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the project was being undertaken with “the design, consent, and approval of the highest levels of the United States Military and Secret Service,” without elaborating.

“The mere bringing of this ridiculous lawsuit has already, unfortunately, exposed this heretofore Top Secret fact,” Trump wrote.

The National Capital Planning Commission voted to approve Trump’s ballroom plan on Thursday, days after a federal judge ordered construction to stop without authorization from Congress.

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In court filings reviewed by NPR, the Secret Service confirmed its involvement but kept details to a minimum.

In one signed declaration, Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn wrote that his agency was working with the contractor on “temporary security and safety measures around the project’s construction site,” which were not fully complete at the time.

“Accordingly, any pause in construction, even temporarily, would leave the contractor’s obligation unfulfilled in this regard and consequently hamper the Secret Service’s ability to meet its statutory obligations and protective mission,” Quinn wrote, before offering to brief the judge privately on more details, “including law enforcement sensitive and/or classified information.”

In a separate filing, Trump administration officials sought to submit further details in a classified setting so as to keep “the discussion of national security concerns” off a publicly available docket.

Trump allies have been similarly vague in other public settings, including at a National Capital Planning Commission meeting in January, where Josh Fisher, the White House director of management and administration, said: “There are some things regarding this project that are, frankly, of top-secret nature that we are currently working on.”

After a period of soliciting public comments, the commission, a government agency that meets monthly to provide planning guidance for D.C.’s federal land and buildings, held its approval vote on a tweaked version of Trump’s ballroom plan this week. It gave it the green light, despite the judge’s order just days earlier.