The Brief

Trudging across the top of Bromley Mountain Ski Resort on a sunny afternoon in January, Matt Folts checks his smartwatch and smiles: 14 degrees Fahrenheit. That is very nearly his favorite temperature for making snow. It’s cold enough for water to quickly crystallize, but not so cold that his hourslong shifts on the mountain are miserable.

Folts is the head snowmaker at Bromley, a small ski area on the southern end of Vermont’s Green Mountains. The burly 35-year-old sports a handlebar mustache, an orange safety jacket, and thick winter boots that crunch in the snow as he walks. A blue hammer swings from his belt.

It is nearing the end of the day for skiers, but not for Folts. He’ll work well into the evening preparing the mountain for tomorrow’s crowd. Cutting across the entrances to Sunder and Corkscrew, he heads toward a stubby snow gun used to blanket Blue Ribbon, an experts-only trail named in honor of Bromley’s founder, Fred Pabst Jr. The apparatus stands a few feet high, with three legs and a metal head that’s angled toward the sky. Two lines that resemble fire hoses supply the device with water and compressed air, which it uses to hiss precipitation into the air. As the water droplets fall, they coalesce into snowflakes.

“If it was warmer I’d be a yeti,” says Folts, referring to wetter snow that, if conditions were just a bit balmier, would leave him abominably white. But at these temperatures the powder he’d just made bounced lightly off his sleeve. “That’s perfect.”

Yet perfect fake fluff like Folts’ poses a climate conundrum. On one hand, making snow requires enormous amounts of energy, which creates planet-warming emissions. On the other, a warming planet means that artificial snow is increasingly essential to an industry that, while admittedly a luxury, pumps over $20 billion annually into ski towns nationwide. The good news is that, in the face of these growing threats, resorts have been dramatically improving the efficiency of their snowmaking operations — a move they hope will help them outrun rising temperatures.

American ski areas logged more 65 million visits last season. A sizable chunk of those likely came during Christmas week, when a resort can make — or lose — a third or more of its annual revenue. The Martin Luther King Jr. and Presidents Day weekends are similarly vital. But ensuring that there’s a surface to slide on is an increasingly fickle business.

Snowpack in the Western U.S. has already declined by 23 percent since 1955, and climbing temperatures have pushed the snowline in Lake Tahoe, California — which is home to more than a dozen resorts — from 1,200 to 1,500 feet. A recent study found that much of the Northern Hemisphere is headed off a “snow-loss cliff” where even marginal increases in temperature could prompt a dramatic loss of snow.

Matt Folts checks a snowmaking gun that is blowing fresh flake on the Blue Ribbon trail at Bromley Mountain Ski Resort. Tik Root / Grist

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By one estimate, only about half of the ski areas in the Northeast will be economically viable by mid-century. Research suggests that Vermont’s ski season could be two to four weeks shorter by 2080, while another study found that Canada’s snowmaking needs will increase 67 to 90 percent by 2050. At Bromley, snow guns have been essential for years; without them, the resort’s mid-January trail count would have likely been in the single digits, rather than 31.

Opening terrain, however, comes at a cost. It takes a lot of horsepower to move water up the hill under pressure, and compress the air the guns need to function. Bromley’s relatively small operation, which produces enough snow each season to cover about 135 acres in three or more feet of the stuff, chews through enough electricity each year to power about 100 homes. All that juice adds nearly half a million dollars to the resort’s utility bill.

But Bill Cairns, Bromley’s president and general manager, says the system is actually much more efficient than it was just a decade ago. “I used to spend about $800,000,” he says. He’s now able to produce more snow for around half the price. “The reduction in cost with snowmaking has totally been a game changer.”

Mastering the 'black art'

Powder days start with specks of dust high in the atmosphere. As they fall, water droplets attach to them, forming snowflakes. Ski areas like Bromley replicate this natural process using miles of pipes that feed water and compressed air to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of snow guns scattered across a mountain.

Early guns mixed compressed air and water inside a chamber, and then used air pressure to propel water droplets skyward through a large nozzle. This was the type of system Fred Pabst Jr., of beer family fame, spent $1 million installing in 1965, making his resort one of America’s earliest adopters.

“It was a black art. We knew nothing,” says Slavko Stanchak, whose inventions and expertise have made him a legend among snowmakers. It was an era when energy was relatively cheap and resorts would rent rows of diesel-powered compressors that threw whatever snow they could generate on the hill. But as energy costs rose in the 1990s and early 2000s, so did the impetus to innovate.

“We focused on making the process viable from a business standpoint,” Stanchak says.

He eventually launched a consulting company that helped ski areas, including Bromley, design or improve their snowmaking operations. On the water side of the equation, Bromley spent the 1990s improving its piping network and added a mid-mountain pump to help get H2O from its ponds to its trails. (Much of the water eventually returns to the watershed during the spring melt.) But the amount of water needed to carpet a ski hill in snow remains relatively fixed from year to year, so there are only so many efficiency gains to be had. Compressing air is what really eats into a budget.

“The air is where the little dollar bills fly out,” says Cairns, adding that two diesel compressors can consume a tanker truck of fuel every week.

The 1990s also saw more efficient snow guns come to market. Tinkerers discovered that devices with multiple small holes, instead of a single large aperture, could utilize water, rather than air pressure, to force fluid upward. This allowed them to move the compressed air nozzles to the outside of the barrel, where they would primarily break the water stream into droplets — a far less strenuous function than forcing them out of the gun.

“An old-school hog might use 800 cubic feet per minute [of compressed air]. This one here uses about 70,” Folts says, pointing toward a tower gun from the early 2000s that stands about 15 feet tall and, unlike the ground guns on Blue Ribbon, can’t be easily moved. Up the hill sits a newer model that can get by on closer to 40 cubic feet per minute, or CFM, and a bit farther down the slope is the resort’s latest tool, which under ideal conditions can use as little as 10. That’s a roughly hundred-fold increase in efficiency.

The state-backed Efficiency Vermont program urges resorts to swap in as many of the more efficient devices as possible. “That work got a real big boost in 2014, when we did the ‘Great Snow Gun Roundup,’” explains Chuck Clerici, a senior account manager at the organization. Before then, it had been doing a handful of sporadic replacements. The roundup retired some 10,000 inefficient models statewide, and, overall, Clerici says snowmaking operations are now using about 80 percent less air than they used to.

Bill Cairns, the president and general manager of Bromley Mountain Ski Resort, with a map of the resort and its snowmaking system.

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While Efficiency Vermont doesn’t separate savings that are the result of snowmaking upgrades from, say, those tied to building improvements, it reports that its efforts to help ski resorts use less energy have saved more than a billion kilowatt hours of electricity between 2000 and 2022. That’s nearly a million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions or the equivalent of taking more than two gas-fired power plants offline for a year.

“The bigger projects we’ve had over the years have been snowmaking projects,” says Clerici. “We don’t have that many instances in the energy-efficiency realm where you can swap something that uses one-fifth of the energy.”

Standing next to the building that houses Bromley’s air compressors, Cairns points to a concrete slab with two manhole covers that once fed massive underground diesel tanks. “Underneath was fuel,” he says. To his right is a large pipe marked where the carbon-spewing generators used to connect to the rest of the snowmaking system. Now it’s cut off.

One snow gun at a time

Bromley is among the many snowmakers that have been able to eliminate, or drastically reduce, its dependence on diesel air compressors. Electrifying the job has also allowed some resorts to incorporate renewable energy. Bolton Valley, in Vermont, features a 121-foot-tall wind turbine. Solar panels now dot the hills of many others, including Bromley, which leases a strip of land beside its parking lot for a solar farm. The array produces more than half the power its snowmaking system consumes.

America’s snowmaking industry has been historically based on the East Coast, where natural snow can be especially elusive. But that’s changing. “We’re doing a lot more work out West,” says Ken Mack, who works for HDK Snowmakers, one of the largest equipment manufacturers. One of the company’s executives recently moved to Colorado to help meet demand.

The snow guns that HDK sells currently may be reaching the limit of how little water and compressed air they use. “We’re probably getting to a point where we’ve gone as low as we can go,” says Mack. That’s required finding gains in other arenas.

One step snowmakers can take, says Mack, is to better track how much energy they use, ideally in real time. He’s in the midst of trying to help revive a metric called the Snowmaking Efficiency Index, or SEI. It’s a measure of how many kilowatt hours it takes to put 1,000 gallons of water worth of snow on the hill, something Stanchek pioneered years ago but never quite took hold. (For reference, under ideal circumstances it takes about 160,00 gallons to cover one acre in one foot of snow.)

If publicly released, such data could provide transparency and allow ski areas to boast about their efficiency. That’s particularly appealing given that sustainability and environmental stewardship are increasingly top of mind for consumers. But because SEI varies considerably from mountain to mountain, and by temperature, it will likely be most effective as a tool for resorts to compete against themselves, rather than each other.

This year, Bromley’s SEI ranged from about 23 in the warm, early weeks of the season to mid-teens when temperatures dropped. Cairns consistently tries to beat those numbers and can monitor them from his office. If the number ever spikes, he can search for an open gun, leaking water line, or other culprit.

“Anything below 20 is really good,” Cairns says. “So we’re trending the right way.”

An arguably more revolutionary development in snowmaking is the move toward automated systems that can be operated almost entirely remotely. One obvious benefit is reducing the need to find people willing to schlep around a mountain in the dead of night, when temperatures can dip into single digits. More importantly, automation allows resorts to ramp snowmaking up and down quickly, which is particularly useful as global temperatures climb.

Snowmaking can occur when the mercury drops to about 28 degrees F (though the process is optimal at around 22 degrees or less); a threshold Mother Nature sometimes crosses for only brief periods. When it does, resorts can take advantage with a press of a button, instead of having to spend the time dispatching a crew out to fire up all those guns. The ability to operate in shorter time windows also means less energy is needed to run pumps and compressors — and get people up and down the mountain.

“You’re done sooner,” says Mack. Where it might take 100 man-hours to cover a trail, automation could cut that to 20 or 30. “It’s absolutely a savings. But it also gives you a little bit of reserve if you need it.”

Europe is far ahead of North America when it comes to automation, in part because governments have subsidized the daunting expense of running electricity and communication lines across a mountain. The cost of installing the technology can quickly run into the millions and, without subsidies, the benefits for American ski areas have been limited largely to smaller mountains in warmer climates, such as in the mid-Atlantic, where it is vital to surviving. But bigger resorts in snowier locales, including Stowe, Stratton, and Sugarbush in Vermont and Big Sky in Montana, have been testing the equipment.

“The future of snowmaking is definitely going to be automation,” says Cairns. “It’s just a lot of money, and nobody really wants to subsidize that yet.”

Bromley is testing one semi-automated gun that could avoid the wiring issue. It uses the existing compressed air supply to spin an internal turbine that creates just enough energy to run a small onboard computer. By monitoring the weather conditions, it can automatically adjust the rate of water and air flow to produce optimal snow.

“Those guns don’t need any power,” says Folts, as he finished adjusting the position of one gun and moved to the next. “That’s kind of another next level.”

Until then, Folts and his crew lumber on into the night, one gun at a time.

For more than 15 years, botanist Naomi Fraga of the California Botanic Garden has been trying to collect seeds from the rare Death Valley sage, for safekeeping in a vault of native California seeds. Each time, she's come home empty handed. But this year, with the desert in the midst of a big bloom, she's trying again.

"It's a little bit of a gamble," she says. "But, you know, the plant's having a really good year. I feel hopeful."

The plant has silvery-green pointy leaves, fuzzy buds and striking deep purple flowers. But it is challenging to study and to sample. Fraga says she often has to hike or scramble up mountainsides, or drive on backroads to find it. Very little is known about the plant's pollinator. And in exceptionally dry years, the Death Valley sage doesn't flower at all – meaning no seeds either.

The sage's habitat is mostly protected, within the boundaries of Death Valley National Park. But climate change doesn't respect park boundaries – and could push these plants that are already living on the brink into even more existential peril.

Naomi Fraga examines the flowers of the Death Valley Sage.

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"You can imagine that if conditions were to get more difficult with a changing climate, it's going to be harder and harder to collect seed," Fraga says.

In late March, Fraga headed into the foothills of the Nopah Range, near an abandoned mine, to check on one of the largest populations she knows of. And for the first time since 2009, she found the seeds. Soon, she says, she'll return with a team to attempt the first big harvest of Death Valley sage seeds.

A bee pollinates a Death Valley Sage in the Nopah Range near Death Valley.

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The first day of fall semester for a university freshman is often stressful. Not for Vanessa Menera, an 18-year-old who’s the first in her family to attend college.

Last year, she arrived 15 minutes early to her first fall class with an internship and campus job already in tow, plus a mental map of Cal State University Dominguez Hills, a sprawling, nearly 350-acre institution in the Los Angeles area’s South Bay.

The already confident student possessed even more motivation to make the most of her time on campus because of a program she took last summer: The First-Year Experience Summer Program.

“Everything was so easy to me, and I'm really grateful, because I know it was because of that First Year Experience that I was able to do that,” said Menera.

The summer program is one of several strategies Cal State Dominguez Hills seeks to expand as it combats a half-decade enrollment slide that’s unraveling its finances. But it’s not the only approach to fiscal right-sizing. Nor is Cal State Dominguez Hills alone in combatting large drops in its student population.

That’s because the money that the country’s largest public four-year university system needs to properly educate its students isn’t there. Now, California State University is embarking on a detailed, sweeping plan to enroll more students as part of an all-out push to bring much-needed cash to the workhorse system of 22 campuses that educates 471,000 students.

Ten campuses, including Dominguez Hills, saw double-digit enrollment declines in fall of 2025 compared to fall 2020, when the first full academic year of the COVID-19 pandemic began.

The loss of enrollment is a major driver of the financial struggles many of the system’s campuses face. The Cal State’s chancellor’s office says the system is facing a $2.3 billion budget gap in the current academic year. There’s a bright spot, though: Cal State officials say the system overall is on pace this year to beat state enrollment targets for the first time in four years.

People walk past the exterior of the Innovation & Instruction building at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson on Feb. 19, 2026. Photo by Zin Chiang for CalMatters Still, a key state lawmaker admonished the system’s under-enrolled campuses for missing its enrollment targets.

“I'm concerned that these campuses may be overfunded,” said Assemblymember David Alvarez, a Democrat from Chula Vista, at a December legislative hearing about Cal State’s finances. He is chairperson of the Assembly’s budget subcommittee on education and a key player in deciding how much state money universities receive. His worry? Other campuses with rising enrollments need the money to educate their ever-growing student body by hiring more professors, tutors and other staff to support students.

The state funds campuses based on how many Californians they enroll; by educating fewer students than what the state pays per student, the campuses are technically collecting more revenue than their enrollment levels would permit. That’s because the state pays schools for the number of California students they’re supposed to enroll, not how many they actually enroll.

By that measure, San Francisco State last year collected close to $50 million more in state dollars than its enrollment levels indicate it should receive — the campus enrolled about 5,300 fewer Californians than state goals stipulated in 2024. Cal State Dominguez Hills was taking about $7 million more. Conversely, Cal Poly Pomona was down about $20 million, because they enrolled 2,500 more students than the state’s target.

California is also eyeing multi-billion-dollar budget deficits, putting even more pressure on lawmakers and school systems to use money wisely.

The Legislature last year required Cal State to submit a report by March 1 detailing how campuses with enrollment struggles plan to attract new students and meet their state targets. Campuses sent their turnaround plans to the system’s chancellor’s office by December.

CalMatters conducted a dozen interviews and issued six records requests for this story.

Spotlight on Cal State Dominguez

Cal State Dominguez Hills’ enrollment is down 20% compared to 2020 and its finances have suffered. As a result, campus officials laid off 38 non-faculty staff and managers in 2025.

The school projects it will lose an additional $8 million this year, cutting deeper into its reserves, which have dwindled from $46 million in 2022 to a projected $10 million this summer.

The campus’ graduation rates fall below the systemwide average. And the campus historically has posted lower retention rates, meaning more students quit after one or two years compared to other campuses in the system. Dominguez Hill’s retention rate has grown in the last year, however.

The school enrolls the highest share of undergraduate students in the system who receive the federal Pell grant for low-income students — 69% compared to a Cal State average of 51%. Systemwide, those Pell students graduate at lower levels than students who don’t receive the grant.

Dominguez Hills’ turnaround plan includes a campus goal of enrolling about 800 more students to hit its enrollment target by 2027-28. More students plus planned systemwide tuition hikes and a new student-approved campus fee are projected to generate $25 million in additional money.

To reach its enrollment goals, the campus will lean on approaches that have demonstrated success, including the First Year Experience summer program, which Dominguez Hills started in 2022. Through the program, about a quarter of the freshman class enrolls in up to two free college courses during the summer before fall term. These are all general education courses required for graduation, with an emphasis on teaching students how to study well. The program also engenders a sense of community among students and campus staff.

Other strategies include attracting new students and keeping more of its current students. Another is to re-enroll students who’ve previously dropped out. It’s an approach that’s top of mind for campuses across the state: California is home to about 3.5 million adults with some college credit but no degree. Even a miniscule bump in the students who return to school could eradicate a campus’ enrollment woes.
Another budget-stabilizing effort may mean additional job losses. Campus professors are now meeting regularly to find ways to combine courses and run fewer sections of the same course. This helps the school average more students per course, but it’ll likely mean fewer lecturers — instructors who lack the full-time benefits and job safety of tenured professors.

Systemwide, 63 degree programs were discontinued by the Board of Trustees in 2024.

A student walks up the stairs in the Innovation and Instruction building at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson on Feb. 19, 2026. Photo by Zin Chiang for CalMatters Dominguez Hills in February reversed course on terminating six majors, including art history and philosophy. Student advocacy spurred the restoration. The school also determined that cutting individual programs made less sense than reviewing all majors to find other ways to integrate academic programs, said Kim Costino, the school’s interim provost, in an interview.

“Everyone is hopeful that we are going to be able to create a more economically efficient curriculum that serves students better,” said Terry McGlynn during an interview. He is a biology professor at Dominguez Hills who is chair of the academic senate, a faculty group that shapes campus academics.

But “there's clearly going to be some pain involved,” he added.

Summer session to keep students longer

The school cited in its report to the system that expanding the The First Year Experience program is one way to increase enrollment.

The campus spends $635,000 annually to run it. Almost 84% of students in the program advanced to their second year of college in fall 2024 — well above the 66% for students who didn’t sign up for the First Year Experience, according to data the campus shared. For a school desperate to undo its enrollment slide, keeping the students it has — and their tuition dollars — is a key strategy.

Any incoming freshman can enroll in the First Year Experience.

One reason Menera knew the campus so well when fall classes began? An extra-credit assignment for her environmental studies course over the summer required her to identify every vending machine on campus.

Student Vanessa Menera, 18, in the Innovation and Instruction Building at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson on Feb. 19, 2026. Photo by Zin Chiang for CalMatters The First Year Experience also features activities that reinforce what students learn, such as a field trip to a museum for an English course led by a guest author whose book the professor assigned to students. For her environmental studies class, Menera said that she carried a trash bag for more than a week to visualize how much waste people accumulate.

The school also awards a $150 scholarship to students who complete a summer-experience course. But for students who work over the summer or help care for family members, that amount alone may not be enough to persuade them to attend the program, said Costino. She ran the summer program until December.

The summer courses are long. Most meet twice weekly for four hours, so a student in two courses is in class for about 16 hours a week. Menera worked anyway that summer, maintaining the job she had during high school at TJ Maxx in Anaheim, some 20 miles from campus. She continues to work now, logging 17 hours a week at a campus convenience store on top of a full academic load. The summer program mentally prepared her for long school and work days, she said.

Costino thinks the program’s growth won’t be in students enrolling the summer before freshman year, but instead in students who earned a D or F in a course their first year and need to make up the class the following summer. While students can presently retake classes, they have to pay for them. Providing free make-up courses that either replace or average out a previous low grade helps the school retain more students who are on academic probation or just lost academic confidence after a bad first year, Costino said.

Re-enrolling students who dropped out

Cal State Dominguez Hills is seeking to expand its efforts to re-enroll students who’ve dropped out. Since 2021 the school has re-enrolled nearly 1,100 such students for fall term through its “Once a Toro, Always a Toro” program, named after the campus mascot.

While these students represent a tiny portion of the campus’ annual enrollment, they lead to instant revenue for the school from tuition and fees. It’s a few extra million dollars for the school, and it costs about $300,000 to $600,000 annually to maintain the re-enrollment program.

Once these students return to Dominguez Hills, most graduate. Data the campus shared with CalMatters show that earlier cohorts of the re-enrolled students have graduation rates of around 50% three years after they return. The numbers grow to about 70% after six years.

The school is now targeting any student who dropped out in the last 15 years or so, said Sabrina Sanders, the program director of Once a Toro.

She maintains a list of 10,000 formerly enrolled students. Annually, about 1,000 apply, around three-quarters are admitted, and roughly 300 to 400 enroll. Some who were admitted don’t enroll for several reasons, including prior low GPAs that make them ineligible for financial aid.

One of the students who returned is Wynette Davis. The 27-year-old is four classes away from finishing her bachelor’s degree in psychology after dropping out two years ago.

Davis transferred to the university from community college in 2022. She was on track to earn her bachelor’s in 2024 and even walked the stage during the spring graduation ceremony, needing just a few more classes that summer to finish her degree. But tragedy struck: Her daughter’s father died in spring 2024, and the shock derailed her academics. That spring and summer, she failed four classes. Davis left as a result.

She tried to re-enroll a year later, but learned she owed the university tuition money and couldn’t qualify for financial aid because her failing grades dropped her below the campus’ threshold for aid eligibility. Davis was ready to give up on earning a bachelor’s until an email from Once a Toro entered her inbox.

A staffer with the program helped Davis receive a waiver for her past-due account balance as long as she promised to pass her classes for the year, Davis said. The staffer also worked with the school financial aid office to reinstate her eligibility for financial aid for her spring classes after her grades improved.

Last fall Davis retook the classes she previously failed, passing them all this time. She’s in two classes this spring and will need two more next fall to earn her bachelor’s degree.

“If it wasn't for the Once a Toro, Always a Toro program, I probably would not have been back in school right now,” Davis said.

Another setback is the changing nature of academic requirements. Students who were gone for a decade may have pursued majors that don’t exist or were heavily altered, so the courses they took toward their majors might not satisfy new requirements. Sanders and the school’s advising teams collaborate with academic department deans to convert the re-enrolling students’ old coursework into the updated expectations for existing majors. Or re-enrolled students pursue an interdisciplinary major that combines old coursework with new.

“There's a sense of shame that comes with dropping out of college and having someone there to kind of put those thoughts and put that inner dialogue to rest” was key, said Stephanie Esquivel, a returning student who re-enrolled in 2022 after leaving the campus her freshman year in 2007.

She credited Sanders with helping her transfer her community college units to her university major. To Esquivel, a team like Once a Toro shows that the campus desires returning students and invests in the social infrastructure to help them, she said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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, 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."

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

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.

In Los Angeles, the soundtrack is familiar. Car horns, the whine of leaf blowers.

But in the middle of Chinatown, another sound cuts through the din: the rhythmic hum of washers and dryers from a trailer parked outside the Alpine Recreation Center.

Chinatown hasn’t had a laundromat for as long as anyone around can remember. This mobile setup – run by the nonprofit The Laundry Truck LA – has become the neighborhood’s de facto laundromat, offering the service for free to locals, twice a week.

For 70-year-old Sam Ma, it’s been a relief.

Ma, a retired construction worker, picked up freshly-laundered items — two pairs of pants, a hat, and some socks, bundled in a white garbage bag for the bus ride home.

He usually washes his clothes by hand. But about two weeks ago, he was hit by a car. Bruises and cuts cover his hands, making it difficult to scrub heavier items.

“The things I can wash, I wash,” he said in Mandarin. “But these are too thick. It’s too hard.”

Rebel Fox of The Laundry Truck L.A. hands a garbage bag filled with newly-laundered sheets to a local.

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Nearby, Laundry Truck employee Rebel Fox checked him out with a clipboard after handing him his load.

“We help a lot of seniors out here,” Fox said. “And we offer folding services, too. It really helps people who don’t have the dexterity in their hands.”

The Laundry Truck started out in 2019 providing laundry services to people experiencing homelessness across Los Angeles and has expanded to high-need communities, like Eaton Fire survivors.

In February, the nonprofit started operating in Chinatown under a year-long contract with Council District 1, showing up every Wednesday and Thursday at 9 a.m.

A sink or bathtub

Chinatown advocates say the lack of a laundromat is especially hard on low-income tenants living in older, neglected buildings.

“These landlords aren’t doing much to keep it updated,” said Sissy Trinh, executive director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance.

Maintaining laundry rooms may require major plumbing upgrades and hookups that many landlords avoid.

Newly-constructed residential buildings are typically being constructed with in-unit laundry.

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Josie Huang

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Advocates say in buildings that do have shared coin-operated machines, they may be broken or in constant use. Many residents decide to launder clothes by hand — in sinks or bathtubs.

“In one building, the sinks were so small, people had to cut their sheets in half just to wash them,” Trinh said. “They’d wash one half, then the other.”

A reversal of access

Those who could benefit from a laundromat include seniors on fixed incomes, and workers living paycheck to paycheck, including garment workers and home health aides.

“You’re talking about low-income, financially-stressed households,” Paul Ong said.

Ong, who studies urban inequality at UCLA, says Chinatown reflects a broader pattern: as neighborhoods change, basic services can disappear.

Each pile of dirty clothes is labeled with customers' names.

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Josie Huang

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The neighborhood’s last full-service grocery store closed in 2019 after the property was sold to a developer. Meanwhile, new market-rate housing has gone up, catering to higher-income residents with amenities like parking and in-unit laundry.

“The irony is that historically, laundry was bread and butter for the Chinese community,” Ong said.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese immigrants built livelihoods around laundry work — one of the few industries open to them at the time.

Nowadays, laundry options have become hard to come by.

Seeking a lasting fix

Residents without access to machines have to leave the neighborhood entirely to find a laundromat in Lincoln Heights or Echo Park, which has seen its own laundromats disappear.

Laundry can be spotted drying on balconies across Chinatown.

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“The long-term, permanent solution is that a laundry service opens up,” in the neighborhood, said Council member Eunisses Hernandez, who represents Chinatown.

Hernandez says constituents have asked for a laundromat from the time she was knocking on doors as a City Council candidate.

Hernandez, who is up for re-election this year, says the neighborhood could benefit from a community-run laundromat offering affordable services.

“If private industry is not making that investment in Chinatown then perhaps it’s up to the city – and the people of that neighborhood – to build something for them,” she said.

In the meantime, Hernandez has directed about $250,000 from her district — using TFAR payments from developers building larger projects — to cover a year of mobile laundry services.

The contract with the Laundry Truck runs through next February.

After that?

“We’ll keep filling the gap until we get to a permanent solution,” Hernandez said.

Could that solution be combined with housing?

Some community advisors to a new affordable housing project being developed on the northwestern edge of Chinatown have been pushing for a self-service laundry that would be open to other neighborhood residents, says Eugene Moy who sits on the advisory board of New High Village.

But any fix will take time. That project, Moy said, could be two years out from even breaking ground.

Taking a load off 

Back at the truck, the machines continue to spin. By mid-afternoon, nearly 18 loads of laundry are done.

The trailer for the LA Laundry Truck is set up outside the Alpine Recreation Center, across from Castelar Elementary School.

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Josie Huang

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LAist

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Two months in, there are kinks to work out. How to get more residents to take advantage of the unit's capacity? Its machines can churn out 40 loads per shift.

There is also the question of whether some seniors are physically able to transport their laundry even a few blocks.

But the service is starting to get regulars. One woman on her second visit stood by the trailer, cradling just-washed clothes in her arms while clutching her daughter's teddy bear, now a sparkling white.

"If it keeps going, I'll keep coming," said the woman who gave her last name as Mo. "It's very convenient."

Her apartment building doesn’t have a laundry room. Sometimes she asks a friend next door if she can use theirs. With three children, the cost adds up quickly.

Thinking aloud, she calculated how much she saved that day.

About $8, she estimated — money she said could now spend on her kids.