Elle Gallagher is the perfect roommate. She pays her bills on time, she’s neat “without being a freak,” she’s an excellent cook, she doesn’t mind if you smoke a joint on the back patio, and she knows how to fix a dishwasher.

If I needed a roommate, I would ask her to move in with me tomorrow.

Yet despite her excellent cohabitation credentials, Gallagher, a Toronto resident who works two part-time jobs — one in child care and another as a virtual assistant — has had an exceedingly tough time finding a roommate.

And she thinks she knows exactly why.

Gallagher is 59, an age she believes scares off many people in the Toronto rental market, where those living in shared spaces skew much younger.

Gallagher wrote about her predicament recently on Bunz Home Zone, a popular Facebook forum where millennial-aged Torontonians post apartment listings and grievances about negligent landlords. It’s rare, however, that they read a grievance about themselves.

“I know I can’t be the only one over 40/50 years of age looking for a shared situation,” Gallagher wrote on Bunz. “But it seems that almost every (rental) ad has the caveat of ‘20-30 age group.’”

She’s right. Take a cursory look at any site advertising apartment rentals or sublets in Toronto and the phrases “seeking roommate in 20s-30s” and “perfect for college student or young couple” are everywhere.

“Please, don’t say no to a new friend or roommate simply because of their age!” Gallagher wrote. “Ageism is the one insurmountable barrier everyone faces eventually.”

It also appears to be the only barrier we aren’t afraid to erect. Of course, there’s plenty of unadulterated racism and homophobia in the Toronto rental market, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a prejudice flaunted as openly as ageism.

“I saw one place in Kensington that would have been perfect,” Gallagher told me over the phone. “But I guess they thought I’d be shutting down the vibe or something, because that was the one where the guy took one look at me and said, ‘Sorry, this isn’t going to work out,’ and shut the door.”

Gallagher is almost certain that age is the reason she’s being turned away from shared rentals, because prospective roommates are enthusiastic about meeting her when they speak to her on the phone or online (where she makes a point of not revealing her age). Yet when she shows up in person, it’s another story.

She isn’t alone.

Terry, a 54-year-old Toronto resident who asked to be identified by her first name only (because of her job), says she rarely even makes it to the door of shared-rental listings. “As soon as they hear you’re not in your 20s or 30s, you don’t even get a reply,” she says.

When Sheena Vickruck, 54, tried to rent out the spare bedroom in the apartment she shares with her husband, the mostly younger crowd who came to view the space were, she’s convinced, put off by her age. “Everything is positive until they see us,” says Vickruck. “They love the place, but they don’t want to live with mom and dad. It’s daunting because Toronto is so expensive.”

Eventually Vickruck and her husband hired an agency who found them a roommate: a 28-year-old German woman who’s in Toronto on a work visa. “Europeans are quite open to that (living with older folks),” Vickruck says.

Apparently Torontonians aren’t.

Virtually all the conversation about affordable housing in this city is centred on young people, largely young people who’d like to start families but can’t remotely hope to afford to buy, or rent, an appropriate property in Toronto.

But what’s lost in this narrative of struggling students and young parents is the reality that Toronto isn’t just expensive for millennials; it’s expensive, period. For young and old and anyone in between.

This makes it doubly ironic that many young renters won’t cut their older peers a break, because millennials are the prime advocates for housing equity.

Maybe to a generation insecure enough about adulthood to turn it into a scary verb — “adulting” — older roommates serve as an uncomfortable reminder that things don’t magically fall into place the moment you reach a certain age. There are ups and downs and, sometimes, when you’re 50, there are nights spent scouring Craigslist.

“I find there are many people around my age that have this idea of adulthood … as a sum of numbers: your age, your work experience, how much money you make,” says 33-year-old Elsa Ratz, a member of Bunz Home Zone. “But it’s OK to be afraid — to not have things figured out at any stage in life.”

Ratz is worth quoting, because she’s also been on the lookout for a new apartment. She doesn’t know Gallagher, but when she saw the 59-year-old’s post she sent her a message anyway.

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“I said, ‘If you’re looking for a place, maybe we can look together.’”

It turns out being an adult has very little to do with how old you are.