The Roommate Audition

The Roommate Audition

Photographs by Natasha Dangond

Text by Joy Shan

Audio edited by Lyra Smith

Between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. on Labor Day, fifteen women filtered through Shoshanna Howard’s living room. Howard, a 33-year-old small-business owner in Oakland, had posted on Craigslist and Facebook about an opening in her four-bedroom house. The room cost $915 a month, was near a train stop, and had a window and a door that could lock. It was, in other words, a rare gem — particularly in a housing market where a reasonable rate for a living room, cordoned off by a Japanese screen, is $1,300 a month. Howard asked only women to apply, and within 24 hours of posting the ad, 30 hopeful messages hit her inbox — and dozens more continued to stream in over the following weeks, even as the first candidates began to arrive on her doorstep.

These 15 visitors had made it through the first round, the written portion of the application process. “You can tell when somebody copies and pastes the response and is sending it everywhere,” Howard said. Over the course of countless roommate-finding cycles, she had learned to plant hidden messages — references to household values or to the specifics of the neighborhood — to see if applicants mentioned them. Each candidate was assigned a half-hour block, during which she would tour the house and meet Howard and her 32-year-old roommate, Holly, for an in-person interview.