A few years ago, I spent a few nights in a home in Chebisa, Bhutan, a beautiful high-mountain Himalayan Village near the Tibetan border. Four generations lived together. As dinner was being prepared, the great-grandparents were visiting with a famous elderly postman, who, in his youth, had won recognition as the fastest postman in the nation. One of the grandmothers was holding and cooing to the baby, while the grandfather played a game with pre-teen children, freeing the granddaughter to make the fire and cook the meal. Everyone was engaged, every senior and child attended with love, and everyone was cared for.
For most of human history, this is how people lived, in multigenerational family clusters. In societies organized through a relational worldview, individuals are placed as parts of larger, interdependent wholes: family, clan, village, tribe, and all of life. Tribal Nation writer Ilarion Merculieff describes this as heart, “a deeper portal of profound interconnectedness and awareness that exists between humans and all living things.”
Multigenerational living reinforces this kind of worldview, but most Western societies have broken the family apart. In the United States, individuals tend to construe themselves as self-actualizing, their well-being arising from their independence. Multigenerational households are rare. Children grow up and leave their parents behind, starting new “nuclear” family units. What is the driver of this historically unusual way of living?
Households are a function of housing as much as culture. As I’ve written about elsewhere, the single-family, two-generation patterns of real estate occupancy were heavily promoted by the secondary beneficiaries of single-family-housing in the early 20th century: real estate and home mortgage brokers, automobile tire manufactures and oil companies. With the goal of expanding the demand for more homes, they lobbied for zoning regulations limiting who could live in a home, such as successfully inducing the newly formed Federal Housing Authority in the 1930s to extend mortgage credit to suburban single-family homes, while restricting it from co-ops and more extended living arrangements.
Such forms of living, however, have huge economic and social costs, as over-stressed and under-supported parents must attend to their children and aging parents from their isolated apartments or homes. In pursuit of “independence,” we have created a fragmented, disassociated society, losing much of our intimate kinship and mutual support inherent in extended families. As a result, eldercare and childcare—as extra-familial professions—are not only relatively modern inventions but costly ones.
In 2020, the median cost of in-home care with a home health aide was $54,912; the median cost of a private room in a nursing home was double the cost of a home health aide, at $105,850. As a result, 24 percent of seniors living in the United States are classified as socially isolated, which is associated with an approximately 50 percent increased risk of developing dementia, a 32 percent increased risk of stroke, a 68 percent increased risk of hospitalization, and 57 percent increased risk of emergency department visits.
Meanwhile, childcare has long been left to a hodgepodge of formal care centers, grandparents and older siblings, nannies, nursemaids, and more. Parents stitch together childcare from pre-kindergarten programs, after-school activities, and summer camps because there is no single, affordable solution. In 2024 the average cost of providing center-based care for an infant in the United States was $1,230 per month. Affordable childcare is defined as costing 7 percent or less of annual household income, but there is not a single state where a family earning the median household income meets this definition of affordability. Meanwhile, housing itself is becoming unaffordable: 35 percent of American households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, while there is not a single county in the United States where a family earning the minimum wage can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment.
Taken together, the costs of housing, childcare, and eldercare are unmanageable for the majority of American families. Many working parents, sandwiched between the needs of their children and parents, go into debt to provide for their care, which reduces their ability to fund the cost of continuing education or purchasing a home. This particularly impacts women, who often provide child- or elder care themselves, and frequently must reduce their working hours to do so. This can have dire long-term consequences, AARP reports, including lost income, reduced career opportunities and savings, and subsequently lower Social Security and retirement benefits. In 2021, the estimated economic value of these family caregivers’ unpaid work was approximately $600 billion.
The Pew Research Center’s report on the demographics of multigenerational households found that multigenerational living has significant financial advantages. Multigenerational households typically have more income earners than single families, and by combining the income of working family members and the social security or pensions of retired ones, Americans living in multigenerational households have lower levels of poverty. While 13 percent of US seniors over 85 live in poverty, only 8 percent who live in multigenerational households live in poverty, a 40 percent reduction.
One solution to the dismemberment of the multigenerational American family is as old as humanity itself: making multigenerational housing easier. However, creating the opportunity for multiple generations of families to live together requires building the spaces for them to do it. That means transforming the zoning regulations, financial structures, and social patterns that separated them, just over a century ago.
The easiest zoning change would be simply to permit accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, to be added to existing single-family houses, something currently not permitted in most single-family zones. Known as granny flats, garden units, in-law apartments, mother-daughter units, and dawdy houses amongst the Amish, ADUs provide a separate living space to a home for grandparents or other relatives, often over a garage, in a backyard or in an occupiable basement. In 2016, the State of California passed a Statewide set of rules that made it much easier to build ADUs; By 2022, over 80,000 new ADUs had been built. Since then, Oregon, Washington, Connecticut, Maine, New York, and Minnesota have followed suit, making it easier to add ADUs to single family homes.
ADUs are only one way to expand existing single-family housing. What if housing could be built specifically for this purpose? Zoning regulations permitting multigenerational occupancy have spread around the globe. In Amsterdam, for example, the Three Generation House provides an apartment for the grandparents on the top floor, served by an elevator, with the family house below, designed to integrate privacy and community for the different generations. The Plain Tiles House, in Surat, India accommodates a couple, their sons, and parents in a series of rooms around a central courtyard, and even has space for the grandfather’s medical practice.
There are other regulatory obstacles to multigenerational living that can be addressed. It is estimated that 2.6 million children in the United States are currently raised by their grandparents, but they rarely qualify for the same benefits that foster parents receive. It has been particularly difficult for low-income grandparents to house their grandchildren under typical affordable housing occupancy regulations. But that, too, is changing. For example, 570 Washington Street, currently in construction in New York City’s West Village, will be one of the first affordable senior communities designed for grandfamilies, grandparents raising grandchildren. Sited in a high-performing school district, it will help the city meet its goal of enrolling low-income children in the city’s best public schools. And the project will provide a full range of social services for the families, enriching the lives of both the seniors and their grandkids.
Another barrier is financing systems that incentivize one or two-generation occupancy.
Eighty percent of Singapore’s housing is built by the HDB, the State housing agency, and until recently, HDB focused on housing elderly singles, couples, and parents raising children. But more recently, recognizing the benefits of intergenerational housing, it now offers financial incentives for two forms of multigenerational living. In the first, “3 Gen Flats,” families can order larger apartments to accommodate several generations. However, recognizing that not all families want to live so closely together, they also have the option to order two nearby apartments in new developments, and have them built to suit their needs. To encourage multigenerational family support, HDB also provides a proximity grant to help families buy or lease existing apartments near each other.
Not every family can live together in the same community, so multigenerational housing, which integrates young and old un-related families in separate units can provide many of the benefits of intergenerational housing. The Giesserei, in Winterthur, Switzerland contains 140 apartments, ranging in size from 1.5 to 9 rooms, housing families of multiple generations. It also includes a range of supportive non-residential uses, including a restaurant, a branch of the Winterthur libraries, a pottery studio, and an art gallery. There are eight communal rooms including a large hall for internal and public events, two common rooms, a music practice room, and three workshops. The cooperative development is self-managed by residents, who focus on providing social programs to activate the community.
Co-housing also provides multigenerational communities. In this model, families live in smaller apartments, townhouses, or small single-family homes, typically clustered around a courtyard and a larger shared community center that provides a place to gather, do laundry, and share meals, daycare, and other amenities. The physical spaces are enlivened by a pro-social culture that encourages group projects, a shared meal typically once or twice a week, and mutual support. Community decision making is collective and usually by consensus. There are currently 165 co-housing communities in the United States and many more in Europe. For example, over 50,000 people live in cohousing in Denmark, and there are more then 150 co-housing communities in the greater Berlin area. These developments are both easily permitted by zoning codes, and widely available thanks to co-operative housing development loans from government agencies and resident purchase loans from banks, which typically only require a minimum down payment of 5 percent of the purchase price.
In Helsingborg, a city in Southern Sweden, the SällBo co-housing project provides affordable long-term senior housing for those over 70, and youth housing for those between 18 and 25, many of whom are refugees. The community includes lots of space for interaction: Each floor has communal kitchens, a living room, a library, a carpentry room, an art room, a yoga room, and a garden, all intentionally designed to support socialization.
There is much to learn from these and other examples. In the United States, zoning codes that permit multigenerational housing, combined with financing support, could make the development of intergenerational housing much easier. For low-income families, HUD programs, and most cities’ affordable housing initiatives could permit the leasing of adjacent apartments or nearby apartments to multigenerational families. Zoning regulations to permit ADUs could be expanded, as well as regulations permitting non-family members to share multigenerational homes. This would legalize home-sharing arrangements, where homeowners rent out part of their house to other families, students, or elderly people. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) could be adjusted to incentivize developers to include multigenerational or family-friendly units in affordable housing projects. And an “essential worker” housing tax credit could expand the affordable housing supply for public safety workers, nurses and hospital orderlies, schoolteachers and administrators, day and elder care staff, and others in related fields. Housing voucher programs like Section 8 could be permitted to be used in co-housing or shared intergenerational living arrangements. Developers could be rewarded with additional density in exchange for including intergenerational or co-housing units in new developments, increasing housing supply in high-demand areas. And social service programs that support multigenerational living, such as daycare centers located near senior housing, or health-care services designed to serve both older adults and families should be encouraged.
Currently, government agencies tend to be siloed in their policies and operations. Because housing, childcare, health, and eldercare agencies function independently, it is much harder to create integrative solutions. For example, could a program to fund multigenerational housing draw from housing, eldercare, and childcare budgets? Might it be time for a broader category, family well-being, which can integrate separate departments? Multigenerational housing is an example of what a more systemic integration of well-being objectives and solutions could achieve by supporting families, children, and seniors and relieving stress both on parents and on social and health-care systems.