Four generations, one address

At our last place, we expanded a duplex into a fourplex, and we moved my wife’s grandmother into one of the new units. She was 102.

For a stretch, there were four generations of the family’s women living on one piece of land: her, my wife’s mother, my wife, and our two daughters. Great-grandmother to great-granddaughters, a few steps apart.

It was magical. It was the best seven months of our lives, and then she passed.

I don’t think we would have had those months any other way. Not in a facility across town with visiting hours. Not in a spare bedroom down the hall, where everyone is always in everyone’s way. A home of her own, a few steps from ours. Close enough to be family every day, far enough apart that everyone kept their dignity.

My mother’s story went the other way. She had a terrible disease and needed a higher level of care toward the end of her life than any home next door could give her. With a different diagnosis, she could have aged in place and enjoyed her grandkids.

That’s the version I can’t stop thinking about. Not for her, it’s too late for that. For everyone whose parents still could.

Life has simplified since then. We bought what we hope is our forever home: plenty of room for our family, and a separate house on the same property for my mother-in-law. Same idea, in a house that’s a hundred years old.

That makes three times. We first did this in a triplex we own, with my mother-in-law in one of the units. Then the fourplex, with four generations. Now the forever home. Three different buildings, three different stages of life, same result: a family that’s closer, and money that works harder.

Which leaves me with the question this whole post is really about: what if modern living were like this?

The problem, from both ends

Our parents’ generation is living longer than any before it, often alone in houses built for families that moved out decades ago. Big, with stairs, built for a different stage of life. When the house stops working, the usual answer is a facility.

Their kids have the opposite problem. The typical first-time homebuyer in America is now 40 years old, a record. In the 1980s it was the late twenties. Plenty of people raising young kids can’t afford to live near their parents, near good schools, or near either.

So one generation sits in too much house, the next can’t get any, and the grandkids see their grandparents on holidays.

It doesn’t have to work that way, and for a lot of families it already doesn’t. About 18% of Americans live in multigenerational households, four times as many people as in 1971, and most say it’s a positive experience. What’s missing is houses designed for it. Most families doing this are making it work in a house built for one family, with grandpa in the converted den.

We got lucky. We had the property and the means to do this three times. Most families don’t, and that’s the company I want to build.

Combine the balance sheets

Here’s the part that makes it more than a nice story.

Taken together, plenty of families have enough to live well. The trouble is where it sits: most of it belongs to the generation that needs the least space, while the generation raising kids has the least to work with. The parents’ wealth is locked up in a house that’s too big for them, and they can’t spend a bedroom they don’t use. The kids have income but no down payment, and they’re spending their prime years paying rent somewhere they’d rather not live.

Put those two balance sheets together and the math changes. The younger generation gets to use the family’s combined strength to live somewhere they could never afford alone: the good school district, the neighborhood near the hospital. The older generation gets to put their assets to work instead of letting them sit, and gets help right next door instead of a call center. The grandkids get their grandparents.

Win, win, win.

Sessions Homes

I’m starting a company to do this for other families: Sessions Homes, by The Sessions Company. I wanted a name that sounds like it’s been around for a hundred years, one you’d trust with your mother’s house keys.

The idea is simple: modern homes where two or three generations live on the same land, each with their own front door, built for a family that’s pooling what it has. Near good hospitals and good schools, because those are what the two ends of the family need most.

It starts small, one property at a time:

• A second home in an existing backyard. Homes with land and parents who’d rather stay put. A real home, not a glorified shed. Whoever’s knees need the single level gets it.
• Buy and build. Buy a house that fits, add the second home, and offer it to a family that wants to live this way.
• Built for it from the start. Eventually, homes designed for three generations from the foundation up.

Further out, I can see whole communities built this way: neighborhoods of multigenerational homes with shared amenities and programs, the way some Amsterdam communities are built around common space. That’s a long way off. The first proof of concept is one property and one family.

And no flipping. If a house doesn’t fit the idea, it’s not our business.

Two rules

Some parents will want to sell the family home instead. For them, the offer is to buy it as-is, with no commission and no open houses, and help with the estate planning that comes with it.

That’s exactly where a company like this could go wrong. A business that buys houses from aging homeowners is one bad incentive away from being a predator. So two rules, and they aren’t negotiable:

• The legal work is never ours. Estate and legal advice comes from the family’s own independent counsel.
• The kids are in the room. No parent signs anything alone.

If those rules ever cost a deal, the deal wasn’t worth doing.

Who it’s for

Anyone who wants what we had. But I want to start with the families who never stopped living this way. For a lot of immigrant families, three generations under one roof isn’t a compromise. It’s the point. Sessions Homes should feel like it was built for them: people who speak their language, and homes designed around how they actually live.

Not the cheap option

The cheapest way to house three generations is a spare bedroom and a lot of patience. Sessions homes won’t compete on price. They’ll compete on what they do for a family, and I’m comfortable with that putting them at the higher end of the market. The families who want this are pooling two balance sheets to buy something neither could alone. They’re paying for a life, not square footage.

What that buys:

• Two real homes, not a house with an in-law suite. Separate front doors, separate kitchens, separate utilities, and walls thick enough that nobody hears anybody’s TV.
• Built to age in. The grandparents’ home is always one story, with no exceptions. Every unit is fully accessible: no-step entries, doorways wide enough for a wheelchair, and bathrooms ready for grab bars before anyone needs them.
• One shared yard. The part where the family actually happens.
• Locations chosen carefully, for both ends of life. Good schools for the kids, good hospitals for the parents, close to both. A great house in the wrong place doesn’t work.
• Help with the hard paperwork. Coordination with the family’s own estate and legal counsel, so the money side gets set up as carefully as the house.

What success looks like

Not houses sold. Families that work. I’ll know it’s working when:

• Families stay. Three years in, they’re still living there together and still speaking to each other.
• Parents age in place. Fewer moves into facilities, and later when they happen.
• The homes hold a premium. They sell or appraise for more per square foot than comparable new homes nearby, because a second home on the lot is worth more than its size.
• Families refer families. Most new buyers come from someone who already lives this way.
• The rules never bend. Every purchase from a parent has independent counsel and the kids in the room. No exceptions.

What I’m afraid of

Building is slow and expensive. Financing two households on one lot is harder than financing one. Not every family should live this close; even among people who like it, almost a quarter say it’s stressful most of the time. And trust is everything. Older homeowners get targeted constantly, so this has to be boringly, visibly honest, or it shouldn’t exist.

Where it stands

It has a name, a plan, and three proofs of concept: a triplex, a fourplex, and the house we live in now.

The next step is finding out whether other families want this as much as we did. If you’d consider it, for yourself or for your parents, tell me about your family at sessionshomes.com. It takes two minutes. Every answer shapes what the first homes look like.

Seven months isn’t long. But my daughters spent those months a few steps from their great-grandmother. If Sessions Homes can give that to a few other families, it will have been worth building.