In The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning epic of the Great Migration, she describes families moving from the deep American South and living together in groups to be able to afford their new homes in places like Chicago, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and New York City. As arriving black families changed the demographics of working-class areas, white neighbours quickly organized to exclude the newcomers by law. In The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein digs into these exclusionary tactics, including the proliferation of the single-family zone. Invented in the late 1920s, it began to cover America by the 1950s, spurred on by a combination of racism and anti-communist zeal. Affluent and up-and-coming communities highlighted the single-family home as the ideal and codified it into large tracts of land (zoned “R1” or “A”) meant only for coveted nuclear-family inhabitants. The zone was exclusionary, by definition, because it prohibited multiple families from sharing a house and the implicit costs. 

The use of zoning to enforce housing segregation played out across American cities throughout the twentieth century. In Greater Cincinnati, where I live, the impact remains visible. Until earlier this year, 70 percent of residential land was zoned single family. This meant that regardless of the existing construction in historic neighbourhoods, any new construction in the yellow zones could house only one family living alone. Here is a map of the spread: 

The preference for single-family homes has echoed throughout Cincinnati’s planning history. In 1925 residents were warned of “apartment homes invading open detached home districts.” By 1948 postwar planners reserved 60 percent of new housing for one- or two-family homes, adding density restrictions to prevent “a large number of families” from occupying single buildings. The 1980 plan, responding to the economic fallout of white flight, doubled down: “Single family residential shall be retained, maintained or rehabilitated and protected from other kinds of development.” 

While many of us today can see the appeal of this vision—families, couples, and singles living privately side by side in their own spaces—it’s worth stating plainly that Jim Crow fast-tracked this housing paradigm. Left with no way to stop trainloads of black families from settling in their neighbourhood, white people could either move to suburban outposts or work a bit harder and make it difficult for those arriving with no jobs to find a place to live affordably. “It’s not that we don’t want black people,” I can imagine them saying. “It’s just that house sharing is illegal.” 

These exclusionary instincts remain embedded. In Norwood, the small carve-out city in Cincinnati where I live, the affluent north side is reserved for R1 homes, a legacy of its history as a sundown town through the 1970s and home to coveted union jobs at the now-closed General Motors plant. When my husband Ben and I began the process of opening a Catholic Worker family shelter here, we learned quickly that the shared living space we had in mind would clash with Norwood’s zoning law, almost regardless of where we put it. We watched as another women’s shelter, five miles away, shuttered over zoning lawsuits. “We must find compliance in the zoning code,” my husband, an architect, warned me. “The devil hides in that detail.” We focused our search on a narrow path along the main street, where zoning is R3 (in which three or more family units are allowed per lot). Finding a large home there, we made an offer contingent on a zoning variance. After hours of scouring the code manual, Ben discovered our path: the boarding house, an antiquated framework still conditionally permitted in R3 zones. 

At the time, my sixty-five-year-old neighbour told me how her father had lived in such a house when he came up from Kentucky to work for the GM plant. He shared a room with other men, and his cheap rent included meals, allowing him to send remittances home to his family in Harlan County. It struck me that several people were probably made less poor, back in 1968, because boarding houses existed. The house mother earned a living by renting rooms, and my neighbour’s family of six children was fed and clothed by their father’s savings, made possible by cheap living expenses during the weekdays. 

By 1985, as sundown politics and practices faded, so did tolerance for collective living. New zoning codes limited housing to no more than four unrelated people in any unit. Over the next twenty years, restrictions tightened: group homes and congregate facilities were capped at six city-wide by 2005; “boarding and lodging houses” were confined to a narrow strip of the zoning map. 

When Ben found this option buried in hundreds of pages of small font, we seized it. Though technically allowed, it was neither prominent nor publicized and still required a variance for housing more than four unrelated adults. Armed with thirty-one testimonials declaring we would be good neighbours, we secured our variance and began renovating Lydia’s House in 2013. As we redesigned the giant property, I imagined the stately house mothers that would have dispensed unsolicited advice to new arrivals from the rural South. Our iteration would look different: my co-founder would be a younger house mother chasing toddlers in a domicile of mostly black, single parents. But in spirit we were offering the same chance for a modern displaced demographic to save and plan for a better future, just as houses like this did for the factory workers of another era. 

Shortly after we opened Lydia’s House, Ben took a job overseeing new-project development at Over-the-Rhine Community Housing, a local affordable housing developer. As owners of five hundred units of “deeply” affordable housing, OTRCH had seen it all when it came to housing policy, zoning, and cultural ideals. When Ben started in 2019, the production cost of new units was $300,000, with federal government requirements for air-conditioning, private kitchens, and other amenities. Today that cost exceeds $400,000 and requires dishwashers and washer-dryers. While housing advocates fought hard for these standards, we were floored by the per-unit cost. How in the world could we house all the homeless families in our region if they were each required to have all these amenities at this cost? Meanwhile, HUD’s privacy preferences were dismantling single-room occupancy for homeless singles—boarding houses by another name. 

As Ben grappled with federal housing-policy constraints, the crew at Lydia’s House was consistently serving families in congregate living. The year we opened, 2014, our operating cost to serve ten families, each for approximately three-month stays, totaled $80,000. Yes, families had to learn some shared-living lessons—keeping dishes from piling up, using headphones when watching a loud movie—but conflict remained surprisingly low. Though three months is brief and our guests voiced dreams to one day live in the single-family units like those the housing advocates had fought for, we began noticing something unexpected: group living was working well, and some mothers even requested longer stays. The women who had grown up in foster homes especially thrived in the busy kitchen and after-dinner porch chats. Children loved the bustle of large meals and impromptu playtimes. When families left, some asked to move back in—apartment keys brought excitement but also fear. 

Even if our families want to stay, however, we have no good way to offer long-term shared housing. It was a battle to open one communal-living property. When we meet with families in shelter to discuss housing, their next-step options are limited to the market rate (unaffordable), Section 8 (which few landlords will accept), and income-based housing (also known as housing projects, which few want to live in). As we pursue any or all of these options, we criss-cross the city putting a woman’s name on every housing list, and we cajole and pray that somehow, in a reasonable time, her name will be called. If it’s not, we often ask her to persuade a family member to let her move (back) in, with the promise that independent housing will eventually materialize. 

We have learned over the years that while some women might prefer congregate living if it were an option, others must have other adults to live with. In these cases, we make the housing plan from shelter an existential command: “Find someone to live with.” For women who are deeply depressed, extra-traumatized, using substances, or developmentally delayed, a single-family unit is not just lonely and expensive; it can be dangerous, especially if they are caring for young children. For those who prefer to live alone in a unit, we’ve found that they struggle to pay utilities, find child care, and keep house. 

The problem, of course, is that the women we serve have been told that living alone is best, and their families believe that continuing to house them is a burden they should not have to bear. The mere possibility of income-based housing, no matter how limited or hard to come by, is a rainbow that the women at our shelter have been told to chase. 

Meanwhile, the combination of our region’s rising housing costs and millennials’ urban migration has eliminated the affordable options along bus routes and near essential services. Adding to this crisis, exclusionary zoning practices have driven market-rate single-family homes above $400,000, making it profitable for owners to convert multi-family buildings into single-family residences. Cincinnati took a bold step this year when it declared a crisis of affordable housing and passed the “Connected Communities” ordinance, allowing new districts of two-, three-, and four-family homes. Despite its aims to increase housing accessibility, the ordinance faces significant opposition, including protests from wealthy neighbourhoods that are seeking historic designation to prevent multi-family housing integration. 

Running parallel tracks—my husband building affordable housing with federal funds while I direct a Catholic Worker house on scraped-together church donations—gives me a unique perspective on housing. What’s clear is that homelessness cannot be solved by federally subsidized housing costs, nor through single-family homes alone. Privacy, while valued, brings added expense, less support for children, and loneliness. For most of human history, in most cultures, humans have shared living space in some capacity. It’s worth asking where the roots of today’s ultra-private housing lie: Does independent living really satisfy the highest and best desires of the human experience, or does it accommodate our fear, affluence, and exclusion? 

As our neighbourhood in Norwood changed and developed over the past century, its leadership bought into exclusionary assumptions and turned them into ideals. These ideals make little room now for the non-traditional living arrangements like those that sustained the GM workers of the mid-century, and the poor are being quickly pushed out of our neighbourhood altogether. Norwood is not alone in this trajectory; if anything, we lag behind other regions in eliminating affordable options. While progressive calls to end single-family zoning echo across coastal cities, and Cincinnati moves toward higher density despite protests, the cultural ideal of the private dwelling remains a powerful norm, one that might be harming us all. 

Years of managing and being formed by community living have taught me this: shared life has costs, but so does private life. Over the twenty-five years that I’ve counted myself an adult, I’ve lived alone for only six months. But more to the point, I’ve lived with someone besides my nuclear family for 80 percent of that time. I’ve done this in formal community, house sharing, and duplex living. In the most recent iteration, we’ve had single women live with us on and off, which sometimes has added to housework and child care, but at other times has just added income, making it possible for me to work for very little at the shelter and still send our kids to Catholic school. 

The addition of housemates means our home is rarely unoccupied. Our children get to experience the blessing of concentric circles of caring adults, and the burdens of house care lighten for our two-parent working family. When I’ve shared with families in need, the outcomes are less concrete, but the times are rich. Meal cooking and the ritual of sitting down make sense when there are more mouths to feed, and the burden of a large cleanup each night is spread around. Here, the house becomes the recipient of life’s abundance, because our unorthodox arrangement means others are likely to drop off food or clothes or simply offer to help. Community begets community. 

The challenges across these various arrangements can be felt, of course, but they’re practical and make for good humour: the kitchen occasionally being double-booked, rare privacy intrusions when we’ve left the bathroom door open, my two sons sharing a room. With families in need, we’ve navigated more kid chaos (and overall chaos) in the shared space, conflicts around cleaning expectations, and delicate negotiations around those who have and those who don’t being in close relationship. (Should the poor contribute their food stamps when the well-off can afford all the food?) I’ve found there are times when the single-family-home model can be helpful, felt perhaps most keenly in my first year of marriage, but rarely has it risen to the top. 

I’d like to posit that our culture defaults to tallying the inconveniences and compromises of shared housing but rarely calculates the true costs of living alone or in isolated family units. These costs, including a heavy environmental footprint and, potentially, keeping another from having a roof over their head, are especially convicting in light of Christian moral teaching. This blind spot affects everyone: it strips away the humanity of the affluent, while for the poor it can result in women and children living in cars and spaces unfit for human habitation. Letting go of the American dream of the single-family home—or even the hope of private housing for every family unit—might be a solution that saves us all, rich and poor alike.