Rachel Cohen

It's not just one generation showing up to serve and rescue another.

Reviving an Older Idea

While multigenerational living among relatives has long offered a way for families to share resources and manage caregiving, intentional home-sharing between unrelated people traces its modern American roots to Philadelphia in the early 1970s.

That's when Maggie Kuhn, forced to retire at age 65 from a job she loved at the Presbyterian Church, founded the Gray Panthers.

The organization advocated for Social Security, Medicare, and against workplace age discrimination, and grew into a movement with 100,000 members across 30 states within its first decade.

As part of this work, Kuhn opened her Philadelphia home to Panther Cubs, younger activists, an experience that led her to establish the National Shared Housing Resource Center in 1980.

That organization would go on to help establish hundreds of home-sharing programs across the U.S., fielding thousands of inquiries annually by the late 1980s.

Kuhn viewed home-sharing as both a form of affordable housing and a way to combat social isolation.

Kuhn's ideas about intergenerational housing have found new urgency in West Philadelphia.

The city's historically Black neighborhood of Mantua is seeing more longtime residents pushed out as Drexel University expands nearby.

Over the past decade, the area's white population has increased by 73 percent, while rents have risen by 44 percent.

More concerning, there's been a startling 454% increase in the number of households that spend more than half their incomes on rent.

In response, leaders through the Mantua Civic Association are partnering with Drexel to match students with older residents in the area.

Again, the goal is twofold, helping longtime residents maintain or achieve homeownership while providing more affordable rental options for students.

This vision gained traction in 2021 when leaders received state and philanthropic funding to help existing Mantua residents make repairs on their duplexes so homeowners could start homesharing.

Now leaders are partnering with a local developer to build a $60 million mixed-use project that will include 18 duplexes and triplexes specifically meant for intergenerational homesharing.

Older Mantua residents will buy the properties and rent out some units to help cover their mortgages.

These home-sharing programs will recruit renters from Drexel's longstanding community-based writing workshop, a free arts program for students and local Philadelphians.

Leaders plan to incorporate journaling and storytelling sessions into their home-sharing model, called Second Story Collective, and already have their sights on expanding to university-adjacent areas beyond Philadelphia.

In 2022, they received a $1 million National Science Foundation grant to explore replicating this model nationwide.