Behind the front door of a modest Cape Cod in Arlington, Va., seven lives are entwined.
Three generations comprising three families live together: two teenage girls, their parents and the girls’ three living grandparents. The age span is 13 to 86.
The Smith family – Rusty Smith; his wife, Lisa Gibbs-Smith; and teenage daughters Audrey and Lauren – moved to Arlington in 2011. They bought the three-level Cape Cod with a main living floor, an upstairs and a basement. Smith and Gibbs-Smith had no intention of expanding the house until they began looking over their shoulders at their parents’ lives.
Rusty Smith’s mother had died, and his father, Frank Smith, 74, lived in Florida. “The stress of being alone was hard,” Frank Smith said.
“We asked him to come up and live with us,” said Rusty Smith, who is a bugler with the U.S. Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps. The house was big enough to accommodate him.
“My dad broached the idea of moving to an assisted-living facility,” said Gibbs-Smith, a pianist and director of worship arts at Clarendon United Methodist Church. Jim Gibbs, 79, and Grace Gibbs, 87, lived in Annandale, Va. She suffered from progressive dementia.
“We had a family conversation and came up with the crazy idea of asking them to live with us, too. ‘Why don’t we add on to our house and just keep putting people in it?’ ” she said.
The Smith house wasn’t big enough for seven, so they had to figure out how to expand, pay for it and manage day-in-and-day-out togetherness.
“The dynamics of moving three independent households into one is complicated. The courage it took for everyone was huge,” Gibbs-Smith said.
Pew Research Center defines a multigenerational household as one with grandparents and grandchildren or with two or more adult generations. The trend since 1980 is more people living in multigenerational homes, and a higher number of multigenerational households, said D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer and editor at Pew.
In 2009, the last year of the Great Recession, 17 percent of Americans lived in households that were multigenerational, Cohn said. This translates to 51.5 million people living in homes with either grandparents and grandchildren, or with two or more adult generations. Pew’s estimates are based on census data.
In 2016, the most recent Pew numbers, 20 percent of Americans – 64 million people – lived in multigenerational homes. “This is a record number of people,” Cohn said.
“Our baby boomer population is getting older, and living together in one house is becoming more common,” said Bob Gallagher, president and co-owner of Sun Design in McLean and Burke, Va., an architectural design and remodeling company with a focus on aging in place.
Kim Adams, director of marketing for the Brambleton Group, said she’s seeing an uptick in multigenerational families. “Builders are adapting their home designs to create additional living spaces that offer privacy and separation for parents or college students moving back home, and ground floor suites for easy access for grandparents,” she said. “We believe this trend will continue.”
Structural modifications are the easiest to negotiate. “Getting rid of stairs or reducing their need with first-floor master suites, eliminating raised transitions between rooms and trip hazards in the shower, and putting up grab bars on bathroom walls are basic concerns when someone gets older,” Gallagher said.
There are also the financial and emotional aspects of uniting disparate families.
When the Smith family talked to a senior citizen adviser, he addressed Gibbs-Smith first: “ ‘How is your marriage?’ ” her father recalled. “Then he asked me: ‘How do you get along with your daughter? It’s important to have good relationships before you enter into something so monumental,’ the adviser told us.”
The Gorman family, in Washington, never had a conversation.
“I’ve lived with my mother my whole life. I’ve never lived without her,” said Mariluz Cortes-Gorman, who is retired from the World Bank and lives in Northwest Washington with her husband, Drew Gorman, who is retired from the military. “We always had an extended family living together.”