The family that buys together STAYS TOGETHER
Pandemic reshaped the housing market and households
Before the pandemic, the Crafts family was scattered: three generations, in three houses, in three different states, with close to zero chance of living together.
Ellen Scherer Crafts and Trevor Crafts lived with their 5-year-old daughter, Riley, in Studio City, California; Jackie Chirico, Ellen’s mother, was in Henderson, Nevada; and Trevor’s parents, Edward and Heather Crafts, were in Richardson, Texas.
But after months in quarantine, with few chances to see each other and limited child care options, they tried something drastic. Each household listed their home for sale in March — and to their surprise, all three sold above asking price within a week.
In May, with their combined windfall, they bought a $2.6 million, 8 ½-acre property in Weston, Connecticut, a state that none of them had lived in, with a Colonial Revival-style five-bedroom home, a guesthouse and a barn with a studio.
“This was a once-in-alifetime opportunity that I didn’t want to miss,” said Edward Crafts, a retired opera singer who now sees his granddaughter daily.
“It was just a product of this crazy-hot real estate market that we were able to put it all together.”
The pandemic has not just reshaped the housing market; for a growing number of homeowners, it is remaking the household. After years of slow growth, multigenerational living is on the rise. As members of the baby boom generation move into their 60s and 70s, many are being called upon by their adult children for help raising their young children, while others are looking for ways to care for their aging parents.
With prices for single-family homes soaring in much of the country, consolidating generations under one roof can mean more buying power, which in turn can provide access to less competitive segments of the housing market — namely, the higher end, where the larger homes are. (Buyer beware: It can also mean reliving family get-togethers every day of the year.)
“I think this could be a trend that’s here to stay,” said Jessica Lautz, vice president of demographics and behavioral insights at the National Association of Realtors, a large trade group.
Multigenerational buying has been expected to grow for years, she said, as families of Asian and Latino descent, who are more likely to live with aging parents, become a larger share of homebuyers nationwide. But it took the pandemic to spur the market.
In a national survey from April to June 2020, during the first wave of the virus, 15% of homebuyers said they bought multigenerational homes, the highest share since 2012, when the group began asking the question. In the eight months before the outbreak, only 11% had bought homes to live with multiple generations of family.
The most common reason cited for the purchase was to bring aging parents into the home because of concerns about isolation and the spread of COVID-19 in senior housing. It also reflects a desire to have grandparents help with child care, Lautz said, with so many parents either working from home or on new schedules.
For Andrea and Dwight Francis, who were renting a 975-square-foot apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, during the pandemic, the arrival last summer of their daughter, Alexandra, gave their home search urgency.
“With the second child, the house just exploded,” said Dwight Francis, 44, a software engineer, who was suddenly working from home along with Andrea Francis, 41, a professor of accounting at LaGuardia Community College, while also caring for their older daughter, Avery, 4. A few weeks before the second child’s arrival, the couple invited Dwight Francis’ mother, Masie, to live with them.
That is when Masie Francis, who, before the pandemic, was living in a retirement community in Atlanta, encouraged the couple to look for a house large enough for her to move in full time. With her financial assistance, the couple bought a Tudorstyle rowhouse in Kew Gardens, a Queens neighborhood
farther east of Manhattan, in January for about $715,000.
It is a mutually beneficial arrangement, Dwight Francis said, because he worried about his mother living alone during the pandemic. “I think as much as she saved us, we saved her,” he said.
Masie Francis, 77, a former teacher, laughed
at the notion but did give credit to the grandchildren. “When I’m here, I have company. The kids keep me alive and going.”
While the pace of U.S. home sales has begun to slow, prices continue to surge. The national median existing-home price in May was $350,300, up nearly 24% from a year ago, a record-high price, and the 111th straight month of year-over-year price gains, according to the National Association of Realtors.
“There was no way that I could afford the cost of a house on my own,” said Erin Wentz-Lesman, 41, a public school teacher in Brooklyn, who had been living in a 769-square-foot co-op with her husband, Toby, who works for a plumbing company, and their two children, Vera, 14, and Ellis, 10.
In October, together with Erin Wentz-Lesman’s parents, Kim and Chip Wentz, both 68, they bought a five-bedroom house in the same neighborhood for $1.25 million. The couple sold their co-op a few months later for about $440,000.
“I always told my husband I wanted to live close enough to help out — but I didn’t know we’d live with them,” Kim Wentz said.
For the Craftses, who joined three households to buy a sprawling compound in Weston, Connecticut, their unusual needs meant they faced less competition for their property, at least compared with heated demand in the single-family market.
“It was one of those properties that didn’t work for everybody,” said Kristi Law, an agent with William Pitt Sotheby’s Realty, who helped them buy the home.
It took some getting used to. “When our granddaughter misbehaves, we send her home,” Edward Crafts joked. He and his wife live in a detached guesthouse, while Scherer Crafts will live in the main house until a barn with a studio on the property can be renovated.