The Rise of Co-Buying Has Queer Roots

This story is part of Dwell’s yearlong 25th-anniversary celebration of the people, places, and ideas we’ve championed over the years.

Three years ago, Amelia Schonbek and her friend Emily Msall found themselves renegotiating their lease, a common crossroads for tenants. The friends had been sharing a four-story brownstone with five other people in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for the better part of a decade. They enjoyed communal living—dividing up chores and meal preparation, having other people to talk to. But they were increasingly frustrated with the instability of renting; the threat of yearly rent increases, unsure if the next lease renewal would price them out or be an option at all.

"I think at that point we were just like, do we have to keep being tenants? Like, is there a way out?" Schonbek says.

They began discussing the idea of buying a home collectively about two years ago and started looking in early 2024 before realizing they didn’t really know what they were doing. That summer, they went on a short retreat and had more serious discussions about finances and how they would go about cooperative ownership, before starting to look again in earnest. Now, Schonbek and a Msall are in the process of closing on a seven bedroom home in Ditmas Park, a "big old house," as Schonbek calls it. The three-story Victorian sports a front porch with green columns, off-white paneling, and brick stairs leading to a mahogany front door.

They were only able to make an offer on the multimillion-dollar building thanks to an inheritance from Schonbek’s grandparents. The home will be transferred into an LLC with shared stock that future co-owners can buy into—the way most stock cooperative buildings divide ownership in New York City. Msall will be a co-owner, reflecting her investment in the building, although her up-front shares are smaller than Schonbek’s. They plan to divide the remaining shares among three more as yet undetermined co-buyers. Schonbek is hoping to enlist a mix of renters and partial owners, depending on what people feel comfortable with and what they can afford; she has already circulated feelers among trusted friends and says she’s received a good amount of interest.

To Schonbek, co-buying was an opportunity to create a stable, long-term living arrangement centered around friends and peers as sources of community. She is queer and single, and hopes that if she gets into a long-term relationship, that person will similarly want to live collaboratively. This framework isn’t new for queer people who have long lived cooperatively as adults, often by necessity after being alienated from biological family.

Buying a home and living with multiple like-minded but unrelated adults is still unorthodox—most buyers are still couples or single adults—but is becoming increasingly popular as housing prices skyrocket and nontraditional households culturally become more acceptable. While there’s no concrete data on co-buying specifically, some indicators suggest that the nuclear family is no longer dominant among home purchasers: According to data from the National Association of Realtors, married couples accounted for 50 percent of first-time homebuyers in 2022, down from 75 percent in 1985. Unmarried couples were 18 percent, compared with 4 percent in 1985. Multigenerational households are also on the rise.

The co-buying trend has gotten much attention and press in recent years; The Wall Street Journal, Time, and Dwell have all explored how millennials are doing it. (Dwell’s executive editor Kate Dries spoke about her own experience co-buying in 2023.) This month, the New York Times noted the increasing popularity of co-buying with Gen Z, whose rates now outpace millennials, according to one poll. The desire to seek nontraditional paths to homeownership speaks to how they remain the best long-term assets for building wealth in the U.S.—especially as wages have stagnated, union membership has declined, and most companies no longer offer pensions. Cooperative homebuying is one way people have been able to build wealth, though it still requires significant savings or inheritances.

Andy Sirkin, a widely sought-out attorney specializing in co-ownership models who counts Schonbek as a client, estimates that over the past 40 years, he has drawn up contracts for 400 homes co-bought among friends, and 70 percent of all those purchases occurred within the last five to seven years. "A lot of people crave that sense of community and togetherness," he says. But the larger explanation is financial: "People are pushed to do shared ownership just because it makes everything much less expensive."

Perhaps taking a cue from queer culture, many first-time homebuyers of all orientations have been drawn to collaborative living and co-buying. When their adult children moved out in 2018, Maggie Fishman and her husband bought a four-story brownstone in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn for $1.85 million with another family and a friend. Fishman and her co-owners used a tenancy-in-common agreement, which allows multiple people on one mortgage to split ownership of different parts of the home. (Sirkin, the lawyer, also helped Fishback’s group with this legal agreement.)

The ground floor is a common space, with a full kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, a sleeper couch, and a garden in the backyard. The three floors above it are separate apartments. The initial down payment and the mortgage are based on the square footage of the individual apartment units. Fishman and her co-buyers are on the title of their home, but not all of them were able to get approved for a mortgage, so they’ve arranged to pay one another the monthly costs.

Of the five people who co-own the house, the eldest is 71, the rest in their fifties and sixties. Their adult children, now in their twenties, periodically live in the home over the summer or when they’re in town. The five co-owners became interested in living cooperatively during the 1990s, when they met in artist and activist circles and lived close to each other in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. They had a mutual fascination with the Danish cohousing movement of the 1960s, which established a model for housing collectives across the globe. "You can have spontaneous, informal relationships with people and deeper relationships just by bumping into each other every day," Fishman says.

John Cross and Weldon Hall had intergenerational living in mind when they purchased a fourplex in Oakland, California. The two friends, who met in the early 2000s as musicians, now live together in one of the building’s units, a three-bedroom apartment where they share a kitchen and common space. It suits them both; Hall is currently going through a divorce. Cross has a partner, and he’s told her she’s welcome to move into the building in the future.

Hall and Cross also bought the property with their elderly mothers in mind. They wanted the ability to move their mothers into units in the building should they need to. Cross’s mother currently lives in Chicago and isn’t sure if she’s up for relocating, while Hall’s mother lives closer by, in San Diego, and is open to the move, but is trying to stay in her own home for as long as she can. "When you have older relatives, you take them in, that’s how I was raised," Hall says of the arrangement.

While co-buying made homeownership economically possible for Cross and Hall, who would not have otherwise been able to afford the $1.4 million property, it leaves them on a tight budget. The mortgage and property taxes are about $11,000 a month, which they split evenly. They both have high-paying jobs; Hall works as a chemist and Cross is a software engineer. They currently rent out two of the units to people they know at $2,100 each, but they’re still paying far more every month than when they were renting.

Though Hall and Cross recommend co-buying and homeownership in general, they both are hesitant to recommend anyone buy with current interest rates in place. A 30-year fixed mortgage rate has jumped from 2.6 percent to almost 7 percent in the past five years. It’s still a lower mortgage rate than in the 1980s, when rates peaked at 18 percent, but average home sale prices have increased by more than 500 percent since then.

"This is a difficult market; I wouldn’t say I recommend it right now," Hall says. Because it’s hard to find any short-term financial benefit from homeownership without taking out loans, their monthly payments are eating into their typical savings. "Financially I don’t feel more secure, except for the fact that you can liquidate," Hall says. He’s hoping that in a few years he will be able to refinance and get a better interest rate. But as someone going through a divorce who couldn’t team up to buy a home with a partner, he advocates for the idea of buying housing with a friend. "I highly recommend it to people."

While many cited a desire for collaborative living, most of those who spoke to Dwell said it would otherwise be impossible for them to purchase a home. Schonbek, who is 38, believes the inability to imagine traditional homeownership is common among millennials like herself. "It makes so much sense for people in our generation because we lived through the recession," Schonbek says. "Buying a house just feels so unattainable to people. And I feel like this way of going about it is just so reasonable." She says that prior to teaming up with a friend, she never thought about buying a house because of how high New York City prices are.

However, the house-buying ecosystem in the U.S. is still mostly geared toward couples and single adults buying homes, and many lenders, agents, and sellers are less familiar with collaborative home-buying, leading to a lack of information for potential buyers. According to Niles Lichtenstein, who founded the co-buying startup Nestment, real estate agents are also skeptical, viewing co-buying as more work for them and with less potential to close.

"If you have a group of people asking to look at homes, and you have a couple or individual person asking to look at a home, you're going to take the individual person or the couple over the group," Lichtenstein says.

Heath Schechinger, director of the Modern Family Institute, which lobbies for policy change to expand legal definitions of family, says the world of homeownership does not make it easy to buy homes with friends. "Most of our legal and financial systems—from mortgage underwriting to zoning laws—still assume that a household is made up of a married couple and their dependents. This narrow definition leaves out a growing number of people forming homes with friends, extended family, or chosen family," he writes in an email.

Most cities still haven’t adapted to co-buying, but some are starting to make strides. In Boston, a new program announced in March offers up to $50,000 in down payment assistance to co-buyers as a zero-interest loan. It is an attempt to get more homeowners to access three-family homes, or triple-deckers, a common housing typology in Boston. It is geared more toward people who want to combine their income to purchase distinct apartments in the same building rather than people who want to share common space; there is a requirement that any building purchased has as many individual units as potential buyers.

Paige Roosa, who works at the Boston Housing Innovation Lab, says that the idea for the program originated because potential homeowners were taking the city’s first-time homebuyer program but not following through and purchasing property. The most commonly cited reason was that there was a lack of homes affordable to buyers who qualify for the city’s first-time homebuyer program, which is available to people making 135 percent of the area median income, or $176,310 for a two-person household. They found that over half of people who were interested in co-purchasing a home with a friend did not have sufficient funds for closing costs and down payments.

"We were thinking, what could we do to open the market?" Roosa says. Boston’s new program allows co-buyers to be evaluated individually for down payment assistance. Previously, multiple people on one mortgage would be evaluated based on their combined income, usually putting them over the income limit and disqualifying them from assistance.

The city is currently working on raising awareness of the program, including hosting happy hours with real estate agents. It’s still new—Roosa says only one house has been closed on so far, but the program has wide interest from the city’s queer community. The city recently did an outreach event about the program in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQIA and Two-Spirit Advancement.

"Boston has a history of being an LGBTQ friendly place…and it’s exciting to think that this might be a way to help folks who aren’t living in traditional or conventional families," Roosa says. 

Other countries are experimenting with cooperative ownership—including for queer people—outside of the private property framework. Vienna, Austria’s experiments in social housing have long been hailed by tenant activists on both sides of the Atlantic as a potential way to reduce housing costs. The city has also experimented with hybrid models that offer state-owned affordable housing along with some of the benefits of ownership. 

"Queerhaus" in Vienna is a social housing development, subsidized by the Austrian government that was designed to be queer-inclusive. Tenants rent from a state-owned cooperative, but have the option to buy their units after five to 10 years. While the project has been successful at providing low-cost rental and homeownership to a wide range of couples, families, and single people, it has not been able to market units exclusively to queer renters because of Austrian law, which considers this discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. According to a study by a group of researchers who interviewed residents, only a third of residents identified as LGBTQ+.

Schechinger, with the Modern Family Institute, says that queer people "are often at the forefront of reimagining what family and home can look like." He says co-buying is more common among queer networks "partly because these communities have long had to create their own support systems outside of traditional institutions."

Regardless of your orientation, it’s not always easy to go into real estate with friends. "In a normal scenario you don’t know how much your friend makes, what their credit score is," says Selena Lounds, who bought a home in Saugerties, New York, with her friend, a gay male, after living in New York City for over 20 years. They had disagreements on several points; her friend had wanted to purchase a fixer-upper. Lounds wanted a home that was ready to move into. Eventually, they ended up with a turnkey home because of Lounds’ advocacy. She thinks if she had bought the house with the wrong person, the friendship would have ended.

"A house is a big deal, you can’t just get out of it easily," she says.

Cross and Hall also say the stress of owning together has created tension. But their friendship has so far weathered it. "It’s effectively like being married," Cross says.

For this reason, experts suggest creating a clear exit strategy if one or several buyers decide they don’t want to live in the home anymore. Sirkin strongly suggests drawing up a legal agreement that goes over these contingencies. "I think the biggest mistake that people make is that they don’t think they need an agreement at all," Sirkin says. "You’re unlikely to ever need it, but when you need it, you really need it."

Boston’s co-buying assistance program has this baked into its requirements: in order to qualify, all applicants have to create a co-buying plan that explains every party’s rights, responsibilities, and ownership stake.

Schonbek says her house will have a way for people to exit the partnership neatly. If someone wants to sell their share of the LLC, they have to find a buyer that meets the other owners’ approval. If there’s tension with one owner who doesn’t want to sell their share, the other owners can force them to sell with a two-thirds vote. The stock cooperative model helps people get in and out of agreements more easily, but things get trickier for people who share a mortgage, as banks don’t always allow people to be swapped out.

The hassle is worth it, Schonbek says, for constructing a type of life that reflects her values. "I’ve seen how rugged it is to be like a nuclear family with two working parents and a child," she says, "and I have become really convinced that it is both nicer and more meaningful, but also just so much saner to share your life with more than one other adult."

Top photo by Andrea Ghoneim via Weinwiki.

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What It’s Really Like to Own a Home Between Three People

The Unexpected Satisfaction of Leaving Behind the American Dream