Some of our deepest and most intimate relationships are formed living with other people. Whether with chosen family, intergenerational households, or Craigslist roommate roulette, our homes are one of the first places we practice community caregiving. Home is where we learn to be mindful of other people’s needs and to clean up after ourselves, where how we choose to organize and decorate our spaces becomes a practice in co-creation. Cohabitation is also an economic tool that makes it possible to make or keep a home in a place as expensive as New York. We asked five New Yorkers to share their stories of creating homes beyond traditional nuclear family structures. Jun Chou and Raj Kottamasu reflect on different forms of cooperative living, from creating chosen family during a pandemic, to a decade long relationship with cohabitation and practices of community accountability. Amy Andrieux and Sabina Sethi Unni share their family immigration stories and how the single-family home is transformed into hubs for Haitian and Indian communities trying to stake out a piece of the American dream. Kai Naima Williams reflects on housing as inheritance and legacy. The great-granddaughter of Civil Rights leaders Bill and Yuri Kochiyama, her apartment has been in her family for the past four decades and once served as a space for organizing in Harlem. – DL & LY
In the early ‘60s, Kai Naima Williams’ great-grandparents Bill and Yuri Kochiyama moved to Harlem, where Yuri would begin her life’s work as a civil rights activist and freedom fighter. Williams, a multidisciplinary writer and performing artist, wrote a children’s biography of Yuri in the same building that generations of her family have called home and where she now lives.
APARTMENT B. True: I live alone. Also true: we live together — all the Kochiyamas who called it home before me. Their presences still vibe in the crust between kitchen tiles, congregating in crown molding where the corners meet.
It was ‘72 when my grandparents arrived at the apartment, Dad in tow. Soon followed by Akemi, Aunt Aichi & Uncle Alkamal in a unit down the hall. Back then, the building was crawling with kids; baby Harlemites adventuring the neighborhood, sparking parties in any apartment free of parents, and battling it out in rounds of Donkey Kong with Grandmaster Flash scoring each clash. There was Keisha in C1, Christina in D1, Paul in E1. Akemi would scamper up and down the fire escape making visits until the day she shimmied through the window and spooked the hell out of [REDACTED], the Black Nationalist leader who they were harboring at the time and her mom put a stop to that behavior, STAT. What are you thinking? Aichi shrieked, We are UNDER SURVEILLANCE!
Everybody’s moms had half a man in lieu of a husband and years after my Grandpa left, Dad started sneaking out after dark, hopscotching over tracks to the subway layup between stations on 137th and 145th to tag slumbering trains. When he moved out in ‘85, Alk & Aichi took his spot in the apartment. And when they died, months apart, in sudden, senseless succession, Akemi inherited the place. But she was studying at Spellman then, leaving vacant space. So Dad and Uncle Eddie occupied it for an era and they did the bachelor pad thing till Mom entered the picture. Then came me, and here we lived, us three. And when we left, it was the first time in decades the apartment was absent of Kochiyamas.
When I moved back in two summers ago, the lease still bearing my father’s name, I wondered if any memories resided within me. I felt them activate as soon as the threshold, my people and their traces, some tangible: the weathered desk and its drawer taped with phone numbers in Grandma’s handwriting, a glass lady-bug charm Aichi fixed to the kitchen light switch – the only object we both touched at some point in our lives. But more so I sensed them stirring in the deep recesses of my consciousness, my infant recollections and any ghosts that precede me, drawing forth no clear pictures, only the sensation of being safely contained, like the dark beneath a blanket, like our family portrait cradled in its frame.
Urban planner and designer Raj Kottamasu has had a decade-long relationship with intentional housing cooperatives. He shares the tender and difficult lessons of living together.
Cooperative living was my first and longest relationship. In college, I lived with 30 other nerdy, crunchy weirdos across two big houses. We took turns cooking, divvied household responsibilities, and talked late into the night over fresh loaves of bread coming out of the oven. I had never experienced intimacy like this before. It was the first time I felt like I belonged to a group that saw me completely, and I was hooked. I lived in three more cooperatives over the next 13 years. Two of them were in Brooklyn: a 16-person collective occupying the four four-bedroom apartments of a Crown Heights brownstone and a 21-person household carving up a decrepit mansion in Clinton Hill. I relished the regular meetings to discuss accountability, chores, and finances; special projects like keeping chickens, tending compost, and constructing bike storage; and preparing and enjoying big communal meals with one another.
There were trials and disappointments, as in any relationship. In the Crown Heights collective, my apartment went on rent strike when the landlord’s renovations created unsafe living conditions. At the same time, we found bedbugs and couldn’t get the landlord to treat for them; instead, he sued to evict us. When we didn’t get support from the other three units to fight him on it, it was hard not to feel let down.
In the Clinton Hill mansion, an early cohort of housemates I knew and loved was replaced by a new wave of people from whom I felt increasingly disconnected. Then a major conflict emerged around sexual harassment. Fractures and factions formed around how to respond, and we were swallowed up by larger differences in perspectives on equity and power among housemates. Despite efforts to recover, the household eventually crumbled under the weight of these issues.
This experience was particularly traumatic, and years later, it seems I might be done with cooperative living. My relationship with it was never perfect or easy, and collectivism couldn’t keep structural oppression from seeping in. But I still hold a lot of love for it. My experiences trained me in so many of the capacities I value most in myself: demonstrating appreciation for others, exercising patience in collaborative processes, listening to and empathizing with people even when my own needs are at stake. Cooperative living is still the thing that has most shaped me and my idea of how people can show up for and validate one another. It left me with a model of how to form and keep strong individual relationships, ones that holds space for thorny conversations around difference and conflict but also are grounded firmly in experiences of intimate care — like the warm feeling of coming home late to a saved plate of nut-free food suited to my own nut-free restrictions, waiting in the fridge with my name on it.
Haitian American Amy Andrieux, Executive Director and Chief Curator of MoCADA, grew up in Laurelton Queens, in the 1980s, a longtime hub for Caribbean immigrants to the city. Through her family’s home she reflects on cultural connection and disconnection in a city where gentrification can make it hard for home to feel permanent.
I vaguely remember learning to memorize my own name, address, and phone number. It was a rite of passage for kids growing up in the NYC of the 1980s. If I ever got lost, I would need to recall these details to let people know I had people, that I came from somewhere.
For me that place was 222-35 141st Road, a three-level brick house in a row of identical adjoined houses in the working-class community of Laurelton, Queens. Our home was safe. It was a world away from the epidemics suffocating the five boroughs back then — crack, HIV/AIDS, rising high-school dropout rates, and urban decay. It was the place where multiple languages were spoken; where I, the first generation born in the US, would fall in love with graffiti and hip-hop; where I would become the eyes and ears of my extended family of grandparents, parents, and uncles — everyone who lived in that house with my little sister and I. It was the beginning of our American dream, recreated from memories of Port-au-Prince, of course. It was where our mother and aunties spent their Friday evenings in the kitchen dipping hard-dough bread into Cafe Bustelo-filled good china, as their husbands drank tafia on the porch and learned the fate of “boat people” on Haitian radio.
I have vivid memories of my parents painting the driveway and front steps ruby red to differentiate our house from the others; competing within the tight-knit enclave of Caribbean families to have the best garden and the best wrought iron gate, complete with marble lion heads.
Home is where the heart is, my mother always said. It’s what tethers you to a place and grounds your identity, especially in a city that is constantly moving, evolving. But as urban renewal gives way to hypergentrification, pricing residents, like me, out of the culturally rich neighborhoods that they gave life to, it’s easy to feel lost here. Whenever I do, I revert back to my early days, recalling my old address and phone number. . . one of the few things I remember by heart today.
Being a 20-something with roommates is a rite of passage for many in New York City. During the height of the pandemic, writer and designer Jun Chou shared a Bushwick loft with roommates who would become more than roommates when the world shut down.
Urban solitude can be defined by the maxim: Alone, together. Even home — often the only place people have to be alone — isn’t exempt. The rate of people taking roommates is rising, especially in expensive cities like New York: lower rent at the expense of privacy. If you’re lucky, you’re among one of the renters who is cohabitating with people you can call your friends. I was lucky to be lucky.
We called our home The Coop. The former furniture warehouse became a loft-style apartment with five bedrooms, one windowless half-bedroom, three gothic chandeliers, two huge couches, one disco ball, and a urinal. Directly outside our tall factory windows was the brutal chaos of Brooklyn’s Broadway. Like the beam of a lighthouse, the J-train rattled back and forth every five minutes or so. The centerpiece of the spacious common area was a large dining table we painted Frida Kahlo blue, around which the six of us shared countless meals.
As an incorrigible romantic, I believe the roommate relationship transcends the threshold of romance and was perhaps the most impactful of all my relationships during the pandemic. The only difference between my roommates and my lovers was that when my roommates and I said goodnight, we went to our separate rooms after.
My roommates bore witness to the ins and outs of my daily existence, through the entire sonic spectrum of yapping, crying, fucking, screaming, and singing. We took care of one another in simple ways: thoughtful texts that said: “hitting the bodega — need anything?”, spontaneous check-ins over coffee in the morning, a shared vat of popcorn during movie nights. On most days, my roommates were the first people I interacted with. During the pandemic, they were the only people I interacted with.
Hanif Abdurraqib, my favorite romantic and writer, claims: “I think you realize that you love a person when they do something they would consider forgettable, but you see it every time you close your eyes.” When I close my eyes, I remember Kelly with his elbow on his knee, sitting in front of his record collection scanning for the perfect track. I peek at Grace behind giant monstera leaves, tucked away on the couch with a podcast in her ears and her latest crochet creation on her lap. I catch Maddie asleep on the couch in a fetal position swaddled with blankets. I hear Mai’s sweet song trilling in her room and in the shower.
With roommates, you observe these little idiosyncrasies. You become endeared to the private habits and daily details that reveal a person’s wholeness. The songs they sing in the shower, the noodles they invariably cook after a night of drinking, the scrunch of their face when an ambulance passes, the eye masks they wear before bed. Your purest self emerges in this intimate space, when you think no one is taking notice.
There is beauty in mundanity. Romance in the quotidian. Love in the witness.
South Asian artist and urban planner Sabina Sethi Unni lives with her extended family near the border of Queens and Long Island. A second-generation Long Islander, she reflects on the ways her grandparents create a multigenerational home for a small but growing South Asian community.
Whenever my grandfather feeds the dog mooli roti under the table, or the Nassau County Legislature tries to make cops a protected class, or we run into my grandma’s chatty students from 40 years ago at Macy’s, or a local developer purchases prime waterfront land with a pesky landmarked home sitting on it until a convenient fire and green goose poop dissolve its foundation, it gives Masi “agita.” I’ve never heard anyone else use the word agita (except my mom) so my cousins thought it was part of the ever expanding familect that develops from us all living within a bike ride away from my grandma’s home. I wouldn’t dare move away from her center of the universe for fear of missing out on Sunday Night Dinner (and also the spider’s web of indebtedness, resentment, and love I have for Long Island, or perhaps my own family, but that’s for another time). Upon researching its linguistic etymology (Yiddish or Italian or Hindi?), we learned that agita is derivative from acido (heartburn) and agitare (agitate) and that the word’s usage peaked on Long Island in the 1970’s.
Nothing gives my mom and Masi more agita than hosting at my grandma’s house.
My grandparents immigrated to Long Island (with stops in Boston and Dover along the way) before the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act which loosened restrictions against Asians, so there’s always been someone sleeping over in my uncle Paul’s old bedroom, for a weekend or a very extended stay. In the 70s and 80s, my grandparents would throw what my mom calls “quintessential wood-paneled basement parties” and potluck cookouts with homemade kabobs, tuna casserole, whiskey sours; inviting their new American friends, everyone from employees who worked at their small businesses to the family doctor who pierced my mom’s ears. By the late 1970s, my grandma was able to coagulate a South Asian posse, so they would host kitty parties (microfinance social lending clubs, according to the cultural anthropologists). Recently, my grandparents have been occupied with anchoring distant relatives wanting to visit Times Square while they figure out their visas and learn how to deal with septic tanks.
Without overly romanticizing the segregated Long Island suburbs of the 1960’s, there’s something beautiful about regrowing community (and social capital) lost through immigrating; and rejecting suburban isolationist individualism by going up the way to the Siasoco’s three generation house on New Year’s Day for pancit and beef strips and whole roast pork. There are still rumors that Bollywood star Rekha attended one of my grandparent’s wood-paneled basement parties, and I believe it.
