Case Study: Coliving with the Strahms, eight years and counting

Learning boundaries while living with openheartedness

Editor’s note: this is a guest post from Ashley Strahm. She describes the easiest kind of coliving to set up: simply sharing a spare room. Living with friends doesn’t have to mean giant houses, contracts, and LLCs (though you know we love talking about those as well). Read on to find out why Ashley and her husband choose to live this way. 

This is part of an ongoing series of deep dives on coliving spaces. To see others, visit the Supernuclear directory.

Name: Ashley and Cody’s Abode

Date founded: September 2015

Location: Durham, NC

Rented or owned: owned

Amount of space: 1 bed/1bath apartment, then 3 bed/2 bath house, now 3 bed/1 bath house

Governance: figuring it out as we go along

Origins

Our coliving experiences technically began just days after our honeymoon wrapped in the summer of 2015 — we returned to our tiny apartment in Durham, North Carolina to a text from my husband Cody’s sister saying she’d packed up her car and was driving from Indiana to start over in Durham. Could she sleep on our futon for a few months? Sure, we said, and proceeded to share a minuscule bathroom that was only accessible via our bedroom. We shared… quite a bit in those months if I’m honest, but being her shelter at a vulnerable time didn’t feel like a heavy lift.

Then, a year into our marriage, we bought a 1,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath home. Soon after, Trump was elected, and our relationship with our church community dissolved. It was a traumatic, faith-shaking experience that drove us tearful, frustrated, afraid, and untethered, to create something we called ‘church at the crib.’ It was essentially a time on Sunday mornings for us to buy a bag of bagels and cry with anyone who wanted to share cream cheese. Some folks would show up for an hour and then never again; others moved in for months. In total, seven people have ended up living in our spare rooms over the course of our 9.5-year relationship. 

I won lots of prizes on The Price Is Right in 2018, and some of our housemates, neighbors and family all got together to celebrate. Our village grew and grew over the years!

I’ve often wondered if Cody and I just don’t like being alone (we currently live in a smaller home with only one bathroom and have welcomed another housemate we met in a cafe mere weeks ago.) We came to this idea of sharing space and time from different foundations: I’m a Guyanese-American Black woman raised by Caribbean parents in a remarkably diverse corner of North Jersey. I was used to taking the train as a teen with the sound of different languages lulling me to sleep on the way home from Manhattan. Cody is the blonde firstborn of a blended, mostly evangelical family who jumped at the chance to leave rural Indiana as soon as he was able, craving walkability and a community that didn’t look identical to him wherever he went.

But the more I think about it, it’s not that we don’t enjoy being alone; we do deeply treasure our private time together, and nearly a decade after meeting Cody I still feel like we’re honeymooning. He’s by far my favorite person, and we do mostly everything together. I think perhaps we are a bit unsettled by the idea of the largely idolized ‘American’ nuclear family — this whole concept of buying a home, building a fence around the yard, hoarding material resources, and folding into one’s self. We were also quite alarmed by how difficult affordable housing was to get (even as a dual-income, no-kid dyad.) We both carried a ton of student loan debt and couldn’t afford much when we first bought a home. So the idea of sharing an extra bedroom just seemed like the easy thing to do; we didn’t have disposable income and weren’t the protesting/canvassing/politically vocal type. But we could offer our space, especially to other financially strapped millennials, folks dealing with mental illness, or others who identified as queer and just didn’t feel safe in their current place. It has always felt like something we were already doing — living — so why not just live in the same time and space with other folks who would live with us?

Around the time we first started co-living in our first home, I submitted our next-door neighbor to the city for 'best neighbor' award. He won, and the whole street came out to support him and his family. Super proud moment for our entire community!

Inner workings

We haven’t ever charged rent, though we had one person who insisted he offer a nominal fee monthly to cover utilities. We have learned a ton about what boundaries even are; those early years were a free-for-all where first, we’d agree to things like boa constrictors, sharing cars, and significant others sleeping over (well, living with us too). We quickly learned that we might need to speak up a bit about snakes in the kitchen… or figure out how to break it to a housemate that another close friend wasn’t romantically interested when things got uncomfortable in common areas. Hey, you live and you learn.

A familiar setting in the fall; fires out in our backyard for kiddos to come and have s'mores.

Most of our housemates began their stays with us completely spontaneously; there would be a word-of-mouth moment between people in the neighborhood, or a friend of a friend would need a place to stay. If it were up to me, it’d be an automatic yes in nearly every instance. I am my mother’s child. It is when I am unpacking someone else’s things, sharing a meal, or listening to a housemate muse about their past well into the wee morning hours that I realize I am the same Diana who continues to cook double the amount of dinner to run Tupperware down the street, or welcome anyone onto our porch for a belly laugh and block party invitation. Cody is far more reserved but he has come alive in our medium-sized city, where multiculturalism is cherished and he could finally embrace his progressive values. We have met most coliving requests with an openheartedness that has made for life-long connections out of some, and fond memories from others. Chosen family, perhaps.

Lessons learned

From what we can tell, each season we shared with our housemates has always ended like a good, satisfying chapter of a book we were all co-writing together: we knew there would be others, but our co-author would finish their version of our book without us. We’ve always assumed that we were a stop along the way — a sweet interlude on the way to something else. And that helped us to view each of our housemates as people who contributed to us, and us to them in a really beautiful, symbiotic way. 

Sometimes community contributions are more concrete: here are my neighbors helping to replace my battery on a random weekday morning when my car wouldn't start <3

Cody and I won’t be having children (though something about our open-door policy to unrelated guests and monthly block parties tends to draw kiddos into our home from up and down the block), but we are fertile in so many other ways. We are planning for a season where one day, we get to take care of our parents as they age nearby, and we are in the early stages of planning to build an ADU in our backyard for a couple of close friends so we never have to say goodbye. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Ashley Strahm

Durham, NC

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Suggested further reading:

• What the research says about living near friends

• Common misconceptions about coliving

If you found this helpful, know someone else who might? You know what to do!