Halfway up the street in midtown Kitchener, Ontario, is a single, detached home much like the other houses around it, but inside, something unusual is happening.
At least the neighbours think so. How does it work? they ask. What are the common areas? How do you get privacy? Is there a limit if they start having babies?
The house is home to five adults—Allan and Marilyn Rudy-Froese, their daughter, Abby, son, Ben, and his wife, Sarah Dyck—as well as two dogs, Caesar and Angus. The house is co-owned by all of the adults.
In 2023, the owner of the house Marilyn and Allan had rented for five years wanted to sell and wanted to sell to the Rudy-Froeses. The purchase was not feasible, and, at the same time, the prospect of renting a different place in the skyrocketing market was daunting.
We learn compassion and forgiveness when we live in community. And it’s about being good stewards.
Marilyn says she’d hear friends question how their young adult children could ever afford a house. “I knew we couldn’t help our kids out—our own future was apartment living. I’m like: maybe it’s not sustainable, everyone having their own single detached house. The world isn’t big enough, and as you look at climate change….”
Marilyn spontaneously put a note in the family chat: “Anyone wanna buy a house? Shall we form a family commune?”
The response surprised her. “Everyone said yes…. We soon realized we were all serious.”
While one of their three kids, Jacob, eventually decided it wasn’t for him— he and his partner, Sydnie, live nearby and are what they call “associate members”—the others moved forward.
Getting a mortgage took a while, in part because few banks accepted more than three owners, and, as Ben says, “It was important to us to have all five owners.” A lawyer helped them work out the arrangement, as well as determining how a future sale would be divided, based on differing initial downpayments.
The sale closed on August 15, 2023. The five are working on a co-ownership agreement to help if they get to a place where they can’t come to agreement.
As Allan had previously, he continues to spend half the year in Indiana, where he teaches at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary.
Sarah says that so far the biggest revelation is “how easy it is. We’ve joked: when does this get hard?” Marilyn is pleasantly surprised how much she enjoys this arrangement. Abby had said to her, “Mom, you don’t get your empty nest,” and Marilyn says she did enjoy having the house to herself previously, but she likes the current arrangement too.
Sarah says, “You don’t actually know until you’re living together…. But we had hints because . . .”
“. . . we’d already been living together so much,” Abby fills in.
Sarah observes, “I thought this would work [because] when you guys hang out as a family, there’s a lot of quiet, solo time…. That has translated well to living together.”
Sarah adds, “It’s also partly because of personalities—everybody is invested in this working well, everybody’s invested in the well-being of each of us.”
Marilyn says, “It helps that it’s family, and I don’t have to entertain. When a guest is in the house, I feel like I have to entertain, and the house has to be tidy, so it’s a different mindset.”
Ben notes that it was also helpful that he wasn’t a kid living at 26 Gildner, so he doesn’t fall into old family roles.
This had not been the plan for the family. Marilyn recalls, when the kids were young, toying with the idea of buying a big multigenerational house near her parents, but says they quickly dismissed it because of costs and location. Allan describes staying at the four-generation Schroeder house in Winnipeg [See “Care comes around,” p. 14], and seeing how they had supper together. “Their grandkids and great-grandkids would be hanging out, letting loose and being super-honest about everything. And Grandma and Grandpa didn’t flinch.”
But still, as Abby says, “It wasn’t planned we would live together. It was expected we would grow up and live independently.” Before Marilyn’s group chat, Abby was expecting to have to try to find a $2,000 one-bedroom apartment. All the children had lived on their own and had begun careers. Their work showed them the value of communal living. Abby did several co-op placements at a L’Arche community where she lived in community.
Ben, who works as a physiotherapist, says, “I see a lot of seniors who live in different set-ups: [for instance] where someone has a separate apartment, but it’s attached to the house, and once or twice a week or maybe every supper, they come over to the main house, and otherwise they live their own life.”
Sarah, who is a midwife, visits many homes and says, “People with newborns do really well when they have a really strong support system with families who live close by.” She adds, “It’s a Western idea that we have to be individualistic and build our little separate spots.”
Allan agrees, saying that his AMBS students are fascinated by this experi- ment, though those from the Global South see it as normal.
In response to questions from neighbours, Allan says, “This is how people from Pakistan and India and Central America live.”
But because it is not how North Americans typically live, it has taken significant conversations—and Abby’s PowerPoint presentations—to work out practical details.
“One of things I said in an early presentation was that we are adults,” says Abby. “One huge theme was how we would get Mom to stop doing mom things. When Jake lived here, he brought this up at dinner one night: ‘Mom is doing a lot of chores, how do we divide this up?’”
“He named my over functioning,” Marilyn says.
They have settled on a monthly cleaning day, followed by a takeout meal and a household meeting, during which they discuss everything from large renovation plans to small household purchases.
They each pay the same monthly amount for mortgage, property tax, insurance, utilities and internet. They use an app to divide grocery costs (omitting Allan when he is away).
Ben does most of the snow shoveling, while “Abby keeps us in sourdough bread,” says Sarah.
Marilyn says “Many people [think what we’re doing] is amazing and unique. They hold us up as this big thing or they think it’s weird.”
Some people talk to Allan about which of their own family members they could or couldn’t live with. Sarah says friends ask her how she can live with her in-laws. Marilyn says, “I don’t take for granted that my children and my daughter-in-law want to live with us. I feel really humbled. People say: ‘You must have done something right,’ but I just lived my life…. My faith is so integral to who I am and what I do, it’s hard to be conscious of how it influences. We learn compassion and forgiveness when we live in community. And it’s about being good stewards.”
Soon they are laughing as they show off Allan’s prized coffee maker that he carts to and from Indiana, and together they set the table for supper.
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