Earlier this year, when Keke Palmer was featured on “Open Door,” a video series of celebrity-home tours published by Architectural Digest, the actress was eager to draw attention to the evidence of a large family: a sister’s shelf of horror paperbacks, a drawing by her niece, a cabinet full of Stanley cups. (“We are a water-drinking family!” she said.) In an accompanying magazine article, Palmer explained that she shares the home with her three-year-old son, her sisters, and her sisters’ children. “My house is kind of like Full House,” she said. “Except instead of three uncles, we’ve got three aunts.”

The video was a hit on social media, where stories about sisters buying homes together have become popular. “So my sisters and I did something iconic,” a thirtysomething says in a TikTok video from July that has been liked over a hundred and eighty thousand times. In a tour of the house that they bought together, she notes the stairway in which they’d be installing a chandelier. “We’re going to try and transform this whole thing into an aesthetic paradise,” she says. Another video shows two sisters who co-own a home in Toronto blowing out candles on a cake with pink frosting. “After four years together there’s only one rule that we have,” one of them says. “No boys,” says the other. Boyfriends must have their own place, the sisters explained. “Basically, we have to date people who have their life together,” one adds.

The trend reflects a broader economic reality: as housing costs increase and marriage rates decrease, many Americans in their twenties and thirties are choosing to live with—and even purchase homes with—their siblings. A 2025 Bank of America survey found that twenty-two per cent of Gen Z homeowners bought their home with siblings, up from twelve per cent in 2024 and four per cent in 2023. Intergenerational living is on the rise, too, a shift that, in many cases, reflects the country’s growing diversity; as Jay Caspian Kang notes in a recent column, such living arrangements are far more prevalent in places with large Latino, Asian, and Black populations.

Sibling cohabitation used to be widespread. In early America, many households were rambling and multigenerational; relatives were less likely to live in the type of isolation that they often do today. Unmarried women often lived in the parental home, or went to live with a married sibling, or formed a household with other sisters who didn’t have husbands, either. “Sibling co-residence solved practical problems: housing, respectability, care, inheritance, disability, widowhood, poverty, and old age,” Steven Mintz, a professor of history at U.T. Austin, wrote in an e-mail. “Before robust welfare states, pensions, nursing homes, and women’s broad access to paid work, siblings were a crucial safety net.” But, as increasing numbers of people began to move to cities to find work, many large families dissolved, and limited opportunities for women’s employment “produced more unmarried women who could not easily form independent households,” Mintz wrote. The “spinster sister,” he wrote, “was not merely a stereotype. She was produced by a society that exalted marriage but did not provide all women with viable marriages or independent livelihoods.” By the mid-twentieth century, the idea of the clearly bounded nuclear family was taking hold. “A new family ideal arose after World War II, abetted by the growth of suburbia, the ideology of ‘family togetherness,’ and the Baby Boom,” Mintz wrote. In mainstream culture, the American Dream became a fantasy of middle-class homeownership in which children lived with their parents only until they, too, could get jobs and a mortgage.

By the late twentieth century, depictions of adult siblings or in-laws cohabiting, such as “Family Matters” and “Full House,” had become popular, but they typically grounded the characters’ circumstances in divorce or tragedy. When female characters were shown living together long-term without male family members, the cause was usually the same. But, in many depictions, there was a subversion of the idea of the spinster as a tragic figure: the sister witches of “Hocus Pocus” and “Practical Magic” turn the community’s fear into a source of power; the divorcées of “Kate & Allie” and “Grace and Frankie” build new households together; the women of “The Golden Girls” make a full and vibrant life of growing old.

The twentieth century was, after all, a time when more women found greater economic opportunity and independence from their husbands and families. In 1991, when the writer Amy Hill Hearth profiled two civil-rights pioneers, Sarah L. and A. Elizabeth Delany, known as Sadie and Bessie, for the New York Times, she didn’t frame their decision to cohabit as a grim incapacity. The sisters, having grown up in a house of ten children, decided when they were young never to have kids of their own, and declined marriage proposals. In an oral history of the sisters that Hearth went on to publish, Bessie declares, “When people ask me how we’ve lived past one hundred, I say, ‘Honey, we never married. We never had husbands to worry us to death!’ ”

Today, many Americans are making the decision not to marry, or to marry later. The U.S. marriage rate hit an all-time low in 2019, and, as of 2021, a quarter of all forty-year-olds have never wed. Most people will have two to three significant romantic relationships in their lifetime—not one. For many people, a relationship with a sibling is one of the deepest, most stable bonds that they have. When Megan McGovern, who works as a lawyer, purchased an apartment, in South Boston, with her sister, Anne, who works in health-care management, she remembered feeling comforted by the relationship’s long track record: “I knew with one-hundred-per-cent certainty that Anne was going to be in my life, no matter what. It wasn’t like a boyfriend, where something could happen two, three years down the road,” Megan said. “There was just that inherent trust in it, because no matter what, we were always going to be siblings.”

Gia Arvin, a real-estate agent in Florida who recently sold homes to two sets of sisters, said that she saw an increase in buyers with unconventional arrangements after the pandemic. “We’re at the highest price we’ve ever been, post-COVID, so I really think it has to do with affordability,” she said. A report from Pew, out this July, found that eighty-seven per cent of U.S. adults say that it is more difficult for them to buy a home than it was for their parents.

Mindy and Kayla, a pair of sisters who live in New England, always knew that they wanted to live near each other, close to the town where they grew up. But incomes have not kept pace with home prices in the decades since their parents bought their childhood home, in 1997. Kayla, a physician assistant, and her husband spent five years searching for a house; Mindy, a product manager in health-care technology, looked for housing for three years. The trio decided to look for homes with a layout that would work for all three of them, and, eventually, they found a place with four bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms—plenty of space for them and the children that Kayla and her husband plan to have. “I don’t see marriage and I don’t see kids in my future,” Mindy said. “But I’ve always loved the idea of being present and being a really supportive aunt.”

The benefits were clear: shared domestic work; a tempered singles tax for Mindy; the sort of spontaneous socializing that can happen when people don’t need to make a date to see one another. They split expenses: Kayla and her husband cover sixty per cent; Mindy covers forty per cent. But the arrangement comes with challenges, too. Conflicts arise; group meetings are held. (When the sisters bought a couch without consulting Kayla’s husband, Kayla got a “little backlash,” she said.) There are husband-wife dates and sister-sister dates. The sisters wake up at around 6:30 A.M. on weekdays to do a virtual exercise class in the basement. They’re bonded, too, by social media, on which they document their domestic life—a typical video shows Kayla, post-workout, bounding up the stairs in periwinkle spandex to the kitchen where her husband, doing dishes off camera, has set out her protein shake. (Kayla’s husband “prefers to not be on video,” Mindy said.) Online, Mindy is often asked what she would do if she met a romantic partner. “I would be able to go to their place when I wanted to,” she said. “There would never be a world where this would fall apart because I met somebody and started dating somebody.”

In “Thicker than Water: Siblings and Their Relations, 1780-1920,” a book about brothers and sisters in middle-class Britain, Leonore Davidoff writes that, given the emotional and financial interdependence of adult siblings, “an impending marriage could be a traumatic event for those left behind.” In “Little Women,” as the possibility of Meg’s marriage looms, Jo pleads, “I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family.” Perhaps one appeal of sharing a home is that it softens the transition. Madeleine and Erica Zetterquist, two sisters in their twenties from California, bought a house in 2023, and Erica’s then boyfriend moved in with them. Recently, the couple got engaged. Despite the upcoming wedding, the sisters don’t have immediate plans to change their arrangement. Madeleine is glad to have her sister’s fiancé there with her and Erica: “We will kind of bite each other’s heads off, so it’s great to have him here to balance us out.” Although she doesn’t imagine living with her sister for her entire life, Madeleine hopes to find a way to live on the same street. “Every goal I have, home-wise, always ties back to my sister,” she said.

For Anne and Megan McGovern—the sisters from Boston, who are now thirty-five and thirty-nine—a shared house wasn’t for forever, either. This May, two nights before Megan moved out, the two sisters went out to dinner together and got matching tattoos: a peony-and-heart design. The separation was emotional for them, but it also affected their broader community: their home had “become a hub for a lot of our family and friends,” Anne said. One of their nephews was taken aback when he heard about the move. She told me that, a year earlier, when she asked him what he wanted to do when he was older, he responded, “Maybe I’ll live in Maine, and my brother and I can live together.” Anne was still delighted to recall it. “For him, right now, that’s totally normal.” ♦