People First, Housing Second: H.O.M.E.’s Intergenerational Model

Sometimes an action we take has consequences beyond the reason we take it. We might decide to forgo eating meat for our health but it benefits the environment too. When the federal government instituted labor laws to prevent children from being exploited in factories and farms, we also paved the way for universal public school education.

In the same way, the philosophy behind the founding of Housing Opportunities and Maintenance for the Elderly is only tangentially about housing. This may be a surprise to some because when one hears H.O.M.E.’s name and the needs it meets, it is only natural to conclude that H.O.M.E.’s purpose is to help solve the housing shortage for older people with low incomes. 

In fact, the origin of H.O.M.E.’s intergenerational housing is more connected to the progressive spirit that undergirded the Catholic Worker Movement than to affordable housing policy. 

H.O.M.E. is born of a spiritual philosophy of community, of all people in all their precious individuality equal under one tent. The way Dorothy Day describes collaborating with Peter Maurin to found Catholic Worker houses during the Depression could very well serve as the raison d’être for H.O.M.E. Here is Day telling the story to Robert Coles in his Lives of Moral Leadership:

“We started with a soup kitchen, and in no time we had a community of us, living together. It wasn’t ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ a few with ‘ideas’ and ‘ideals’ and the hungry poor ‘we’ worked to feed; it was a mix of people – some who had no place to stay, and ‘us,’ who were searching, you could say, for our place to stay!” 

The key word is “our.” H.O.M.E. started not with a soup kitchen but as an outgrowth of Little Brothers of the Poor (now Little Brothers – Friends of the Elderly), whose volunteers visited lonely elderly widows and widowers in Paris in the aftermath of WWII. Its credo of “flowers before bread” means that all people need social and spiritual connection, even over physical sustenance. 

Michel Salmon came to Chicago in 1959 to start Little Brothers in this country. He later married Lilo, another volunteer and a social worker from Germany. They found that substandard housing, homelessness, and out-of-reach rents burdened low-income Chicago seniors on a daily basis; on a practical level, this issue rose to the top of any issue facing older people. Together, Michel and Lilo launched H.O.M.E. in 1982 with a small seed grant from Little Brothers.

Housing, for H.O.M.E.’s founders, was intended to be a means by which to heal a broken community, to turn “us” and “them” into “we.” Housing is not the end in itself. Although nonsectarian, to this day, H.O.M.E. is animated by a faith-inspired vision of mutuality. 

When people ask me what makes H.O.M.E.’s intergenerational housing unique, I can respond with confidence that H.O.M.E.’s family-style communal arrangement that allows a dozen older people to live under one roof with a handful of young adult Resident Assistants, sharing meals and activities together, is unparalleled. Groups around the world contact H.O.M.E. to learn more about our “Good Life Senior Residences” – Pat Crowley House in Edgewater, which also incorporates a family with a kindergartner, and the top floor of Nathalie Salmon House in Rogers Park – which blend privacy and camaraderie, access to community nursing and resident-led events, all with H.O.M.E. staff support.

But the secret to H.O.M.E.’s success lies in its intergenerational intent. That intent was not what one might think, of having younger people “do for” older people so they can live comfortably. It was to create a joyful amalgamation of equals.

“From the start we had a good sense of community, of caring, of ‘being in it together,’” wrote Lilo of the 1983 establishment of Pat Crowley House. She elaborates in her history of H.O.M.E.:

“The community dinners once a week at the house reminded us of our community life at Little Brothers. It was like a seamless continuation of a lifestyle to which we were accustomed, only better, because we had the old people live with us, so to speak. At Little Brothers, we always had to take the old people home, after parties, after a vacation, after an outing, we had to take many of them back to miserable conditions until ‘the next time.’ At the Pat Crowley House we could provide all the things which they had lacked in their former circumstances.”

Older people with low incomes are among those people society most marginalizes. The genius of H.O.M.E. was in turning “intergenerationality” into a verb, solving for isolation by providing age-integrated housing and housing outreach services, and serving as a conduit for ordinary people from all walks of life to share their time, energy, and resources with older people and with one another. 

The secret of H.O.M.E.’s intergenerational housing is communality. It is that “seamless continuation” of a world in which there is no “Other,” shaped by mutual upholding as a way of life.