Growing Families That Stay Put Some families are crowding together for the sake of preserving close-knit neighborhood relationships, especially those forged among children.
Ryan and Moira Goepfert were elated when they were selected for student housing at Columbia University. The move would put them in a renovated doorman building across from campus, and it would save them $600 a month in rent. But after Mr. Goepfert visited the quiet hallways of the university building, the couple turned down the offer.
“Almost 100 percent of the reason was our daughter, Grace, and the relationships she’s built on our floor,” said Mr. Goepfert, 34, who is pursuing a degree at Columbia’s School of General Studies. The Goepferts live in a one-bedroom rental on West 119th Street in Harlem. Their floor has six children between the ages of 4 months and 7 years and the family next door has a baby on the way. Especially in the winter, the children hang out in the 12-by-15-foot landing outside the elevator. They ride their scooters down the hallway and kick around a ball. While their children are playing, the families keep their doors unlocked.
“As the kids have come together, so have the parents,” said Mr. Goepfert, whose daughter is 2. “We have dinners together, share toys, hand-me-downs, get help with last-minute babysitting. That kind of community isn’t all that common in New York, and it fosters an environment that’s so valuable that we turned down a significant amount of money.”
It’s common practice in New York for families to move for the sake of the children: Parents angle to buy or rent in a more desirable school district, head for cheaper apartments in the outer boroughs or flee these parts altogether in search of suburban backyards and better schools.
Then there are the families who stay put — sometimes under less than ideal real estate circumstances — because of close-knit neighborhood relationships, especially those forged among children. These parents are willing to make significant sacrifices in space and living expenses to preserve the uber-local community their families have formed with others in nearby blocks or even inside the same building.
With the impending arrival of a third child, many families would begin plotting their suburban escape. For the Gilmores, a family of five in South Park Slope, Brooklyn, this wasn’t an option. For the last three and a half years, they have lived in a 500-square-foot one-bedroom on 11th Street, for which they pay $2,100 a month.
“Living here means so much to my family,” said Lauren Gilmore, 34, who home schools her older child in a neighborhood co-op. “We’d rather work out the tensions of being in each other’s business all the time and learn to deal with what we have for the sake of all this community.”
When Ms. Gilmore became pregnant with their third child, she and her husband, Jacob Gilmore, 31, who works for the online clothing companyJackThreads, realized they’d have to get creative with the sleeping arrangements. “We had so many things taking up floor space, but we weren’t utilizing our nine-foot ceilings,” Ms. Gilmore said.
She began searching online for adult bunk beds and eventually found a company that would custom-build a queen over a queen. Now the two older kids sleep on the top bunk together and the baby sleeps with his parents below.
For the Gilmores, the lack of privacy is a small price to pay for the network of children. In the frigid winter months, up to eight local families switch off hosting each other’s toddlers and preschool-age children indoors for daily art projects, baking and dress-up. In the summer, these families gather for a weekly barbecue in Prospect Park.
Most important to the Gilmores, is a family one block over. Their 5 1/2-year-old daughter and the other family’s son have become especially close — a friendship that has fostered a similar intimacy between the parents. Each Friday night, the Gilmores and their friends around the corner cook a large dinner.
“My family is in Columbus, Ohio, and my husband’s family is in Columbus and Massachusetts, so my friend operates as our family,” Ms. Gilmore said.
About 20 blocks farther north, on St. Marks Place near the Barclays Center, Sandy Ferguson and Heather McMaster, have also chosen community over space. In 2013, the couple bought a 3,530-square-foot townhouse in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, but when it came time to sell their 1,000-square-foot apartment, they couldn’t bring themselves to leave. The reason: the neighbor’s children.
The Fergusons’s 7-year-old daughter, Lucia, was born within weeks of Arlo Davis Bivins, who lives one flight up, and their 3 1/2-year-old daughter, Senia, is friends with Levi Ullmann, 4, who lives one floor below. The children are inseparable.
“There’s a flow between apartments; the kids just go up and down,” said Ms. McMaster, an associate broker with the Corcoran Group. Ms. McMaster said that having these families in such proximity to her daughters is like having two additional sets of parents.
“They’re so familiar and familial,” said Ms. McMaster, who like her husband, is in her 40s. “Arlo’s parents will even reprimand Lucia, if the kids get out of hand.” Meanwhile, the parents said they try to abide by each other’s household rules. Arlo isn’t allowed to watch much TV, so the family turns it off when he comes over.
Some of the building’s older residents have become surrogate grandparents, teaching the children how to garden in the shared backyard and cooking them breakfast. “It’s a big intergenerational building,” said Mr. Ferguson, an administrator at the Department of Education. “We all grew into families together. It’s like what I imagined 1930s or 1890s New York to be.”
David Favaloro, director of curatorial affairs at the Lower East SideTenement Museum, is quick to point out that city residents at the turn of the last century “would not have romanticized” these types of relationships as we do now. Tenement living would have made the Gilmores’s 500-square-foot shoe box seem palatial. Many standard tenements in the late 1800s fit three rooms into 325 square feet of space.
And if Mr. Ferguson has occasionally felt claustrophobic, crammed into the family’s stall-size half-bath with his daughters and wife, at least he doesn’t have to share that toilet with everyone on the floor, as tenement residents once did.
“The nature of the brownstone is that they encourage constant communication with your neighbors,” said Dr. Julie Golia, director of public history at the Brooklyn Historical Society. And especially at the turn of the last century, when neighborhoods were grouped by regional as well as national origin, “there might have been a more communal or clan-based approach to child rearing.”
But a building doesn’t have to be low-rise to generate tight bonds. Michele Gold, 44, lives with her husband, Rob Ichelson, 45, and two sons, ages 10 and 11, in the Park Royal, a 15-story luxury building near Central Park West. Ms. Gold, a consultant for the skin care company Rodan and Fields, likens the interaction between her youngest child, Max, and his best friend, Jaret Solomon, 10, three floors up, to her own experience growing up on a cul-de-sac in Toronto.
“There were no fences, so you could run through all the yards,” she said. “I had sleepovers all the time at my best friend’s house. It almost feels like a similar experience in the building.”
The boys use an internal house phone to call up and down to see if the other is home, and they frequently eat dinner at one another’s apartments. On weekends, they run through the hallways or play hockey in the building’s playroom. Soon their parents will allow them to go to the park and playground together without adult supervision.
Not that every member of the Gold-Ichelson household feels so strongly about their two-family suburbia. For the last year, Mr. Ichelson, who works in advertising at DirecTV, has been eyeing the real estate listings and driving his wife to open houses. “He wants more space,” she said. “He’s over sharing a living room with the kids.”
But Ms. Gold is loath to leave and not just because of the boys. Through Max and Jaret, Ms. Gold and Jaret’s mother, Hillary Solomon, have become close. Now the families have Thanksgiving together: Appetizers and dessert are in the Gold-Ichelson apartment; dinner is at the Solomons’s. It’s a friendship, in fact, that Ms. Gold anticipates outlasting the children’s.
“I can’t make sure that relationships the boys have now will remain strong into the future,” she said. “I don’t know a single person that I was friends with in fifth grade. But Hillary and I will carry through regardless of what happens with the kids.”
In Brooklyn, the Fergusons recognize that their children and the neighbors’ children might eventually grow apart, but they don’t anticipate this happening anytime soon.
“They’re at the age when girls and boys separate and that just isn’t the story for these kids,” Mr. Ferguson said. “They’ll stay like siblings or cousins, even if Lucia goes punk rock and Arlo goes Celine Dion.”
But not all relationships are without tension. Children, like adults, can blow hot and cold on their friends, and the periods of frost can be awkward. It’s difficult enough in the suburbs, but even worse when you’re stuck in a painfully slow prewar elevator with the parents of your child’s frenemy.
In Brooklyn, Ms. Gilmore has learned to turn neighborhood tensions into teachable moments. One recent encounter, she said, presented the “perfect opportunity for my daughter to learn how to talk to people who rub you the wrong way.”
For the Gilmores, the surrounding blocks seem like a small town, their own urban microcosm. And if that means bumping into some people you’d rather not, it also means having close friends nearby. Ms. Gilmore is hoping to make her queen bunk beds work as long as possible. “For now, it’s really doable,” she said.
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