After 10 years, a Washington, D.C., residence that combined affordable housing with communal living is shutting down.
Anne Montgomery House, run by Catholic nuns, offered below-market rent to young women, often while they completed internships or fellowships.
Its closing highlights a squeeze in costly cities, where students and workers at the start of their careers have fewer accessible housing options.
Here's what to know
As NPR recently reported, Anne Montgomery House was operated for the past decade by Sister Diane Roche of the Society of the Sacred Heart. Rooms were available there for between $500 and $700 a month, far below standard prices in the nation's capital, which can run into the thousands.
Roche said keeping the house running had become more than she could continue to handle.
"I'm 76 years old and running a house like this takes a lot of energy," she said. "Something inside me just said this is it."
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NPR described the house as part of a trend in which young workers have been turning to Catholic-run residences to make life in expensive cities more feasible. But cheap rent was only one reason the home stood out. Anne Montgomery House residents shared meals, rotated cooking, joined a brief morning reflection, and agreed to serve others.
Former resident Abigail Bulman, 23, said she went in expecting little beyond somewhere to stay and ended up finding far more. "I had no idea they were going to be people that now have been my lifelong friends," she told NPR.
More background
The same housing pressures that made Anne Montgomery House so useful are only intensifying.
As NPR noted, Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies found that a record 22.7 million renter households spend more than 30% of their income on housing. Young adults are often especially exposed to that burden.
The news outlet also cited a 2025 Pew Charitable Trusts analysis showing that the U.S. lost about 1 million single-room occupancy units between 1960 and 2020, even though boarding houses and SROs once offered lower-cost living for many workers and newcomers.
For people who lived at Anne Montgomery House, what is disappearing is not just affordability but also a sense of refuge.
Mary Gardner, 24, told NPR she needed "a community that was like a safe haven," especially after exhausting days interning on Capitol Hill.
What can be done?
New York University professor Ingrid Gould Ellen told NPR the cities that want to stay livable for young workers need to permit a broader range of housing.
Keeping rooming houses, SROs, and other modest options in place — or adding more of them — could help people remain close to their workplaces in costly cities.
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