{"id":199504,"date":"2026-04-16T16:04:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T16:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/199504\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T16:04:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T16:04:10","slug":"we-couldnt-afford-new-york-as-single-mothers-so-we-built-a-mommune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/199504\/","title":{"rendered":"We couldn\u2019t afford New York as single mothers \u2014 so we built a mommune"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Bernie Sinclaire\u2019s ex-boyfriend moved out of their Manhattan apartment, she vowed never to rely on a man for financial security again. But as a single mother of two paying for rent, bills and childcare, she knew that to live the life she wanted she needed someone to share the load.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew that in order to rise above poverty and avoid being stuck like I was as a child in my a single mother\u2019s home, I would need to secure housing where I could comfortably pay the rent or the mortgage, and I would need a two-income household in order to do that,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s not, like, a man-hating thing, it\u2019s just that women need stability in order to flourish.\u201d<\/p>\n

For years Sinclaire, 38, had dreamed of starting a \u201cmommune\u201d \u2014 moving in with another single mother to live communally \u2014 but her plans had always fallen through. So when she reconnected with her friend Anabelle Gonzalez, 39, who was recently divorced and raising her daughter by herself in a studio apartment around the corner in Washington Heights, she suggested they move in together.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI called her, and I was like, \u2018Move in with me; let\u2019s just do it.\u2019 Anabelle wasn\u2019t ready, and we both cried at the other end of the phone, and then about three months later she moved in,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Sinclaire and Gonzalez, both teachers at an all-girls school in the Bronx, are part of a growing number of single parents turning to unconventional living arrangements to afford soaring rent and childcare costs, and to provide emotional support.<\/p>\n

In recent years, mommunes have cropped up everywhere from Jacksonville, Florida to Kansas City, Missouri, with single mothers living communally to help ease the stresses of parenting. The unique set-up is less common \u2014 or less publicised \u2014 in big cities such as New York where space costs a premium.<\/p>\n

In a city where the average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan is $6,500 according to RentHop, getting by even without small children is no easy feat. But single mothers are the socio-economic group most vulnerable to falling into poverty. In New York, 86 per cent of single mothers with young children cannot cover the cost of basic needs, according to a 2023 report from the Center for Women\u2019s Welfare.<\/p>\n

For Gonzalez and Sinclaire, the benefits of pooling financial, physical and emotional resources have been immense.<\/p>\n

Initially Gonzalez and her seven-year-old daughter Sophia moved in with Sinclaire and her two sons, Marcos, nine, and Nicolas, four, in their two-bedroom flat. Six months later, in December 2024, they signed a lease for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,200 sq ft apartment a block from the Hudson River in Hamilton Heights, a more affluent area of Manhattan. The building includes a gym, a playroom and laundry facilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time we come home we think it\u2019s a joke, we\u2019re like, \u2018What a blessing\u2019,\u201d Sinclaire says, sipping a frothy cappuccino Gonzalez just made her.<\/p>\n

The flat itself is an explosion of colour, featuring a large open-plan kitchen and living room decorated with an enormous pink and orange shaggy rug. Sinclaire has applied bright wallpaper, installed light fittings and painted a window arch to make the rented home their own. There is a cat called Toulouse, a handmade puppet called Bob and a stuffed axolotl \u2014 a type of salamander \u2014 called, well, Axolotl, which they bought on their mommune holiday to Mexico last year.<\/p>\n

\"TwoThe two mothers say cohabiting makes household tasks far easierJohn Munro for the times<\/p>\n

The children, who refer to themselves as the \u201ckidsmune\u201d, have space in their bedroom for a Barbie dreamhouse and a WWE wrestling ring. When asked what his favourite thing about the mommune is, the youngest, Nicolas, says: \u201cWe can play together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore, I was just in soldier mode \u2014 single motherhood is just pushing through from day to day,\u201d says Gonzalez. \u201cI would take a deep breath at the end of the day when I was in bed, and just say, \u2018OK, Sophia\u2019s good,\u2019 and then wake up and do it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within eight months of starting the mommune, Sinclaire was promoted at work after feeling a new lease of energy and ability to focus. The amount she can save each month has increased to $1,325. She also won a paid fellowship from Barnard College to study women\u2019s role in the American Revolution.<\/p>\n

Sinclaire began posting about their communal life on Instagram in August. Last month one of her posts went viral. She went from 165 followers to more than 30,000. She has been inundated with requests from single parents, prompting her and Gonzalez to start developing a not-for-profit app to help like-minded single mothers who want to start their own mommunes connect.<\/p>\n

While widely seen as the norm in the western world, the nuclear family is a relatively modern construct that became more common in the US as couples moved away from their extended families for work during industrialisation. Historically, however, children had many caregivers.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur species evolved as what I call a co-operative breeder \u2026 species where \u2018alloparents\u2019 \u2014 group members other than the parents \u2014 help to care for and provision offspring,\u201d says the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, professor emerita at the University of California, Davis.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think extended families were the norm throughout most of history,\u201d she adds. \u201cConcepts like the nuclear family and privacy have so much to answer for in terms of the psychological distress of children and the loneliness of mothers, and so we just shouldn\u2019t expect a mother to do this all by herself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sinclaire questioned the idyll of the nuclear family when she was 13 and her Italian father walked out on her family, abandoning her American-born mother with five children. They went from living a beautiful life in Venice \u2014 where her father was the provider and her mother stayed at home with the children \u2014 to living in a hotel in Baltimore.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother was 27 with five kids, had never had a job, never graduated high school and my father just ran off with another woman,\u201d Sinclaire says. \u201c[For years] I watched her continuously have to struggle between independence or romantic partnership in order to get by, and I never wanted to have to make those choices. Women need a village, women need community, and so do children. The mommune is not an antithesis to the nuclear family, it\u2019s more an extension of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AnabelleThe mommune is likely to become more widespread as living costs place pressure on single mumsJohn Munro for the times<\/p>\n

Having more than one caregiver in the home generally leads to better outcomes for children, experts say.<\/p>\n

\u201cKids are demanding and generally you need more than one income to help raise kids because they\u2019re expensive,\u201d says Christina Gibson-Davis, sociology professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She adds: \u201cSo it just strikes me that they\u2019re [the mommune] creating a new form of family to meet these very real needs of child-rearing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The division of labour in the mommune centres on the different strengths Sinclaire and Gonzalez have. Sinclaire takes care of the interior design, the car and the admin, while Gonzalez manages more of the cleaning and the emotional temperature of the flat. They share the cooking and help each other with childcare, although they have no set rota. Nobody ever has to ask the other to pick up milk; if someone sees it\u2019s running out, they simply buy more.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like sometimes in hetero[sexual] relationships, when you have kids, I always felt like I was keeping a running list of all the stuff that I was doing and all the stuff they weren\u2019t doing. The mommune\u2019s not like that,\u201d Sinclaire says.<\/p>\n

Sinclaire and Gonzalez are aware that as the children grow up they will need their own bedrooms. Eventually they say they will need a bigger place, but right now they are taking things one day at a time. Neither parent is actively dating at the moment but they say if they were, they would not bring anyone back to the mommune.<\/p>\n

But what happens if one of them finds a new partner and wants to live with them? \u201cI can\u2019t imagine that, but I also can\u2019t predict the future,\u201d Sinclaire says. \u201cAnd the point of the mommune is certainly not like \u2018sign here in blood\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gonzalez, who was raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, says the changes she has experienced since she moved into the mommune are immense. \u201cWe were walking in our old neighbourhood and I said, \u2018Oh my god, I\u2019m breathing differently,\u2019\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew the mommune would be a step towards a more holistic life, but I never imagined that it would feel as supportive as it has been. It\u2019s not just the money, but it\u2019s also that sense of self \u2014 you can just breathe easier.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Bernie Sinclaire\u2019s ex-boyfriend moved out of their Manhattan apartment, she vowed never to rely on a man…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199505,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":{"0":"post-199504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-city-news","12":"tag-ny"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}