How Long Island's multigen households make it work

In the iconic TV show “Everybody Loves Raymond,” set in Lynbrook, the main character’s proximity to his parents and brother proved too close for comfort. But that’s not necessarily the reality for some Long Islanders, whose homes shelter generations of kinfolk.

For these relatives, nothing beats the convenient and warmhearted benefits of living near or with one another. And although the single-family home reigns supreme on the Island, there is opportunity to blend generations in the same household or at least nearby.

“It keeps the family unit together, because someone is always here to help out,” said Pat Caggiano, 61, a retired New York City firefighter who lives in North Lindenhurst with his wife, grown daughter, son-in-law and two grandkids, ages 5 and 9. “I highly recommend this to everyone.”

Living together under one roof — whether in a single-family home or an attached duplex — is one affordable way for families to hold on to a decent quality-of-life in Long Island’s ever-rising real estate market. Many times, the generations combine their financial resources to buy a property that accommodates parents, grandparents and grandchildren.

Families interviewed for this story said they typically split overhead expenses, including utilities, as well as chores like gardening, cooking and maintaining the backyard pool. And if a home’s resident is sidelined by an accident, illness or aging, others in the household generally supplement the professional care with familial TLC.

Frank Pititto, a partner in West Babylon-based Dormer King, credited the COVID-19 pandemic with feeding the trend of multigen living on Long Island. He said that young families began migrating from the city to their relatives’ homes for the space and backyards and other reasons. He has also noticed older Long Islanders giving up their homes and going south in the winter but returning to Long Island to live the rest of the year with their grown offspring.

“The kids move upstairs and the parents downstairs, since parents don’t want to take the stairs,” said Pititto, who said his business has experienced about a 20% increase in dormers for extended-family households since 2020. Generally, second-story dormers start at $150,000, but can cost much more, depending on square footage and finishes, he said.

Fern Karhu, broker/owner at Woodbury-based Realty Connect USA, said that while many families opt to live intergenerationally in a single-unit house with one kitchen, “multiunit residences are plentiful on Long Island.” In a recent perusal of the OneKey MLS website, Karhu found 114 multifamily homes, with prices ranging from $479,000 for a Lindenhurst duplex to $4 million for a triplex in Long Beach.

After living for nearly two decades in his two-story home, Caggiano turned to Dormer King in 2023 to transform it into a two-family property to accommodate his daughter and her family. His efforts included converting the top floor from a two-bedroom area into a legal accessory apartment with a separate entrance, three bedrooms, 11⁄2-baths, a kitchen and laundry closet.

“The price of everything on Long Island had gone through the roof, including taxes, and with my daughter and son-in-law, who were living in the Village of Lindenhurst, going to work and I was watching the kids, it just made sense for all of us to live in one home,” Caggiano said.

Setting expectations

Before extended families move in together, Donna Lutz, a developmental psychologist family therapist with Long Island Family Therapy in Commack, suggests promoting intergenerational harmony by setting clear expectations on:

• Division of costs for utilities, taxes and mortgage
• Division of labor for household repairs, cooking, cleaning, gardening;
• Respect for privacy;
• Unsolicited advice;
• How much child care grandparents want to offer;
• Keeping an open dialogue.

“There’s less conflict when there’s agreement on what the roles are,” Lutz said. “And you can determine them through conversation.”

Both older and younger residents — whether living together in a one- or two-family home — often make extra helpings of food for one another. And before heading to the supermarket, they frequently inquire about one another’s needs and desires.

“We all benefit,” said Lola Sweeting, 68, who has lived for five years in a single-family Coram home with her husband, Neal Fauntleroy, 74, son Nikken Fauntleroy, 37, his wife Vianny, 37, and their three kids, ages 16, 9 and 8. “I do a lot of the cooking because [my son and daughter-in-law are] working and, because they’re younger, they help us with stuff we can’t do, like carrying packages.”

Her son, the owner of a cleaning service, said he maintains the pool and does small repairs around the house. And “depending on what the family wants for dinner and who has the time,” he will make his specialty — steak — and his wife, an administrator at another cleaning firm, cooks Dominican rice and beans.

Pooling their finances and sharing the mortgage, the two couples bought their home, which had been a foreclosed property, for $395,000 in 2020, said Nikken Fauntleroy. The house has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a dining room, two living rooms, a basement and a small pond.

After Nikken Fauntleroy and his wife were injured three years ago in separate car accidents, their multigen household helped them recover, he said. His family’s efforts included running errands, and the kids watched over each other. Everyone provided “moral support, big time,” he said.

For Sweeting, living with family allows her to provide the younger generations the close-knit family atmosphere that she experienced as a youngster.

“I grew up this way,” said the Amityville native, who lived in a single-family residence with her mother, grandmother, an uncle and a great-uncle. “Watching my grandmother is how I learned to cook.”

Drumming with her grandson

Bay Shore resident Harriet Fishman, 80, who has lived for nearly two decades in a two-family house with her extended family, relishes how the multigen home has fostered special relationships and shared memories with grandsons Rainer, 19, and Atticus, 17.

“I had the beauty of seeing them grow up in a close and affectionate way,” said Fishman. “As a little boy, Rainer helped me plant flowers each season, and because Atticus was always a drummer and plays the djembe drum [a drum originally from West Africa], he inspired me to drum with him as a child.”

And thanks to her son Matt Pasca, 51, and daughter-in-law Terri Muuss, 55, who lead writing workshops at Teatro Yerbabruja, an arts organization in Bay Shore, Fishman said she has the opportunity to share viewpoints with a diverse circle of friends.

They decided to live together because Pasca’s mother and her then-husband were looking to move closer to the city and downsize from their large home in Manorville. Meanwhile, Pasca, an English teacher, and Muuss, a social worker, wanted to sell their Kew Gardens, Queens, co-op and move east, where they could have more space, including a backyard.

The two couples combined finances to buy their home for nearly $1 million. But since the older generation had the wherewithal to pay a larger portion of the price, Fishman’s name is on the mortgage and Muuss and Pasca “mostly pay rent” to her, he said.

Pasca said that initially, he and his wife were concerned about living in a shared house — “which can be tricky even when you love the people.” But a respect for each other’s space, an occasional family game night and shared recipes and favorite baked goods have made those concerns moot, he said.

‘I bought 10 pork chops’

In 2001, when Margaret and Michael Cohen and their three children had outgrown their three-bedroom house in Brightwaters, they moved into her parents’ three-story, 20-room Victorian mansion, also in Brightwaters. Her late father, Fred W. Grello, a pediatrician, and mother, Rose Grello, purchased the house in 1964 and raised their six children there.

“My mother had said, ‘Why don’t you join us?’ ” recalled Margaret Cohen, 64, a retired high school special education teacher.

The Cohens said their arrival was also beneficial to her parents, who had begun to find the large home a physical challenge, including navigating to the second-floor laundry room, and a financial burden.

“We shared the expenses to run the house,” said Michael Cohen, 75, a retired public school administrator. Eventually, the Cohens purchased the house from the Grellos.

But their multigen life had its ups and downs.

“I didn’t want to eat dinner with my parents every night,” Margaret Cohen said. Although the Cohens’ living quarters had spare cooking facilities, including a microwave, toaster oven and sink, she and her then-adolescent children resisted her mother’s invitations because they weren’t fond of her formal place settings and custom of saying grace at the table every night.

She voiced her sentiments to her mother, but “when I came home from work, my mother would ask what are you making for dinner and say, ‘Don’t worry about it. I bought 10 pork chops,’ ” Cohen said. “She wore me down, and little by little we ate with them.” But her mother yielded to Cohen’s request to replace her portion of pork chops with chicken or pasta.

Rose Grello later suffered from dementia, which “broke my heart and cast a pall over the house, and everyone had to adjust in his or her way,” Margaret Cohen said.

Both Grellos died at 89 and exactly where they wanted — in their beloved home. Her father passed away in 2020, and her mother three years later.

Having recently sold the mansion and now splitting their time between rentals in East Islip and Paris, Margaret and Michael Cohen said they have no regrets about choosing a multigen life.

“It wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops but a labor of love, and the children are better for it,” Margaret Cohen said.