For 10 years, this Washington DC house rented rooms for $700. Now it’s gone

For ten years, a house in Northeast Washington DC rented rooms to young women for $500 a month shared, or $700 for a private room. On July 31 it closed for good.

Anne Montgomery House was run by the Society of the Sacred Heart, which owned the building outright and used that to keep rooms far under market. Sister Diane Roche opened it a decade ago and is now 76. "I'm 76 years old and running a house like this takes a lot of energy," she told NPR. "Something inside me just said this is it."

It's a small closing with a very large number behind it.

What $700 bought in a $2,192 market

A typical one-bedroom in Washington DC runs about $2,192 a month, and the typical apartment across all sizes costs $2,528. A private room at Anne Montgomery went for $700, so a resident there paid roughly $1,492 less every month than the market asked, which comes to $17,904 over a year.

Put it through the standard rule that rent should stay under 30% of income and the gap gets harder to look at. Clearing that $2,192 one-bedroom takes about $87,680 a year. Clearing a $700 room takes $28,000.

Roche kept returning to the example of a doctoral student trying to live in Washington DC on a research stipend. "The stipend for a Ph.D. is something like $700 a month," she said. "How are you supposed to support yourself on that?" That stipend comes to $8,400 a year against a market one-bedroom costing $26,304, so the arithmetic never had a chance without something like this house.

Residents also paid a single fee that covered meals and household costs, which is the part that rarely survives in modern shared housing. Abigail Bulman, who moved in at 23 after starting a fellowship, said she arrived expecting a roof and found something closer to family. Mary Gardner, who joined at 24 while interning on Capitol Hill, put it more plainly: "I needed a community that was like a safe haven."

The housing tier the country deleted

Cheap rooms with shared kitchens used to be ordinary. Boarding houses and single-room occupancy buildings housed workers, students and new arrivals in every American city, and then they were zoned and regulated out of existence.

The Pew Charitable Trusts found the country lost roughly a million single-room occupancy units between 1960 and 2020. Had that housing simply grown at the same rate as everything else, Pew estimates there would be about 2.5 million more of these units today. That's the hole Anne Montgomery House was quietly filling for eight women at a time.

Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service, said young adults get hit hardest because they haven't built savings for deposits or high rents yet. "In the late 19th century and early 20th century, a large share of young adults in U.S. cities lived in boarding houses," she said. "We don't have that option anymore."

Ellen is careful about the scale of what places like this can do, since a house of eight isn't a housing policy. She argues the stakes run past the residents, because cities that won't allow varied housing types struggle to attract the workers their industries depend on.

The pressure behind all of it keeps building, and Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies counts a record 22.7 million renter households now spending more than 30% of income on housing.

Roche is moving into an apartment and says she isn't retiring, with plans to keep working with refugees in Washington DC. Funmilayo Erinfolami, who came from Nigeria to study space physics and lived at the house, is still looking for somewhere affordable near her university.

We've looked at what shared housing saves in our breakdown of roommate savings by city and at a for-profit version of the same idea in Charlotte's co-living market.

Sources

• NPR, Living with nuns: Priced out of D.C., young women found low rent with unlikely roommates (August 17, 2026), for the house, quotes and residents

• Pew Charitable Trusts, How States and Cities Decimated Americans' Lowest-Cost Housing Option (2025), for the SRO decline

• Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, for the record cost-burdened renter count

• RentDataNow Washington, D.C. rent data, anchored to the Zillow Observed Rent Index, June 2026