Living with nuns: Priced out of D.C., young women found low rent with unlikely roommates

A Decade of Affordable Housing for Young Women in D.C. Ends at Anne Montgomery House

Ecorescuezone.com – By the time evening falls on a quiet street in Northeast Washington, the front door of Anne Montgomery House will close for the final time. For roughly ten years, the building has offered early-career women a foothold in one of the most expensive metropolitan housing markets in the country — a foothold that now disappears as its founder, 76-year-old Sister Diane Roche, decides the physical toll of running the home has become too great.

“I’m 76 years old and running a house like this takes a lot of energy. Something inside me just said this is it.”

The decision marks the end of a small but meaningful experiment in communal, below-market housing that sat at the intersection of religious vocation and a very practical economic problem. As graduate stipends, fellowship salaries, and entry-level wages in Washington struggle to cover even a single room in a shared apartment, arrangements like the one Roche built have taken on added urgency for young professionals trying to establish themselves in the capital.

The Woman Behind the House

Roche’s path to Anne Montgomery House was neither sudden nor singular. A member of the Society of the Sacred Heart, an international Catholic religious order, she spent years serving in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo before turning her attention to building intentional living communities in American cities. She helped establish comparable houses in St. Louis and New Orleans. Today she also works with a local office of Catholic Charities, assisting refugees with resettlement in the United States.

“Time after time, place after place, wherever I went, I would find a way to build a community.”

The Washington house was, in her telling, simply the latest chapter of a lifelong pattern. What made it financially viable was the fact that the broader Sacred Heart order owned the building outright, eliminating landlord markups and allowing rent to be set well below what the surrounding market demanded.

The Numbers That Made It Work

Residents paid $500 per month for a shared room or $700 for a private one. In a city where even a single room in a shared house routinely exceeds $1,000 before food and utilities are factored in, those figures represented a substantial cushion. For a doctoral student whose monthly stipend hovers around $700, the difference between paying market rate and paying the Anne Montgomery rate was the difference between staying in Washington and leaving.

“The stipend for a Ph.D. is something like $700 a month. How are you supposed to support yourself on that?”

Roche framed the arrangement not as charity but as structural possibility: because the order owned the property, the women inside could live at a price that made their studies and careers feasible.

“It is extremely satisfying to know that simply by living in a house which we own, we can have these women living with us at a price that makes it possible for them to flourish.”

More Than a Roof

Affordability was the entry condition, but it was not the whole design. Roche gathered women of varying ages, faiths, and professional backgrounds under one roof and asked them to share meals, cook for one another, observe a brief morning reflection, and commit to some form of service. The house carried the name of Sister Anne Montgomery, a Sacred Heart member and longtime peace activist who had worked in conflict zones across the globe.

Abigail Bulman, now 23, walked through the door in January 2025, shortly after graduating from college and accepting a fellowship with an international public relations firm in Washington. She needed a place she could afford in a city where rent had outpaced her income. What she found exceeded the financial calculus.

“I thought this was going to be a place that we pray in the morning, I had chores to do, and then I was going to go to bed here. I had no idea they were going to be people that now have been my lifelong friends.”

Bulman described sharing homemade dinners and daily routines that, over months, converted a group of strangers into something resembling a family. The communal structure — one consolidated fee covering meals and household expenses — removed much of the financial friction that can erode communal living arrangements over time. Roche called the model a kind of “community light,” lighter in obligation than full intentional communities but structured enough to sustain genuine social bonds.

What the Nuns Gained

Roche was candid about the reciprocal nature of the arrangement. Living alongside women decades younger brought her companionship, laughter, and perspectives she would not have encountered in a cloister or an office. The sisters became, by her account, informal gatekeepers of the residents’ personal lives. When a resident brought a boyfriend home for dinner, the sisters would “size them up and kind of vet them.”

“They keep me young. You just become people together.”

Why the Closing Matters Now

The shutdown of Anne Montgomery House arrives at a moment when the gap between young adult earnings and Washington-area housing costs has widened considerably. Graduate stipends, post-graduation fellowships, and junior professional salaries in the capital frequently fall short of even modest rent burdens, let alone the full cost of living. Catholic-run and faith-adjacent housing cooperatives have emerged in several expensive cities as a partial answer, but they remain small in number and dependent on institutional property ownership that most congregations do not possess.

Roche’s decade-long experiment demonstrated that the model could function — financially, socially, and spiritually — when the underlying asset was owned by the order rather than leased from a market landlord. Its closure does not erase that proof of concept, but it does remove one of the few working examples in the nation’s capital, leaving the women who might have needed it next year to search for alternatives in a market that offers little below-market supply.

For Roche, the closing is not a failure but a natural endpoint. The energy required to sustain the daily rhythms of a shared household — cooking, cleaning, mediating relationships, maintaining the building — has outstripped what she can give at 76. The question now belongs to the order, to the women who will need what the house provided, and to a city whose housing economics continue to price out the very young professionals it depends on.