Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

39 With Family Built In: JENNIFER ACOSTA AND HER FAMILY IN WOODHAVEN, QUEENS (April 11, 2010)

2 1 3 39 With Family Built In Jennifer Acosta and Her Family in Woodhaven, Queens ApRIL 11, 2010 Jennifer Acosta, an Ecuadorean immigrant, and her sons in a three-family house in Woodhaven, Queens. (Uli Seit for The New York Times) 2 1 4 If by some miracle you could slice off the front of Jennifer Acosta’s red- and cream-colored house in Woodhaven, Queens, as if it were one of those dollhouses that open to reveal what lies within, you would find most of the people she feels closest to in the world. Ms. Acosta, who’s divorced and works in Manhattan as a personal assistant, shares the ground-floor unit with her son Derek, who is 12, and his 5-year-old brother, JanPaul. The second floor is home to her older sister, Jacqueline Andrade, who works as a nanny; Jacqueline’s husband, Diego, who installs hardwood floors; and their 16-year-old daughter, Fernanda. On the top floor live Ms. Acosta’s older brother, Luis Garcia, a warehouse supervisor, along with his wife, Alexandra, a former day-care worker, and their 14-year-old son, Calvin. Even siblings besotted with one another might think twice about placing themselves under a single roof, especially one that looks barely large enough to shelter three households. But for these Ecuadorean immigrants , who were raised largely in a one-bedroom apartment near Fordham Road in the Bronx, the arrangement offered an escape from cramped quarters in a troubled part of the city. Theirs is the contemporary immigrant story, one that involves shuttling between homeland and New York, husbands separated from wives, children separated from parents and attending schools both here and there, parents holding down typical immigrant jobs (the father was a cab driver), and everyone struggling to learn English as they inch closer to legal residence in the United States. Ms. Acosta and her brother and sister had long talked about buying a place together. Yet only seven years ago, when they were shown this century-old house opposite Forest Park, did they realize they had found something both large enough to accommodate three separate households and priced at a level they could afford. “We’d been looking for a year,” Ms. Acosta says. “The day we saw this house, we had already seen seven other places. This was the last one.” The driveway shared with the house next door almost proved a deal breaker; initially, Ms. Andrade refused even to set foot inside the front door. They bought the house for $400,000, dividing the down payment equally among the three families. The sharing continues, and in meticulous fashion. On the 15th of each month, Ms. Andrade takes a check for the mortgage to the bank. Mr. Garcia makes sure the taxes are paid. Ms. w I T H fA M I Ly B U I LT I N 2 1 5 Acosta administers to the sometimes temperamental boiler, a task she’s proud that she mastered on her own. A strict schedule spells out who’s responsible for sorting the recyclables (Mr. Garcia in January, Ms. Andrade in February, Ms. Acosta in March, and so on). The three take turns shoveling snow and raking leaves. When it comes to tending the small front garden, a task that includes putting up Christmas decorations, everyone pitches in, kids included . Every summer, the three families buy something new—one year it was a fence, another a new front door. When something breaks, the cost of repairing it is divided into thirds. The arrangement sounds like something out of a 21st-century version of The Brady Bunch, this one set in a working-class immigrant neighborhood whose main drag, Jamaica Avenue, is lined with fluorescent-lit fast-food restaurants and shadowed by an el. On occasion, one of those meticulously worked-out arrangements goes awry, memorably the time Ms. Andrade forgot to make the mortgage payment and her brother had to rush to the bank with a check minutes before the doors closed. And even people who love one another dearly can conclude that togetherness has its limits. “You know everyone ’s schedule,” Ms. Acosta says. “You lack a certain privacy.” A family member tiptoeing home late at night should expect pointed questions the next morning. “On the other hand,” she says, “if there’s a problem, like somebody’s making too much noise, it’s a lot...