CHICAGO — At the age of 24, Francy Sandoval has unwittingly become the sole breadwinner for her family, after her mom, dad and brother — a nanny, a painter and a server — all lost their jobs in the coronavirus pandemic.
Her family needs the money, so the aspiring nurse feels she has no choice but to keep her high-risk job at the front desk of a suburban Chicago community health clinic treating many COVID-19 patients. But her home hardly feels like a haven either.
“Working during this time is not as stressful as coming home,” she said. “You were surrounded with patients who could have been or are positive and you might get your parents sick by just opening the door.”
Sandoval, an immigrant from Colombia, is among tens of millions of Americans living in multigenerational homes where one of the main strategies for avoiding infection — following social distancing protocols — can be near impossible.
The problem reverberates deepest in communities of color, where families from different generations live together at much higher rates, in some cases nearly double that of white families. Joint living also often intersects with factors like poverty, health issues and jobs that can’t be done from home, offering another glimpse of what fuels the troubling racial disparities of COVID-19.
“When you have generations in a household, some of them have to work, especially if they are in the service jobs or the retail or the grocery. They have to come in and out of that household,” said the Rev. Willie Briscoe, who leads a black church on Milwaukee’s north side, where the pandemic has hit hard. “You cannot safely quarantine.”
Families live together for many reasons — saving money, pooling resources, child care, elderly care or just culture. It’s a practice that’s been on the rise since the 1980s, particularly after the recession, experts say.
In the U.S., roughly 64 million people live in multigenerational family households, or 1 in 5 households, according to Richard Fry, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center. But it’s far more common among people of color: 29% of those households are Asian, 27% are Hispanic, 26% are African American and 16% are white.
Fry said two major factors accounting for multigenerational living are location, with higher rates in densely populated urban centers where the cost of living is high, and culture, especially for immigrants in the U.S. Living with family into adulthood, common in many parts of the world, was blamed for contributing to the spread of the coronavirus in Spain and Italy.
Dr. Garth Walker, an emergency room physician at a Chicago veterans’ hospital, said he has trouble counseling families living in cramped quarters about what they should do. His best advice is to choose one person to grocery shop and consider sending the most at-risk person to live elsewhere if possible.
“They just have a difficulty adapting to a pandemic because they can’t adhere to the recommendations that we suggest to everybody, like physical distancing, because it is a privilege,” he said of multigenerational families.
That’s echoed by Dr. Lisa Green, who runs the Family Christian Health Center south of Chicago, a low-income clinic where most of the nearly 20,000 patients each year are black or Latino and multigenerational living is common.
“Those options that we are telling everyone else over the phone to do are not options for them,” Green said. “When you have a fixed income, your options are fixed.”
Sandoval follows strict procedures at home, removing her work clothes immediately and wiping every surface she touches before retreating alone to the attic. That’s where she spends her time, including her most recent birthday.
She hopes to start nursing school online soon and dreams of stress-free family time again.
“My mom said, ‘I can’t wait until you are able to come home, and I can hug you,’” Sandoval said.