Carehaus is the United States’ first intergenerational care-based cohousing project. Carehaus provides quality care and homes for disabled adults as well as quality jobs and homes for caregivers and their families. Carehaus codesign workshops have iteratively taken place since 2020 but are imagined here as a single session. These vignettes capture some of the critical discussion points informing the design of Carehaus Baltimore, which is slated to open doors in 2026.
Carehaus Baltimore, rendering 2020. Architect: Rafi Segal A+U with collaborating artist Marisa Morán Jahn. The first location, in central Baltimore, features twenty units, housing seventeen older adults and disabled people, four caregivers with their families, a site manager, and a team of experts in nutrition, fitness, art, and wellness. In the co-living community, Carehaus residents share utilities, meals, appliances, and tools. By optimizing energy consumption, food waste, care, and labor, Carehaus is able to pass these cost savings on to residents in the form of benefits—higher-quality care for residents and sustainable wages for caregivers. Credit: Carehaus
Guillermina Castellanos walks us around the Mission, a neighborhood in San Francisco that is home to her and many of the Latinx nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers from La Colectiva de Mujeres, the organization she helps direct. About the neighborhood she says, “It’s gone through so many changes—from the huge rent swell due to Silicon Valley to the opioid crisis today. Still, it’s hard to make rent, and it’s hard to imagine what’s going to happen to us in the future. Who will take care of us and where will we live?”
Castellanos’s concerns echo the worries of the United States’ 2.2 million domestic workers, over 90 percent of whom are women.[1] While the United States relies on the help of domestic workers to ensure the well-being of our homes, they themselves face significant challenges in their home lives: 84 percent experience food scarcity, and 51 percent are housing insecure.[2] In turn, the low wages and high turnover in the industry directly impact the well-being of those who rely on care to go to work—or even simply to get out of bed, take a shower, or eat a meal.
Since 2010, artist Marisa Morán Jahn has collaborated with domestic workers groups and individuals like Castellanos on various public artworks and films. In response to the urgency of our nation’s care crisis, Jahn began thinking about the role of architecture in shifting how we value care and design to better meet domestic workers’ needs. Jahn then began collaborating with architect Rafi Segal to lead the design of Carehaus. Jahn and Segal involved Baltimore-based real estate developer and urban planner Ernst Valery, who is committed to increasing wealth in low-income Black and brown communities.
We’re sitting around a table jotting notes and sketching on the floor plans of Carehaus’s first building designed for Baltimore. Joining is Jamaican-born caregiver June Barrett, social movement leader Ai-jen Poo, Castellanos, and other members of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Those joining us via Zoom from around the country have copies of the floor plans they can mark up and share.
Valery has chosen a historically disinvested site in Baltimore whose strategic location could benefit from a few key infrastructural investments. Turning to the group, he says, “We’d like to open up the bottom floor so that it can be used by local communities. Like exercise classes where other elders from the community can come participate, or shared meals and art programs. But what do you think?”
Notes:
[1] Asha Banerjee, Katherine DeCourcy, Kyle K. Moore, and Julia Wolfe, “Domestic Worker Policy ChartBook 2022,” Economic Policy Institute, November 22, 2022. accessed Aug 20, 2024, https://www.epi.org/publication/domestic-workers-chartbook-2022/.
[2] La Alianza surveys, National Domestic Workers Alliance, “Domestic Workers Economic Situation Report with Analysis from the second quarter of 2024,” July 9, 2024; based on the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Employment Situation Report in the second quarter, 2024.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
Carehaus Baltimore, rendering 2020. Architect: Rafi Segal A+U with collaborating artist Marisa Morán Jahn. Carehaus Baltimore is a five-story building designed around a shared courtyard allowing ground-level access from both the street and alley. To ensure light and air circulation, each floor has a shared terrace facing the courtyard, and each residence has windows facing at least two directions. Built to withstand a pandemic and encourage social integration, Carehaus’s architectural features include outdoor gardens, terraces, an absence of corridors, and drop-off locations for packages. Credit: Carehaus
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