Creating housing solutions for non-traditional families

By Samara Trilling ’25

I grew up in a circle of four houses in Northern California. My best friend lived in the front house, and I lived in the back. Every house had two kids, all within 8 years of each other. We’d ride our bikes around the lamppost in the middle of the shared driveway and draw spaceships in chalk. We’d put on plays in the garage for our parents. Everyone was always in each other’s backyards – sometimes we’d come home to find a kid playing in our backyard play structure or swinging on the tire swing, and I knew I could always grab lemons from our neighbor’s tree. Kids from the neighborhood seemed to like coming over to our house, even though it was much smaller than the Silicon Valley mansions around us. It was a pretty cool way to grow up (even if I did have to share a room with my brother).

All of us rented. That didn’t seem to be a problem, until Facebook and several other tech companies IPO’d when I was a sophomore in college and rents skyrocketed. My parents, and many of my friends’ parents, eventually had to move away. I couldn’t stop thinking about how things would have been different if my parents and all our neighbors had co-owned the land. As teachers and nonprofit workers, none of them could have afforded to buy the whole lot with four two-bedroom one-bath houses on it, but they might have been able to split it four ways if each person could get their own mortgage.

I went to law school in part to figure out how to make this kind of co-ownership work for people like me, my family, and my friends, many of whom will be working in public interest jobs that won’t pay enough for us to afford to own a place of our own. What kinds of provisions does property law have for co-owning property? How hard is it to set up a coop? How much money do you need? Can everyone get their own mortgage? What if someone buys in but can’t afford it anymore or has to move away to take care of family?

It was the LGBTQ+ Advocacy clinic that gave me the opportunity to do this exploration. This year, I’m collaborating with the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition to write a legal guide on how to buy property with chosen family for the clinic’s work in polyamory advocacy.

Launched in 2020, the LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic is one of the newest clinics at HLS. The clinic initially focused on impact litigation. Students worked on filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of three transgender young people who were arrested while participating in Black Lives Matter and Black Trans Lives Matter protests and subjected to degrading treatment while jailed, including unnecessary strip searches and sexual harassment. The clinic has also represented Florida state employees who were denied health insurance coverage for transgender-related healthcare in a federal lawsuit against the state of Florida; partnered with the ACLU to challenge the constitutionality of West Virginia’s refusal to change birth certificate gender markers; and secured a landmark settlement on behalf of a trans woman who experienced sexual and physical abuse, retaliation, and lack of disability accommodations in the New York City shelter system. The clinic has filed amicus briefs in some of the highest-profile cases about queer, trans and intersex rights in recent history, including Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti.

More recently, as the composition of the federal courts has shifted, the clinic has expanded its policy portfolio and published public comments, campaign toolkits, and whitepapers on Title IX athletics, nondiscrimination for nonbinary and gender nonconforming people, and intersex youth rights. Recently, the clinic has focused on two distinct workstreams: 1) representing LGBTQ+ individuals in the criminal justice system, and 2) advancing the civil and human rights of polyamorous and consensually non-monogamous individuals, communities and families through legislative advocacy, public policy, and public education.

This last workstream isn’t something on the radar of most lawyers. Polyamory is a practice or philosophy where someone has, or is open to having, multiple loving partners simultaneously with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. It falls under the umbrella of consensual non-monogamy (CNM), which describes any relationship in which all participants explicitly agree to have multiple concurrent sexual, intimate, and/or romantic relationships. The specific agreements within CNM relationships can vary, depending on what the partners need and want. (You can read more here!)

More than 20% of people in the United States have engaged in a consensually non-monogamous relationship at some point in their lives. Non-traditional family relationships are common – from co-parenting with multiple partners, exes, friends or relatives to forming communities of support around transportation, illness, childcare, or social connection – and yet much of family and property law still assumes and privileges a base unit of a nuclear monogamous married couple raising children alone. Research and lived experience increasingly shows that this isolated familial experience isn’t fulfilling the needs we have for connection and mutual support, especially as governmental support for families declines. The clinic takes a much broader look at what constitutes important social and familial ties – Prof. Alexander Chen, the head of Harvard’s LGBTQ+ Advocacy clinic, and his collaborator Prof. Christina Mulligan from Brooklyn Law School recently wrote an excellent piece defining “parafamily” – and helps advocate for a compelling, robust, alternative version of legally-protected social relationships.

Polyamorous and nonmonogamous people are often stigmatized as less moral, less stable, and less capable of caring for children than monogamous people, facing discrimination in marriage, divorce, adoption, assisted reproduction, taxes, legal definitions of parenthood, housing, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and healthcare. Over the past two years, the clinic has spearheaded municipal ordinances establishing multi-person domestic partnerships and non-discrimination ordinances in Cambridge, MA, Somerville, MA, Arlington, MA, Berkeley, CA, and Oakland, CA.

This year, in addition to the How to Buy Property With Chosen Family legal guide, I contributed to the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition’s work writing and publishing a legislative guide for local proponents on how to pass a non-discrimination ordinance for non-traditional families. I researched and summarized the average city council legislative process, translating sometimes arcane procedures into a more useful step-by-step breakdown.

In November 2024, I was honored to attend what, to our knowledge, was the first gathering of legal practitioners around polyamory issues in the United States. Twenty or so law professors, property and family lawyers, organizers, and political advocates – and me – gathered on a Friday in a New York conference room and talked about the future that the law could enable for our clients and communities.

It was an excellent environment for research for the legal co-ownership guide. Two property attorneys talked with me about the pros and cons of co-ownership structures (LLCs are good if you have cash, but it can be hard to get a good mortgage rate; cooperatives are a bit of an administrative lift but let you own shares in the whole; tenancy in common doesn’t protect co-owners from each other’s debts, but is the most flexible). A family lawyer talked with me about how to plan for separation – what if someone has to move away to take care of their family? What if a relationship ends and someone wants to live alone? I learned about the operating agreements that help guide the answers to these questions (contract law was never so exciting).

In the winter after the 2L crush of job and clerkship applications, I felt lucky to spend time with a group of people who cared about the same things I did. I saw lawyers who were helping people form strong families with multiple parents so everyone could contribute to both family finances and taking care of kids. I saw lawyers who were thinking creatively and expansively about ways of sharing resources in uncertain times. I saw lawyers who were using existing laws and local government ordinances to help people thrive.

This work is housed within the polyamory advocacy workstream, but it’s not just for poly people. As the housing crunch means fewer people can afford their own home, more people will look to ways of creating mutually supportive communities and sharing resources. This is cutting edge work that plans for the future, not just with sober legal analysis, but with a lot of creativity and joy.

As for my own future, after law school, I (like so many of my queer friends) plan to co-buy a building of four units or so with various friends and lovers, with a shared backyard where we can grow tomatoes and zucchinis and maybe a lemon tree and host community organizing meetings in the summer. And when we separate, we’ll have set up ways to take care of each other through that too. I’ve never been prouder or more excited to start my career as a lawyer.