Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Pat Price has lived in St. Louis her entire life. She keeps an immaculate house and cherishes routine, plays bridge, quilts, goes to church, watches little TV. She “cooked every night for, it seemed like, a thousand years,” and after her husband died, promptly and deliberately forgot how. Evenings are quiet: “Nine o’clock’s the new midnight,” she says dryly.
Annie Mbale was born in Rumphi, Malawi. Her room is piled with clean but not-yet-folded laundry, books, and supplies for crafting Afrocentric jewelry. “I don’t think I have a routine,” she says, “except waking up.” When Mbale watches TV, she binge-watches: “I don’t have the patience to wait to see what’s going to happen.” A great cook, she can’t stand to spend money at a restaurant and be disappointed. Her usual bedtime’s 1 a.m.
You wouldn’t automatically pair these two as roommates? Odd Couples Housing did.
Mbale had just finished her MBA and needed an affordable place to live. Price, who had polio as a child, was feeling its effects and welcomed the idea of somebody helping with a few chores, like sweeping, that are awkward on crutches.
I visit when they’re both home, and Mbale gives a quick tour: “This is the dining room, but normally we eat in the kitchen, me and her. I have a lot of spices, so she gave me that shelf. And she’s easy about where things go, so I thought, OK, I’m not going to mess things up.” The patio off the kitchen is perfectly landscaped; Price is as passionate a gardener as Mbale’s mother was. “Me, I can kill aloe vera,” Mbale says with a shrug. But all summer, she carefully watered the lantana spilling over the window boxes.
The idea for Odd Couples Housing flashed when John Levis watched his mother-in-law living alone, her twin sister nearby, also living alone. “Twins start out in the womb together—why not put them back together again?” he asked his wife. The twins agreed, and as they shared living expenses and did more socializing, their lives improved noticeably. So noticeably, in fact, that Levis and his business partner, John O’Connell, commissioned Washington University MBA students to do a viability study of shared elder housing. Halfway through, the students remarked, “If you pair two seniors and it doesn’t work, you’re going to have a displaced older person. But how about us?” There were a lot of young people trying to pay down debt without living in squalor.
“So we pivoted,” Levis says. And then they walked across campus to ask Brian Carpenter, professor of psychological and brain sciences, how to develop compatibility questions.
“My students will do it,” he offered. But how could they fit the questions into an algorithm, gradually weighting the questions that had successfully predicted a good match? That took engineering students. And the hottest expertise in social media, they said, was at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, so Levis posted an opening there for a director of social media. A student expressed interest before it ever hit the internet.
That student was Annie Mbale. When she came to interview Pat Price, she thought it was a job assignment—but loved Price and her house, a charming four-bedroom home in a tree-lined Kirkwood neighborhood perfect for Mbale’s long runs. After the interview, Price found herself wishing it would be Mbale who shared her home, even though “it was Kirkwood, for God’s sake, not Clayton or downtown.”
Location was the big tradeoff, Mbale admits, because she loves the city.
“I get that,” Price assures her. “I lived in Soulard for 13 years, but my husband wanted to mow grass.” What the two women admire most about each other is the same trait: independence. Mbale conducts long-distance seminars for women in Malawi, teaching budgeting and finance, “because that’s one way women can be independent.”
“No matter what,” says Price, “Annie will land on her feet.”
Still, she worried the day Mbale went for a run and didn’t come back, and darkness fell, and she still wasn’t back, and…
Price, who’s been determined not to play a mother’s role, broke down and called her. Mbale was fine, just had her headphones on and got in the zone. But it felt good, she says, “to know somebody cares. I lost my parents when I was 11, and I’m the oldest in my family, so I had to be the mom.”
The two tease each other easily, Price rolling her eyes about Mbale’s huge wardrobe, Mbale saying she’s trying to like Price’s country music. Mbale still hasn’t unpacked all of her boxes. “You probably don’t need what’s in them, darlin’, if you haven’t looked for it since June,” Price remarks. The other evening, Mbale called from the kitchen, “Are these my eggs or your eggs?” and Price called back, “I think they’re our eggs.”
Levis says there are similar programs in other cities, “but they don’t have the housing stock we do, so they have to buy buildings and do rental-basedmultigenerational housing.” Odd Couples wanted compatibility-based housing, with either shared expenses or agreed-upon duties.
The program’s growing nicely. What Levis likes best is “the win-win of it. A cybersecurity grad student was apologizing because his parents still send him vast quantities of food from India every month, and the homeowner’s eyes lit up. She said, ‘I love Indian food!’”
