In a housing market where a one-bedroom in D.C. runs about $2,250 a month, a group of young women in the nation's capital found a rather unconventional bargain: rent starting at $500 a month, courtesy of a 76-year-old nun and her order. But as of July 31, 2026, the experiment is over.

Anne Montgomery House, a community home run by the Society of the Sacred Heart in Northeast Washington, D.C., closed its doors after a decade of providing below-market rent and, as it turns out, a whole lot more. Sister Diane Roche, 76, who opened the home a decade ago, said the decision to close came down to simple arithmetic: "I'm 76 years old and running a house like this takes a lot of energy," she told NPR. "Something inside me just said this is it."

The house was the latest in a long line of intentional communities Roche has helped establish, following stints in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, St. Louis, and New Orleans. Today, she works with Catholic Charities helping refugees resettle in the U.S., but Anne Montgomery House was her signature project: a place where young women could afford to live while studying, interning, or starting careers in one of the country's most expensive cities.

Residents paid $500 a month for a shared room or $700 for a private one - a steal compared to the $1,000-plus they'd fork over for a room in a typical shared house. "The stipend for a Ph.D. is something like $700 a month," Roche noted. "How are you supposed to support yourself on that?"

But the real magic wasn't the price tag; it was what came with it. Abigail Bulman, 23, arrived last year on a fellowship with an international PR firm expecting little more than a bed and a chore list. Instead, she found what she now calls "lifelong friends." "I thought this was going to be a place that we pray in the morning, I had chores to do, and then I was going to go to bed here," she said. "I had no idea they were going to be people that now have been my lifelong friends."

Mary Gardner, 24, joined in the summer of 2024 while interning on Capitol Hill and prepping for her senior year at Catholic University. She couldn't afford off-campus housing, but more than that, she said, "I needed a community that was like a safe haven." When she came home from politically charged days on the Hill, Sister Clare Pratt, 86, provided what Gardner described as a "breath of fresh air": no lectures, no solutions, just patient listening.

The house was named after Sister Anne Montgomery, a peace activist who worked in conflict zones worldwide. Roche asked residents to share meals, cook for one another, participate in morning reflection, and commit to some form of service. One fee covered everything, removing the financial stress that often sinks communal living.

The model is part of a broader trend in pricey cities: young professionals opting into Catholic-run homes for below-market rent. But as Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, points out, these communities aren't a large-scale fix. "They haven't had a chance to get their footing," she said of young adults priced out of cities. She harkened back to a time when boarding houses were common in U.S. cities - a model that has largely vanished. A 2025 Pew Charitable Trusts analysis found the number of single-room occupancy units dropped by roughly 1 million between 1960 and 2020.

Ellen warns that the consequences extend beyond individual hardship: "If cities don't allow their housing stocks to grow and don't accommodate a variety of different housing types, then it's going to make it very difficult for them to attract workers," she said, calling it "potentially a threat to economic growth for the country as a whole."

As the sun set on Anne Montgomery House's final day, former residents and friends gathered for a farewell celebration - Creole dishes, barbecue, lemon margaritas, and a sing-along of "Amazing Grace" and "This Little Light of Mine." Roche led a traditional Greek circle dance, hand-in-hand with the young women who'd become her extended family. "She definitely has the most moxie of any person I think I've ever met," Bulman said.

Upstairs, Funmilayo Erinfolami, a space physicist from Nigeria, packed boxes beneath autographed photos of NASA astronauts, including Jeremy Hansen. She'd come to study space physics, hoping to work at NASA one day, and found a home at Anne Montgomery House. "It felt so fresh, so welcoming," she said, struggling to imagine leaving it behind.

For Roche, the closing is bittersweet but inevitable. "They keep me young," she said of her young housemates. "You just become people together."