Full house

Junior Eve Arias has never really had a space of her own. She shares her home with her parents, two younger brothers, two uncles and two aunts (who aren't speaking), one of whom has a five year-old daughter and another child on the way.

High housing costs in Montgomery County make it difficult for families to afford their own homes, says Elias Zeleke, a real estate agent for Long and Foster. "Montgomery County is getting too expensive," affecting lower and middle-class residents alike, he says. While the poor are being pushed out to areas where housing is cheaper, he says, some of the remaining county residents may opt to live in crowded homes, renting out their homes to help pay for the mortgage or sharing their homes with family members in need.

Students living in crowded homes, whether for financial or cultural reasons, have to endure noise and lack of privacy. They face psychological and academic repercussions, in addition to the inevitable tensions that arise in a crowded home.

Crowded beginnings

Until she was seven, Arias and her two brothers shared a small, two-bedroom apartment with her parents, paternal uncle and a family friend. Her family lived in one bedroom, the friend lived in the other, and her uncle slept on the living room couch.

Realizing that the family needed more space, Arias's parents bought a four-bedroom home when Arias was seven. Arias was thrilled about all the extra space, but she was disappointed that she would still have to share a room with her two younger brothers. Though she enjoyed being around them, she still needed some privacy.

When she was 10 years old, the family friend moved out and her uncle relocated to the basement with his new wife. Arias finally got what she'd always wanted: her own room.

But she soon found herself cramped and crowded again. A year ago, Arias's family happily welcomed her paternal aunt and her husband, immigrants from El Salvador, but with her family occupying the top two levels of the house and her uncle's family in the basement, Arias was worried. "Okay, but where are they going to sleep?" she thought.

To lessen the crowding, Arias's father applied for a building permit and remodeled the empty space in the basement into a kitchen and two bedrooms. Both families in the basement finally had a room to call their own. The addition made everyone more comfortable, but Arias says the fact remained that three families were living in a space meant for one.

Withdrawing from the chaos

Like Arias, freshman Amber Harris is frustrated with living in a crowded home. Harris shares a small, three-bedroom apartment with seven other people: her parents, her younger brother and sister, her grandmother, her cousin and her paternal aunt, whom Harris says has been looking for an affordable place to live for the past few years.

When she returns home from school most days, someone is usually playing music loudly and family members are always arguing about something –– cleaning duty or sharing the television, bathroom or telephone.

Harris has found that the best way to cope with the tension is simply to ignore it. Upon returning to a noisy home after school, Harris hides out in her room until the noise subsides, or simply stays at a friend's house until later in the evening.

Gary Evans, a professor of design and environmental analysis at Cornell University who researches the effects of crowding on children, says that many people cope with crowding in the same way. "People who live where it's more crowded are actually more withdrawn," he says. "Crowding is not just physical; it's really psychological."

Harris says that the crowding at her home makes her feel constrained and tense. In his research, Evans noticed a connection between accumulated stress from crowding and health impairments like hypertension.

Academic difficulties

For most of her life, senior Margaret Khan lived with her two parents, four siblings and grandmother in a six-bedroom home. In February 2002, her two uncles moved in from Bangladesh, and their wives joined them last year so that they could find better opportunities in the United States.

Though she enjoys her family's company, Khan says, sometimes, she gets so distracted by what everyone else is doing in her home that it is difficult for her to focus on homework.

Research shows that crowding can make it more difficult to study because it impairs the ability to learn and retain material, says John Aiello, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University. In his studies, he says, "there was a definite reduction in cognitive abilities in people living in crowded environments."

Noise violation

But for senior Dilsia Menjivar, her crowded home is the source of her stress. For the past four years, she has shared her house with her two parents, her older sister and a basement full of tenants, she says. Her father has always rented out the basement of her home to help pay the mortgage, Menjivar says, but their tenants were usually close relatives. She was upset when her father agreed to rent the basement to these strangers, but because it was financially necessary, she had to deal with it.

After the tenants moved in, they quickly began to disturb the neighbors, making too much noise and littering in the yard. When a neighbor complained to Menjivar's dad about the tenants' behavior, her father, with the neighbor's approval, constructed a wooden fence between the two yards, which stopped the littering at least.

But the tenants continue making so much noise that Menjivar often feels like her living space is more cramped than it actually is. "The music is so loud that it sounds like it's upstairs when it's really downstairs. My dad gets so tired of telling them to keep it down," she says.

Menjivar often feels helpless because of the noise, she says. When the tenants are playing their music loudly, she usually tries to drown out their noise by listening to her iPod. Other times, she gets so frustrated that she defiantly plays her own music or television loudly, trying to compete with the noise downstairs.

In a study he conducted, Evans saw that many of the children living in crowding also felt helpless and frustrated, struggling to cope.

Menjivar and Harris say their situations are only temporary, so they look forward to the day when their homes will be their own again. Until then, they just have to persevere. "I know they won't be here forever," Menjivar says about her tenants. "It's all about waiting now."