Sam Bliss, left, and housemates Marina Rubio Herranz and Austin Kahn practice social distancing at their downtown Burlington residence. And don't overlook Dan Coddle peering from the upstairs window. Photo by Jim Welch/VTDigger

When Achala Gowda’s job in New York went remote due to COVID-19, she moved up to Essex Junction to live with her boyfriend and wait out the pandemic. She has been in Vermont for a little over a month, and she said her housemates have devised a strategy to minimize contact, since her boyfriend’s two roommates, another couple, still work outside the house.

“Before they come home, so sometime before 4 p.m., we try to be done cooking and showering,” she said. “During the weekends, they tend to avoid the kitchen if we are using the kitchen.”

Gowda said they have arranged an informal schedule so that the two couples living in the house never use the common space at the same time. When she wakes up after her roommates have left for work, she disinfects the kitchen and bathroom. Before they return, she and her boyfriend retreat to their room.

Gowda is not alone. Many others residing in Vermont and living with roommates have been trying to negotiate shared living spaces during a global pandemic. Often, this has meant setting rules and expectations around social distancing and disinfection to keep everyone safe, and navigating situations ranging from people who want to see their significant other to people who have partial custody of children.

Individuals who feel their roommates are not taking the virus seriously enough have faced their own set of challenges, as Kate Roberge discovered. Roberge lives with two friends in Burlington and said she has sometimes struggled with their attitude toward the pandemic.

“I’m the one in the house with the most anxiety, so it’s definitely been hard,” she said. “It’s definitely been stressful because you can only really control yourself in this situation, and that’s what’s hard about living with roommates.”

Roberge said her roommates are taking some aspects of the pandemic seriously, but do not always follow recommendations such as wearing masks when they go grocery shopping. She said she’s also had a hard time getting them to read the information she sends about the best ways to avoid spreading the virus. She has tried to set house rules such requiring people to wash their hands when they get home, not sharing food and regularly sanitizing surfaces, but she doesn't know how careful her roommates are.

“I can throw it out there to them, but then what they’re doing I have to be OK with,” she said. “I have this whole cleaning routine when they get back because they don’t wear masks when they go grocery shopping and they don’t wear gloves.”

Roberge said part of the problem might be that she and her roommates have yet to sit down and have a formal conversation about the pandemic, and she struggles to know how much to bring it up on her own.

“If I keep pressuring too much it’s going to make for a very unhappy living situation,” she said. “I don’t want to do that for the last month we’re living together because then that just adds to the stress and anxiety that’s already here because of the pandemic.”

Jules Lees was in a similar situation with roommates in Burlington and decided to move back to the family home in Danby, Vt., in late March. Lees had a co-op living arrangement with six roommates, which meant the group agreed to live communally and share cooking and other responsibilities. Lees said that while the group was good at communicating, there were just too many different needs and expectations in the group.

“A lot of people had partners that lived outside the house,” Lees said. “There was a lot of tension trying to decide how our house would work because some people wanted to see their partners, which was then potentially compromising other people’s health or the health of their relatives.”

Lees said several housemates who were most concerned about contracting COVID-19 or being a vector for the virus ended up leaving and finding other living arrangements.

“We had the rule about washing your hands, but it was hard to negotiate against having people over,” Lees said. “And the people some of my roommates were having over weren’t really following the hand-washing rules.”

Lees’ co-op is part of the Federation of Burlington Cooperative Houses, which Trav Fryer started about a year ago. Fryer now lives in one of the Federation’s six houses and has four roommates. He said his roommates have agreed on how to handle the virus, which has reduced stress.

“We talked about our boundaries and what we were all comfortable with,” he said. “We were lucky that we were all pretty much on the same page to begin with.”

His house has a list of rules they’ve agreed to in order to minimize exposure, including staying 6 feet apart from others in public, limiting trips to the grocery store, wearing a mask in public, washing hands when they come inside and leaving mail and nonperishables outside for three days, which is the amount of time the virus is thought to stay on most surfaces.

Another house in the Federation with six people living in it has fewer rules, but resident Sam Bliss said there has not been much conflict among his roommates.

“We haven’t had too many strict rules, but mostly the protocols we’ve developed are about who will come over to the house and the need to wash hands and stuff. We haven’t done much to control each other’s behavior outside the house,” he said. “That’s been able to work at our house because we trust each other. Through those conversations it became clear that people are taking this really seriously.”

Bliss said he is especially glad to be living in a co-op arrangement right now.

“One thing in community houses that’s lucky is everyone signs up for this open communication process when they move in,” he said. “Not everybody has that.”

Ivan Hennessy lives with one roommate in Brattleboro and said he and his roommate have not had an explicit conversation about how to handle coronavirus, but that he trusts his roommate to be conscientious. Hennessy and his roommate both have partial custody of their respective children, and said the most challenging part of their living arrangement has been negotiating having his young kids in the house more often.

“Schools being closed is the hardest part,” he said. “Normally I would pick the kids up from school on Friday, and now I have them for the whole day. I think what probably grates on my roommate the most is they are not especially well-adjusted to being home all the time.”

Many people who live with roommates said they preferred the arrangement to the thought of living alone.

“I feel bad for people who are super-isolated because they’re not able to have any socialization,” Fryer said. “We spent a lot of time playing board games together and socializing.”

Roberge expressed a similar sentiment, despite the challenges that she has had.

“In the end, even though it’s hard, I think I will be very grateful I had some humans to be around me,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine being home and just talking through a computer all day.”