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Tess Strong’s adult son, his wife and their twins live in the ground-level suite and that suits her just fine.

“Some of us have begun to realize that we aren’t going to live forever,” she said. “If you need help to live at home, what better way than to have your family with you?”

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Strong and her husband Roger — both retired — live upstairs in an Abbotsford home, which allows her son Anton to home-school his six-year-old children and work part-time.

“Anton and his wife Samantha had moved down from Squamish and were living in an apartment, but they didn’t have the income to buy a house,” Strong said. “We had already been looking after our grandkids a couple of days a week, so in a lot of ways it made sense to share a home.”

They are not alone. Ben and Stacey Panlilio and their boys — now five and 10 — live in a suite in his mother’s house in Richmond.

“When we moved back here we knew it would be long-term, but now we think we will be here forever,” said Stacey. “Maybe 30 years from now we will be living upstairs and one of the boys will start a family down here.”