Linda Taylor, a 70-year-old from Minneapolis, was given two months' notice to vacate the home she had cherished for almost two decades. The thought of leaving her beloved house was both terrifying and heartbreaking. "It felt like the world had been pulled from under me," she told The Washington Post. "My house means everything to me."
Taylor bought the house in 2004, but got caught in a real estate deal she didn't fully understand. The house reverted to the previous owner, who allowed her to stay as a renter. In 2006, after the owner became involved in a mortgage fraud scheme, the home was purchased by Greg Berendt, the current landlord who is now trying to evict Taylor.
In 2022, Taylor's new landlord shocked her with an unexpected notice to vacate by April 1. Berendt offered to sell the house for $299,000 and threatened her with eviction if she didn't buy it. "I could not sleep, I could not eat. I felt really defeated,” said Taylor.
She worked at a local nonprofit organization for nearly three years before she was laid off during the coronavirus pandemic. After losing her paycheck, she continued paying rent of $1,400 a month exhausting all her life savings, money from family and government subsidies including RentHelpMN, a program started during the pandemic to aid Minnesotans at risk of losing housing. She said to herself, "I'm going to do something about it. This is my house."
Taylor had a good bond with her neighbor Andrew Fahlstrom, who lived across the street. A housing rights organizer by profession, the 41-year-old heard the struggles related to the house and decided to assist her in some capacity. He said, "She has always been the one in the neighborhood who greets everyone." He contacted neighbors to see what they could do to help Taylor.
Soon, word spread about a campaign to save Taylor's house. The Powderhorn Park community stepped in and was determined to stop their neighbor from getting displaced. A strong force of 400 neighbors joined the movement and wrote a letter to Berendt. They were able to get a June 30th deadline at a slightly less negotiated rate of $250,000.
With the deadline set for purchase, it was time to fulfill the financial requirements to buy the house. Starting from Block parties, art galleries and social media campaigns, everything was done to spread the word about the cause and help bring funds to the table. The community even started a fundraising page where people donated anywhere from $5 to $15,000. However, the largest donation came from a local church that decided to pitch in $200,000 to the cause which made a massive difference in the end. Within four months, the community raised $275,000 for Taylor, which was enough for her to buy the house. The remaining funds were used to cover repairs and some went towards pending utility payments.
By the end of May, Taylor was able to sign the purchase papers, making the house finally hers after nearly two decades. "When it's yours, it gives you a different type of feeling," Taylor said. "I'm safe, I'm secure, and I have a home...I'm here to help the next person and the next person and the next person."
Editor's note: This article was originally published on June 29, 2024. It has since been updated.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.