Cohousing: A vision for living

Real estate developers bait potential buyers with terms like “village” and “community,” but that’s language some groups honestly mean. In this article, the first of our three part series of cohousing, we look at what cohousing is and why two groups on Canada’s East Coast are hoping to create some.

Kathryn and Ed Belzer, both in their mid-60s, want to build an intentional community, also known as “cohousing,” on their own acreage in Middle Musquodoboit, Nova Scotia. The Belzers, who hope at least 10 other families will join them, have just launched a membership drive to attract more investors to their rolling farmland, which resembles parts of Saskatchewan.

Pat Kipping is pitching an urban alternative. Like the Belzers, the 53-year old empty-nester is looking to secure her retirement in the most sustainable way she can imagine – but on the Halifax peninsula, an increasingly expensive place to buy. Kipping’s north end neighbourhood is gradually shifting from being a working class area into a one densely populated by young families and professionals.

Both groups are fishing for live-in investors with communal ideals among the ver-50 crowd. Or at least in part: “I don’t want to live with people only my own age,” says Kipping of seniors-only housing. “But I also don’t want to be the only person shovelling snow any more, or the only person taking out the garbage, or the only one buying a new roof.”

What is cohousing?
“Some people call them [intentional communities] a return to the best of small-town communities,” reads the Canadian Cohousing Network website (www.cohousing.ca/). “Others say they are like a traditional village or the close-knit neighbourhood where they grew up, while futurists call them an altogether new response to social, economic and environmental challenges of the 21st century.”

In a cluster of up to 35 individually-owned houses — apartments, rowhouses or freestanding structures — custom-designed by the residents, a group of families and singles who want to live in an intentional community combine home-ownership with shared common space for activities like communal meals, laundry and parking.

Cohousing is typically multi-generational. It’s also “green,” incorporating environmentally sustainable technology like solar energy. It’s got Atlantic roots, but not in Canada: it’s actually a Danish movement that has been gaining momentum since the 1960s, mostly in Scandinavia, the UK, Australia and the United States. From California and Washington, the cohousing idea migrated both north — BC has five completed cohousing projects and five more in development — and east to Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont, where there are 23 cohousing projects.

The Belzers’ Chaswood Cohousing and Kipping’s Halifax Green Cohousing Initiative (HGCI), along with a third Nova Scotia group, each received $10,000 in seed money and another $10,000 as a forgiveable loan from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation last spring to develop cohousing in their communities.

The individual houses in cohousing are generally smaller than most new contractor homes (1,000 – 2,000 sq. ft.) because the common house consolidates space that might go under-utilized in a conventional house — it’s 3,000 sq. ft in Chaswood’s proposal.

It’s not about the money – it’s about the principle
Ronaye Matthew, a Vancouver cohousing consultant who in mid-August gave a weekend workshop in Halifax for Chaswood and HGCI members, warned participants that cohousing is not more affordable than regular housing. Matthew also says the seed money isn’t enough to do anything except eliminate some of the risk at the outset: “If the cohousing group isn’t able to generate a lot more money than that — at least 25 per cent of the cost of the development — if there aren’t people willing to take the risk, the likelihood of it happening is very low.”

In part, that’s because building green costs more up-front and has a long-term pay-back –lower heating bills, for example. As well, sustainable residential construction, unlike institutions such as schools, is not subsidized in Atlantic Canada.

Kathryn Belzer compares cohousing to the role a church used to play in rural communities or to the Co-Op grocery store: “People are concerned that the rural way of life is not sustainable — because you can’t have old people in their houses here and their children in Alberta. But it is in an inter-generational community like the one we want to build.”

She and her husband give Chaswood five years to get up and running. If the idea hasn’t progressed by then, she says that they will have to drop it.

While they can afford to take a risk, it’s also just more likely that people above age 50 will get the ball rolling in Nova Scotia, according to Matthew — because they have taken risks which paid off.

Belzer grins like a seasoned conspirator and widens her eyes: “It’s not like we’ve never put it all out there before now.”

Next: Living in cohousing on Canada’s West Coast

Lis van Berkel is a journalist in Halifax, Nova Scotia.