Who Has Historically Had Access to the Cohousing Lifestyle?

I fell in love with the idea of cohousing long before I ever imagined developing a community myself. As I shared in When a Dream Becomes a Place, for years, I researched communities, read about them, attended presentations, visited when I could and pictured what it might be like to live in a neighborhood where people actually knew their neighbors. I loved the idea of having my own private home but also having shared spaces, community meals, gardens and people nearby who noticed when you hadn't been around for a few days. It just made sense to me. For a long time, I assumed that eventually I would find one of these communities where my daughter and I could make our home.

Then I started looking more seriously at what it would actually cost to live in one. I couldn't afford it. That wasn't what I expected to find. So much of what had attracted me to cohousing was the idea of sharing resources, living somewhat more simply and creating a neighborhood where people helped each other. Yet some of the communities I visited were financially far beyond my reach. They were beautiful, and many offered almost exactly what I was looking for, but wanting that lifestyle and being able to pay for it turned out to be two very different things.

That experience eventually made me start asking a question I hadn't really considered before: Who has historically been able to choose this lifestyle?

As I learned more, I discovered that my experience wasn't particularly unusual. Research on cohousing has found that residents have tended to be highly educated and financially comfortable. One U.S. study of older adults living in intergenerational cohousing found that 95 percent of the participants were white. The National Cohousing Alliance has also written about affordability as an ongoing challenge for the movement. Most cohousing in the United States has been developed as market-rate housing, which makes sense when you understand how difficult these communities are to finance and build. But it also means that people who can't afford market-rate housing are often left out.

And buying the eventual home isn't the only financial hurdle. This is something I understand much better now that we're developing Gratitude Village. As I wrote about in Before the First Shovel: Why Building a Neighborhood Starts with Spreadsheets, an enormous amount of work and money goes into creating a neighborhood long before anyone sees construction begin. There is land to purchase, architects and engineers to hire, legal work to complete, surveys and environmental studies to pay for, and entitlement and permitting costs that arrive well before anyone can move in. In many forming communities, future residents help fund some of those early expenses. That means participating may require not only the ability to eventually qualify for a mortgage, but also the ability to put thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars into a project before there is a home to purchase.

That changes who can participate from the very beginning. It's one thing to be able to qualify for a mortgage once a home is built. It's another to have thousands, or potentially tens of thousands, of dollars available to invest in a community years before you can move into it. Someone who already owns a home and has accumulated equity may be able to do that. Someone paying high rent every month while trying to save a down payment probably has a much harder time.

This is the part I have a hard time reconciling. One of the reasons I was drawn to cohousing in the first place was because of everything it offers that most neighborhoods don't. Older adults can age surrounded by people they know. Children can grow up with more adults looking out for them. Neighbors share things, help one another and, perhaps most importantly, actually know each other. Why should those things only be available to people who can afford an expensive home?

In fact, I sometimes wonder whether we have it backwards. The people who could benefit most from the financial and social support of community may be the very people who have the hardest time getting through the front door.

I certainly wasn't looking for a luxury home when I was searching for cohousing. I wanted a smaller, energy-efficient home, neighbors I knew, shared spaces that meant I didn't have to own everything myself and a community where my daughter and I could put down roots. I wasn't looking for something extravagant. I was looking for a place where we could belong. Yet again and again, the communities I was interested in required financial resources I simply didn't have.

That experience became one of the reasons Gratitude Village exists.

When we started creating Gratitude Village, I knew I didn't want affordability to be something we put on a list of values and then tried to figure out at the end. If we really wanted a mixed-income community, we had to start working on that while we were working on everything else. Our goal at Gratitude Village Brighton is for up to half of our homes to be permanently affordable, alongside market-rate homes. We also created our Equity Access Fund through Colorado Gives because even getting to the point of buying a home can require money that lower-income households don't have available. I wish I could say we had figured out exactly how to do all of this. We haven't.

What I have learned is that building an affordable home doesn't necessarily cost less than building the market-rate home next door. The water and sewer lines cost the same. So do the streets, permits, engineering, windows, appliances, lumber and labor. If it costs more to create a home than the future homeowner can afford to pay for it, that gap has to be filled somehow. That is where affordable housing gets complicated very quickly.

There are cohousing communities that have found ways to address this. Some have partnered with community land trusts, while others have included income-restricted homes alongside market-rate homes. Linden Cohousing in Madison, Wisconsin, for example, has 11 income-restricted homes among its 45 homes. Troy Gardens, also in Madison, used a community land trust model to create permanently affordable housing. I find examples like these encouraging, but they also make something pretty clear: affordability usually doesn't happen just because a community wants to be affordable. It takes money, partnerships and a lot of intentional work.

We are discovering that firsthand. We are exploring partnerships with housing organizations, looking at different sources of funding, working through what permanent affordability actually means and trying to make decisions now that will give us the best chance of reaching our goal. Some days I feel very optimistic about it. Other days, after looking at another development budget or learning about another funding requirement, it feels pretty daunting.

I also want to be careful about suggesting that cohousing communities have intentionally excluded people who couldn't afford to live there. That hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the people I've met in the cohousing world care deeply about inclusion, sustainability, connection and creating better ways for people to live together. The problem is that they are trying to build those communities within the same housing system everyone else is working within, and that system makes it very difficult to create new housing that is genuinely affordable.

Still, I don't think that means we should accept that cohousing will always be available primarily to people who already have significant financial resources. If we believe that there is something valuable about living in a neighborhood where people know and support one another, then we need to keep looking for ways to make that opportunity available to more people. For Gratitude Village, that means permanently affordable homes, smaller and more efficient homes, shared spaces, partnerships with organizations that know far more about affordable housing than I do and finding ways to reduce some of the upfront financial barriers for lower-income families who want to be part of creating the community.

I'm sure we'll learn more along the way, and I'm equally sure some of our ideas will change as we learn what is actually possible. That's already happened many times during this project. But there is one question I don't want us to lose sight of while we're dealing with zoning, engineering, financing, home designs and everything else involved in building a neighborhood.

Who will actually be able to live here?

I don't know yet if we will get all of this right at Gratitude Village. We're still figuring it out and some of the affordability challenges are proving every bit as difficult as we expected. But I do know that we're asking the question now, while there is still time for the answers to shape what we build. Because if we're really going to create a community centered around belonging, we have to think about who gets the opportunity to belong there.

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