The happier missing middle: Lessons for building an urban cohousing village

Our Urban Village offers a sustainable, social model for adding gentle density to single-family neighbourhoods. (Madeleine Hebert / Happy Cities)

Have you ever wondered what it's like to develop your own multi-unit housing? How about living in a social community where you commit to making decisions together, sharing communal meals, and supporting your neighbours?

On May 30, we hosted a webinar with the project team and community behind Our Urban Village—Vancouver’s newest cohousing community—to explore the answers to some of these questions.

Cohousing is a form of intentional community where residents choose to develop a home together and cultivate a more social, supportive community of neighbours. Residents own their own private units, but share extensive common spaces. However, cohousing communities face many challenges in developing housing, including expensive land, significant time and financial commitments, and complex municipal policy. So Our Urban Village partnered with Tomo Spaces, a local developer, to create a new model called “cohousing lite,” which aims to reduce the barriers that prevent many cohousing projects from coming to life.

Watch the discussion below with Leslie Shieh (Tomo Spaces), Marianne Amodio, (MA+HG Architects), Rodrigo Alba and Kathy Sayers (Our Urban Village), and Madeleine Hebert and Emma Avery (Happy Cities) to hear about the community’s experiences developing the building, forming connections, and sharing a home together.

We are grateful for the 100+ participants who joined the conversations and asked thoughtful questions about the benefits and challenges of the “cohousing lite” model, pioneered by Tomo Spaces and Our Urban Village. Below, we’ve included a summary of some of the questions we heard, and the discussion that followed.

The conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.

What were the challenges and benefits of working with Our Urban Village from the start and knowing the people that you were building for?

Leslie Shieh: It's really rare to be able to know the people that you're building for, and even rarer to see how families that you’ve designed and built for are using the space and living their everyday lives. It’s been really great. We've known each other from day one, and we really appreciate the collaboration as well as the friendship.

Marianne Amodio: For us [as architects], while we have a lot of these wellbeing principles that we design for, we know that, at the end of the day, we're designing for people. There's still a certain anonymity to what we're doing. So to meet Kathy and to meet other people from Our Urban Village, it really made the project personal for us. And I think that lent a hand in our development of the design and the development of the work. 

What is the financial investment required for co-housing members?

Leslie Shieh: Typically, in a traditional cohousing community, that cohousing community themselves are the developer. But in this collaboration, as the developer, we acquired the land, we hired the consultants. Our relationship with Our Urban Village was more like a pre-sale. However, rather than waiting until pre-sale to engage the community, we engaged the community from day one. So we took the pre-sale model and, building on our collaboration and trust, we designed [the building] together. [The residents] made certain decisions [about] how they intended to live together. 

Kathy Sayers: With cohousing, you are on two tracks. You're building a community and you're building a building. And what we did to build a community is we asked for a deposit to show that people were serious about being in the community, which in the first iteration was like $500. But we realized we needed more skin in the game. And so eventually, we asked for a deposit of $10,000. Two thousand [of that] went to the community for legal fees, for babysitting, for consultations, that kind of thing. And $1,000 went towards the unit and that let us know that people were serious about being in the community. After that it was Tomo Spaces, Leslie's group, asking us for the deposit, the normal deposit you would need to buy a pre-sale. So I think eventually, we all put in 20 per cent before building and then the paid remainder when the building was done. 

What needs to happen for more of these projects to be built?

Leslie Shieh: One thing is that it did take six years [to build] 12 units, and I think two of those six were to go through rezoning. And so having to rezone a small little project like this did take up quite a bit of time. 

Marianne Amodio: Zoning in Vancouver has changed significantly since the time that we started Our Urban Village. I think the tide has shifted from a cultural perspective. At the time, we had exclusive zoning for single family over around 80 per cent of Vancouver’s landmass. That has now changed zoning, which permits up to eight units of multiplex. We also have a relatively new RR zone, which is one block off of arterials and allows for up to four-storey apartment buildings in a secured rental model. And of course, the Province's transit-oriented area policies are really a sea change and how we're developing density. After many years of opposing densification, I think people are really understanding that it's their own children or their grandchildren who can't afford to live in the neighbourhoods that they grew up in. 

[We’re hearing] voices of people who are embracing this kind of attitude of living together. The biggest sea change that I've seen is the principles that we put in OUV aren’t so much cohousing principles. To me, the reason why they're successful is because this group of people believes in sharing their life with a community of strangers. And that community of strangers over time becomes family. When we see a cultural shift, the policies are usually a little bit behind the culture, but it gets there.

Madeleine Hebert: There's a social shift needed from us to ask for more community. A lot of people have this desire to feel more connected and there are other ways to achieve that. There's a lot of education and work [to be done] around intentionally bringing social connection into projects at all stages, from how we’re designing our policies, to how developers and architects are thinking about space.

And there are ways to actually build intentional communities where we live already. A lot of system-wide shifts are needed and are happening, but cohousing is a really great model that I hope continues to grow in Canada and get more recognition from funders.

Are there affordable units at Our Urban Village?

Leslie Shieh: With rezoning in Vancouver, developers or the project pays a community amenity contribution. So in this project, part of the community amenity contribution went into creating affordable homeownership homes. We wanted to make the affordable homes have a steeper discount. So, that's why [the amenity contribution] was only spread across three homes. And with that we were able to achieve about 30 to 35 per cent below market for those.

How do you develop and design a similar project that is available to lower-income residents?

Madeleine Hebert: Traditionally, cohousing has been lived in by people with higher incomes. I would encourage you to look at Co:Here, which is not traditional cohousing but is another building in Vancouver that has a similar community agreement in the way that they live together, but also offer affordable and supportive housing for residents. So it is possible, but building affordable housing is incredibly difficult. And then trying to create a cohousing model that is 100% affordable, I don't think anyone has managed to do that yet. 

What we've been trying to do with this research is recognize that cohousing is still very much an innovative housing model, and it's going to take a long time to scale it up. It’s financially and technically complex. It takes a lot of energy, a lot of champions to actually push these projects through. So what can we learn from cohousing communities that we can bring to rental housing and larger, denser models of housing? 

One of the things that we have been talking about a lot is redefining social space. So, for example, if we're seeing that most social interactions are happening in walkways and courtyards, how can we redesign municipal policies to recognize that? Because traditionally, these shared corridors don’t count as amenity space, so they add cost to the project. The other piece is thinking about how we can prioritize social design in all types of housing. The way we design our buildings matters for social interaction. So rather than just checking a box that yes, I have X square feet of amenity space, we need to know about the quality of that space. Where is it located in the building? Is that room actually going to get used? Because often what we see is that it doesn't get used. This beautiful, messy life that we see at Our Urban Village does not happen in most of our multi-unit housing. So we're really trying to challenge planners, developers, and architects to think more intentionally [about social connection]. 

Does the project include an elevator or other design features for multi-generational living?

Leslie Shieh: The lift in the building was a decision by Our Urban Village to include.

Marianne Amodio: It’s not technically a hydraulic elevator. But it operates and acts the same way as an elevator. You push a button, the doors open, you enter. This one is the LULA Lift, so it’s slower than normal elevators, but it allows for 100% access to all the levels of the building.

Kathy Sayers: In January, I broke my leg. So I used the LULA Lift. And the other thing was that my neighbours, if they were going to the grocery store, they said, ‘What do you need?’ They schlepped for me for, you know, a very short term. We also use the elevators if we’ve got a heavy load or strollers. But I'd say 100% of us prefer the stairs because it's actually quicker to walk up three flights than take the lift.

Marianne Amodio: The Vancouver Building By-law and the B.C. Building Code coming up have what are called ‘Adaptable Housing Requirements.’ So each suite is designed for aging in place essentially. That’s related to clearances and bathrooms, creating areas to put future guardrails, [and more]. The public areas of the building are designed to be accessible, which was required by code. For example, it's a sloped site at the back, so there are ramps that take you up and down through the level as well as stairs. There's a fully accessible washroom in the common house. Then we also added the lift, which wasn't technically a code requirement.

How did the project team engage with residents in the neighbourhood to alleviate concerns around density and new development? 

Marianne Amodio: There were a lot of people at the open house who were opposed to the idea of a bigger building. But I think having members of Our Urban Village at that public open house meant that we could introduce people to their neighbours, and they could stop seeing density as physical building, and start seeing density as people and neighbours and relationships and connections. Having the [future residents from Our Urban Village] present during those times of approval was really essential.

We just really got to meet people through [the public engagement and rezoning] process and explain to them that it was people just like them who were coming to live in that neighbourhood. At the end of the day, the project was unanimously passed at every stage. At the public hearing and urban design panel, we got numerous letters of support for the work. So I think, in general, it was welcomed and wanted.

How do you manage conflict in a close-knit community like this? 

Kathy Sayers: We're living closely with other human beings. Of course there's going to be conflict. But we have something called a community relations team. And we also have regular workshops on how you deal with it if somebody steps on your toes, how to communicate, ‘You've stepped on my toes,’ and not, ‘This is world war three.’ And once there's this level of trust in the community, you assume good intent. So it's really down to problem solving. It's like, ‘This isn't working for me, what can we do about it?’ And so taking the sting out of it being a big deal, and just normally living together is how we handle it.

Leslie Shieh: Typically, when we think about living in community, it can be romanticized. One thing that came out of the report, since the post-occupancy study was done in two parts, was that there was an adjustment period for residents. And I think sometimes we don’t recognize that living in community does take some time and labour. There is a process that needs to be worked out.

Madeleine Hebert: Yeah, and you see conflicts in non-cohousing buildings. But the difference is that they often don't have that trust and those communication channels. Sometimes, the only interactions you have with your neighbours are negative ones. They're noise complaints, or, ‘Your kids are too loud in the courtyard,’ or things like that. But when you have that base level of trust, it becomes less personal and more like, hey, I'm just gonna go over and ask this person, ‘Can we do this differently? Or can we find the solution?’ So it's all reinforcing itself over time. But yeah, we all know that relationships take work.

Is there anything you would change in hindsight in the building’s design? 

Kathy Sayers: No, I was surprised and delighted. Our agreement with Tomo was that we would have input on the common house only. So we had less input than most pre-sales on, you know, finishings, doorknobs, that kind of thing because the developer owned the land, they took the financial risk of the building, so we didn't want to drive them crazy. So when we moved in, for instance, I don't think any of us knew our building was going to be green. We were surprised and generally delighted. Our common house, the lighting in there, it looks like a work of art to me. I've been really pleasantly surprised.