Shared spaces

Whoever came up with the line “build a longer table, not a higher wall” may have found the prescription for saving the world. On a smaller scale, they’ve created a powerful advertising slogan for the concept of shared housing.

Not long ago, Dr. Gordon Lovegrove, an associate professor of engineering at UBC’s Okanagan campus, was in Davis, California, attending a conference. He Airbnb-ed a room nearby, which turned out to be part of a co-housing community. One of the owners shared its origin story. “Initially, they were all just neighbours living in detached homes,” Dr. Lovegrove says. But as they got to know each other, they found they were pretty simpatico. One day, two side-by-side neighbours pulled down the fence between their yards. Suddenly everything got better. Kids could play in this larger expanse. Dogs could run. A common garden went in.

Soon they had a community on their hands. “It was a beautiful thing,” says Dr. Lovegrove, who is also a first-term Kelowna city councillor, pushing an affordable housing agenda as part of his brief for smarter living and more sustainable growth in the Okanagan region.

All those neighbours in Davis considered the benefits of leaning into this more communal arrangement. If you went on vacation, someone could absorb your pet into their own menagerie. If you needed to borrow a rake, there was one in the communal shed. “An older resident was on the verge of having to move into a care facility,” Dr. Lovegrove says. “They were such close friends, the neighbours got together and said to the fellow, 'Tell you what: let all of us together buy your house. You can rent a room from us, and some of us will live in there with you.' ” They turned the garage into an activity room where people could gather and play guitar, and have meals together. Next thing you knew, they had a co-op. And everyone was wondering: why didn’t we think of this before?

The urban dream of occupying your own castle dies hard. Here in the West, we’ve been slow to shake off the idea that “if you want to consider yourself a success in life, you should be living in a single-family house,” as UBC sociologist Dr. Nathanael Lauster, author of The Death and Life of the Single-Family House, puts it. But latterly there are signs that, driven by both social and economic pressures, “late-stage individualism” (in writer Ezra Klein’s coinage) may be coming to an end. Over the past 20 years, cities have shifted toward higher-density, cheek-by-jowl living. Zoning restrictions, which had kept more communal arrangements off the board, have eased. In a pivot back toward a social experiment that worked pretty well for most of human history, shared living is growing in popularity in Canada, with BC leading the way.

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Of course, there are a lot of ways shared living can look. In a typical housing co-op, residents live independently in self-contained units (often with energy-efficient design), and share management decisions. That’s different from co-housing, which implies a more personal social contract: We want to integrate our lives, to some degree, because we share certain values (like environmental sustainability). “The desire for community is often what drives it,” says Dr. Lovegrove. “A lot of times a group of people already know and like each other, and now they take the next step with this living arrangement.

“What I think is ideal is that you share a nightly meal.” If there are between 20 and 30 people in the co-op—the sweet spot recommended in the book Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities, widely considered the bible of the movement—that means everyone cooks dinner around once a month for the group. “So you have multiple generations around the same table: moms, dads, kids, grandparents, empty-nesters. If you’re not much of a cook, maybe you contribute in a different way: say, pulling weeds or tutoring kids in math.” A key element here is agency over when you’re alone and when you want company. You create a semipermeable membrane between you and others. It’s a bit like wearing a single earbud: a sign that you’re both in a private world and open for business socially.

A growing body of data trumpets the health benefits—both mental and physical—of communal living arrangements. Human fragility does not map well onto solo sailing, especially at the extremes of our lifespan, as UBC philosopher Kimberley Brownlee points out: “When we’re young and when we’re old, we are vulnerable enough that our lives are happy only if other people choose to care about us.” When push comes to shove, almighty Privacy caves to the reality that in the end, nobody really wants to live and die alone.

Increasingly, climate concerns figure into people’s interest in the shared-housing movement—the desire for a smaller carbon footprint. But let’s not kid ourselves; the main driver is probably simple economics. Dr. Lauster has studied Vancouver’s overheated real-estate market and the way prices have tracked with increasing density. “It’s when the middle class starts getting hit that things start to shift in terms of policy,” he says. Vancouver now has one of the lowest rates of single-family home occupants in North America—with shared-housing arrangements an increasing portion of the pie. For young families, there is often no other option. “We’ve got adult kids in their 30s now,” says Dr. Lovegrove, “and they’ve given up on ever owning a house." Across BC, the mindset shifts to: "How can I make myself at home without a house?”

Just as Dr. Lauster emphasizes that there’s no one “right” way humans ought to live, there’s no one profile of a community that’s a deadlock fit for shared housing. Co-housing may appeal to folks who, for example, are thinking strategically about their retirement years (in which case Dr. Lovegrove’s Kelowna, with its climate and demographics, fits the bill). Larger communities give folks investigating shared living better odds of finding their peeps. “Your chances of connecting with like-minded people are higher in bigger cities like Vancouver,” Dr. Lovegrove says. It becomes an interesting social experiment: As people come together to investigate co-housing options, and start mapping things out, everyone discovers what their values truly are. “People start thinking, what are the ‘must-haves’ here?” Dr. Lovegrove says. Is environmental sustainability paramount, even if it costs a little more? Do we thoroughly vet owners so we know they share our values, or do we actively welcome diversity? And then you have to look at yourself in the mirror: Am I flexible enough for this to work, or am I too much of a control freak?

The phrase “good fences make good neighbours” is well known but often misunderstood. “Robert Frost is always fun to go to, because you can draw two different lessons from that poem,” Dr. Lauster says. In the poem (called “Mending Wall”), two neighbours meet once a year to patch the fence along the property boundary. The fence defines each of their personal spaces, but that’s not its main function; it’s also a common property resource that brings both men together to maintain it.

A growing body of data trumpets the health benefits—both mental and physical—of communal living arrangements. Human fragility does not map well onto solo sailing, especially at the extremes of our lifespan.

Such are the sneaky benefits of shared housing arrangements. They teach people how to resolve their conflicts in a way that detached neighbours may never learn. They can provide for children what some faith traditions say those kids need most—at least five adults in their life (besides their parents) whom they can trust implicitly. Dr. Lovegrove calls the intergenerational component the “secret sauce” of many successful co-ops: often there’s a transfer not just of services (carpentry, babysitting) but of knowledge and care. As shared housing spreads across a whole community, these are the kind of ties that can come in handy.

Dr. Lauster did his postdoc work in Minneapolis, a community with lots of co-housing thanks to the influence of Scandinavian immigrants who brought their love of co-housing with them. It has made for a close-knit community. “That history of looking to social solutions may be coming into play now,” he says. “They’re drawing on it to band together to push ICE out.”

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Since he moved to Kelowna to teach at UBCO a decade ago, Dr. Lovegrove has developed his vision for a Kelowna co-housing community—a multi-generational, pedestrian-oriented, sustainable living model—and has enlisted his engineering and management grad students in research and organizing public meetings to explain and promote the concept. Buzz around the idea has built, to the point where the city altered its bylaws to accommodate it. For example, the City of Kelowna’s Affordable Housing Action Plan now offers tax exemptions for co-housing plans. And, directly as a result of UBCO’s efforts, the first co-housing development in the Okanagan is underway in Kaleden.

At one point, Dr. Lovegrove came this close to taking the shared-housing plunge himself. “We got together with neighbours on two sides and sketched out a 30-unit co-housing design on a one-acre parcel of land,” he says. They met with city planners. They all read “the book” (Creating Cohousing). They had meals together and schemed. They asked the big questions of the intentional-community game: Who are we and would we want to do this? What are our must-haves? “In the end, we had one neighbour say yes and the other neighbour said no, and it collapsed,” Dr. Lovegrove says. He and his wife ended up in a detached home, a lovely carriage house he designed and helped build. There’s a separate unit in it he rents out to international students and travellers. “We’ve met some amazing people—from Mexico, Nigeria, Japan…” But he believes the other path might have been even better.

Now, lest this story make co-housing seem such a no-brainer that you’re already moving money out of your savings account and scanning your neighbourhood for potential co-conspirators, be warned: the bad-apple effect is real. The prospect of one sour owner who spoils the plan for the whole group is among the biggest things that scares people off. Folks of a certain age may remember those utopian communities of the 1970s, which mostly ended disastrously. If your shared-living arrangement goes south, it can be worse than living alone. “I’ve heard it takes six ‘touches’ on average”—or six conversations about co-housing—“before people warm to the idea,” says Dr. Lovegrove.

But these days, more and more folks seem willing to roll the dice. At stake is a shot at what is known in Arabic as asabiyyah—the kind of social cohesion that can only be found when a culture throws stubborn individualism over the side.