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Three women standing in front of a row of new townhouses
Cohousing residents Laetitia O'Connell, Tania Sawicki Mead and Nicole McCrossin outside their development in Wellington. ‘We get to live close to people we care about,’ says Mead. Photograph: Tania Sawicki Mead
Cohousing residents Laetitia O'Connell, Tania Sawicki Mead and Nicole McCrossin outside their development in Wellington. ‘We get to live close to people we care about,’ says Mead. Photograph: Tania Sawicki Mead

Hope and heartbreak for New Zealanders dreaming of a communal life

This article is more than 1 year old

Cohousing offers a vision of connected, community-based living – but the path to realising the dream can be far from smooth

“Welcome to the site of hope and heartbreak.”

With these words Bronwen Newton greets visitors to a quarter-acre gravel carpark between two industrial buildings in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington. Still visible are the foundations of a sheet-metal workshop that once stood there; not visible is the cohousing project that Newton and 23 other families hoped to build, but now never will.

Since 2018 Newton – a lawyer and property developer – has helped steer the Urban Habitat Collective, one of New Zealand’s latest attempts at a cohousing scheme. The story of its collapse is the story of the difficulties facing those who dream of living in a connected community outside the conventional models of the property market – often at considerable personal cost.

Cohousing is a semi-communal housing model, typically featuring a mix of private and shared spaces but retaining individual ownership of homes.

Mark Southcombe, a Wellington architect and academic, lauds it as a “self-help, bottom-up organising” of house-building that delivers stable, well-connected communities – important in a world of increasing loneliness.

“I think cohousing is wonderful,” he says, adding that in a country where property investing is a national obsession and has helped drive house prices to world-record highs, there is a need to “re-socialise” housing.

For Newton, cohousing is about ensuring people can live not just physically close, but also connected. Inspired by such sentiments, her collective’s 24 members – a mix of retirees, families with children, and others – bought a site in Wellington’s Adelaide Road in 2019 for NZ$2.25m.

Their final design featured two buildings with shared dining areas, a rooftop social space, a bike workshop, car-share parks and an expansive communal garden. “We used to say we are building ‘together-ments’, not apart-ments”, Newton adds.

For developers, though, the project sat awkwardly between the familiar profitable territory of stand-alone houses and 80-unit apartment blocks. Few were willing to take on the job, and then rising construction prices wreaked havoc. Estimated costs nearly doubled, to $23m. At this point, Newton says, the “last sliver of hope” vanished: even if their bank hadn’t pulled out of financing the construction, many owners would have struggled to get mortgages.

The scheme itself is effectively over, and at some cost: between them the families have spent millions of dollars on design and other expenses, and will likely be out of pocket. Some had sold homes or used inheritances to finance their involvement.

In light of this collapse, how does Newton feel? “It only hurts when I think about it,” she says. “I don’t regret doing it. [But] I really still regret not having a building. It’s what we set out to do, it’s what we worked for, it’s what we still want.”

‘We get to be a community’

Across town, a happier story unfolded. On Christmas Eve last year, six Wellingtonians moved into a cohousing scheme they had been planning since early 2017. One of the residents, Tania Sawicki Mead, says: “Independently lots of us had been talking about wanting to buy a house, and the impossibility of affording one.”

Moving quickly, they bought a site in November 2017 and settled on a small local building firm.

But even getting a building loan took eight months. The problem wasn’t the costs, it was that the group weren’t a conventional one-home, nuclear-family customer, nor could they be classed as commercial developers. “We were just weird – we didn’t fit into any category.”

The supposed complexity of a six-owner structure also “gave people the heebie-jeebies … They were so obsessed with the idea that we were a risk.”

Eventually, though, the project got a loan and today the row of four townhouses stands proudly amid still-fresh concrete paths, work-in-progress gardens and common room and deck.

“The ability to socialise together was really important,” Mead says. “That made it worth the time and hassle … We get to live close to people we care about and we have a space where we can hold those connections alive. We get to be a community.”

Extending the pool

These projects mirror the fortunes of New Zealand’s cohousing movement. Alongside well-established examples like Auckland’s Earthsong, recent successes include Dunedin’s Toiora High Street, which repurposes a former school site, and another Auckland project, Cohaus. But planned schemes in Cambridge and Lyttelton have folded.

Southcombe is among those working to create open-source guides and legal templates for prospective cohousing groups. Cohousing advocates have also urged the government to allocate spare public land for collective house-building, and to provide support for people navigating the many finance, tax and building-consent hurdles.

Such moves, Mead says, would help “extend the pool” of groups able to carry out cohousing projects, among them hapū (indigenous families) seeking to build papakainga developments – a traditional multi-generational shared housing model.

For her part, Newton wants to see “fundamental issues” in the construction industry resolved, including its boom and bust cycles and the unbalanced risk-sharing that sees clients pay more if costs escalate but developers pocket the proceeds of any savings. State agencies, too, could be waiving development contributions for cohousing projects and providing other supports. Anything, she says, to recognise the fact that cohousing collectives are people “trying to do something different, at great personal cost and risk”.

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