With land secured, N.L.'s first co-housing project picks up steam

Newfoundland and Labrador's first co-housing development project is moving forward, as its organizers hope to depart from a traditional model of living and showcase a new one built on community, equity and accessibility.

Fifty-eight acres of scenic, rolling farmland and forest in Portugal Cove-St. Philip's is now owned by Co-Housing Newfoundland and Labrador. The group's vision is to build about 30 homes on the land, a 3,000-square-foot common house with communal kitchen, dining, co-working and play areas, along with farming and natural areas. 

"We're just trying to demonstrate that this is a really cool way of developing. It uses the land better. It's more democratic," said Wendy Reid Fairhurst, the co-founder and managing director of Co-Housing N.L.

Co-housing — a blend of private homes with shared spaces, collectively owned and managed by the people who live there — originated in Denmark in the 1960s. It's neither gated community nor commune, although it mixes aspects of both.

"It's a bit of a shift in culture, a shift in, like, your whole worldview of thinking about housing," she said.

In Reid Fairhurst's view, co-housing is the opposite of car-dependent, sprawling suburbia.

"What gets built actually meets the specific needs of who's going to live there," she said.

"As opposed to just, you know, building things on spec that get bigger and bigger and bigger, because profit is the driver. Here, making something we want to live in for the rest of our lives is the driver."

An emphasis on community is sprinkled throughout co-housing designs. The homes and shared spaces are meant to be walkable, accessible and grouped close together to encourage relationships to build.

"There's a science behind how you make friends. And if you have constant interactions and there might be little conversations, but if you have them consistently, at the end of the day, like, you've got enough built up social capital that you end up with as friendship forming, even when you didn't mean to," said Reid Fairhurst.

"And that's kind of what we're intending to be intentional about."

This is a big step for Reid Fairhurst's big dream.

In 2014, she was working and raising her kids as her husband worked away for months at a time. "I started feeling pretty isolated, pretty car dependent if I wanted any social life," she said.

That loneliness spurred her into deep thinking on co-housing, an idea she'd first been exposed to as a university student. She brought together a few friends with the same interest and by 2018 was having regular meetings about it. But a lack of business skills to navigate the collective ownership model with banks and insurance tanked that project, she said. In the wake of that, she took time off to complete a graduate degree in social enterprise to school herself on the skills needed to help a future project take off.