practical living
A problem halved
Co-housing for older people
may be the solution to many of
the housing and sustainability
challenges seen in big cities.
Chris Riedy interviewed
by Dallas Bastian
T
he term co-housing might typically conjure the image of
a commune or university dorm, but researchers say the
model might be a viable option for older Australians who
wish to remain in the community, provided they’re able to shed
negative preconceptions of sharing a property with others.
Researchers from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at
the University of Technology Sydney spent a year exploring
alternative living options for older people, talking to housing and
ageing policymakers, co-housing developers and older people
themselves.
Professor Chris Riedy, who led the research, said co-housing is
an attractive option but few are aware of its potential.
“Most people still think of hippies, communes or share houses,”
Riedy said. “We found co-housing can help older people stay in
a part of the city they love, in a supportive environment that will
provide them with social interaction and greater access to services
as they age.”
Aged Care Insite spoke with Riedy about the setup, its benefits
and challenges, and the stereotypes that need to be tackled.
ACI: Why was co-housing seen as a viable option?
CR: We’ve had long interest in co-housing here at the Institute
for Sustainable Futures at UTS, because we think it’s a possible
response to a lot of the housing challenges and sustainability
challenges that we face in Sydney.
When we were thinking about how to take that idea forward,
we asked: Is it something that might be able to help, particularly
with some of the challenges that older people face as they try to
grapple with housing challenges?
16 agedcareinsite.com.au
There was a suitable grants program with the Department of
Family and Community Services to support research into some
of the challenges that older people face, and we thought it was a
really nice fit to explore co-housing for that particular audience.
Along with the housing affordability challenges that are well
known, and some of the environmental challenges of traffic
congestion, use of resources and so on, the challenges that
seniors can face as they age are things like social isolation and
losing their sense of community, and co-housing is something
that can help respond to those challenges.
The research team put forward three co-housing options:
deliberative development, cooperative tenancy and small scale
co-housing. What stands out about those three approaches?
There are many ways you can do co-housing. It has a long history
in parts of Europe, in Denmark, and even in the United States over
the recent decades, but it really hasn’t taken off in Australia. So
we wanted to think, well, what might an Australian model of co-
housing look like? From our interviews with experts in the fields
of ageing and housing, those were three models that emerged
as having some potential and potentially being attractive to an
audience here.
Taking them one at a time, the deliberative development
model is really just an approach that lets the future residents of
a development have some say in the design process so that we
don’t just end up with cookie-cutter apartments that people don’t
actually want to live in, but we end up with a really liveable kind
of space for people. We found that kind of approach was taking
off, particularly in Melbourne through the Nightingale Housing
organisation, which has developed quite a few new apartment
blocks down there, but it hadn’t taken off in Sydney.
What we find is, when you do ask future residents to get
involved in the design process, what they tend to choose is to
include more shared spaces in the final development, so that’s
consistent with being able to deliver co-housing at a medium
density kind of scale, even up to a high density scale.
The cooperative tenancy model is very different. Whereas the
deliberative development approach is aimed at owner-occupiers