practical living
who are going to live in the property after it’s designed and built,
the cooperative tenancy model is really about people that are
in the private rental market, or maybe are in social housing, or
community housing, that want some security of tenure so that
they’re not having to change homes all the time. They aren’t in
the owner-occupier market and they want some of the benefits
of co-housing, so it involves a cooperative coming together of
the people that are going to be residents in the property and they
basically self-manage the property as a cooperative. People have
shares in that cooperative and that gives them some security of
tenure. And often, not always, those cooperatives choose to have
some significant shared spaces, along with the private dwellings,
as part of what they come up with.
Then we have the final model. There’s a lot of diversity in this
category, but it’s what we’re calling small scale co-housing. It’s
probably most familiar to people through the idea of granny
flats: take an existing property that might have a single dwelling
on it and add some more dwellings. So, typically 2–4 dwellings
on a property that might previously have had one, through
renovation or sometimes through buying adjacent properties and
knocking down what was there to put a newly designed building
in place. Essentially, it’s about getting more dwellings into a
space and ideally having some shared spaces so that there’s a bit
of a community feel to that space compared to what it used to
be like. at us blankly. They might be able to guess what it means, but they
certainly hadn’t heard of it, so that’s the first step.
Then there are challenges to getting a co-housing development
up and running. They vary a bit, depending on the model, but
if you want to do a deliberative development approach, that
normally involves an architect or a designer leading that, and
the first step is securing some land that might be suitable for
developing a property, and of course in Sydney, with high property
prices, that can be challenging.
Also, you need a group of like-minded people that want the
same kind of level of sharing and are willing to work together,
perhaps for a few years, to get this up and running, and then
willing to live together afterwards. So linking people up who might
be interested in this idea is important. There are some online
platforms emerging to help people connect who might want to do
co-housing, but they’re still very much in their infancy.
With some of the models, there are still legal and planning
and potentially financial barriers to overcome, and it’s a bit of a
minefield out there for what might be the impact on people’s
pension eligibility. What does it mean in terms of capital gains
tax? What does it mean in terms of having an inheritance to pass
onto the children? Not all of those problems have been solved
yet, so there’s still some more research to do, particularly in the
small-scale co-housing models about how to overcome some of
those challenges.
You said co-housing has an image problem. What are people
concerned about? What impact do you think wide adoption could have in terms
of housing Australia’s growing older population and helping
people stay in the community?
Well, when we talk about co-housing with people, we often hear
the word ‘hippy’, or it’s a commune, or ‘I did share houses when I
was at uni and I don’t want to go back to that kind of living’. What
we’re trying to tell people is that that’s not what we’re talking about
at all. The shared house you might have had in your university days
was not designed to be a space that is co-housing; it didn’t have a
mix of private and shared spaces, so you ended up sharing a house
that was really designed to be a private property, and that leads to
all sorts of challenges and it’s not the way we want to live for long
periods of time.
Co-housing development is designed so that there is this mix
of private and shared spaces so you’re not forced to be interacting
with the other people in the property all the time, but there are
spaces that are conducive to that if that’s what you want to do, and
you can always retreat to your own private space which is self-
contained and has its own kitchen and bathroom.
So you’re not sharing bathrooms with other people, you’re not
sharing kitchens with other people, you always have those spaces
to yourself. But you might also have a communal kitchen where
you can cook some meals together and do some eating together,
and that can help to build community, build relationships, help to
address feelings of social isolation.
We’re trying to get the idea out there that co-housing is not
the old sort of sharing models that you might be familiar with, it’s
something that’s been really brought into the 21st century and
with modern design can offer some great liveable spaces.
What else is needed to get this model off the ground on a
broader scale?
A lot of it is still about people even being aware of these options,
so there’s not a lot of awareness out there. When we did our focus
groups with older people, we’d ask what is co-housing? Have
you heard of it? What do you think it is? And people would look
A few things are clear. One is that we have nowhere near enough
accommodation in aged care facilities for our ageing population,
so increasingly people are going to need to stay in their homes
longer and to be able to age in place. And that’s what people want.
People are not clamouring to move to aged care facilities. Some
people are very keen to move into retirement villages, but they’re
not for everyone. Most people we spoke to during the research
want to age in place. They like the places they live in, they like the
communities they’ve built up, and they want to stay there.
So co-housing can potentially help with that in a couple of ways.
One is that when you’re part of a community in the building, there
is a little bit of informal caring that can go on, so if someone falls
sick, there might be somebody else in the building that’s willing
to look after them just for a couple of days, so that they can avoid
having to go into care, or go to a hospital, or whatever it might be.
But the other quite interesting possibility is that when you’ve
got more older people living together in a space, then it could be
possible for a live-in carer to stay in that property as well, and to
have enough people there that can support the cost of doing that.
It can be possible for home care packages to be delivered more
efficiently, because there’s only one propert y they need to go to. So
there can be some benefits in terms of the efficiency of getting care
to people that need it by having more seniors living in one place.
Those are some key potential benefits in terms of delivering
care for people, and I think at the same time with the housing
affordability challenges that we face and wanting to limit urban
sprawl, that co-housing can be a great model for consolidating
the density of the city and building more medium density, without
negatively affecting the character of suburbs, so really trying to fit
more dwellings into spaces that have perhaps got homes on them
at the moment that are bigger than people are going to need as
they age and their kids move out. ■
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