9 families, 1 roof: Urban cohousing in Seattle

Seattle’s housing scene is defined by high prices and shrinking apartments, leaving many people feeling both financially squeezed and socially disconnected.

Cohousing offers an alternative.

It’s rooted in sharing and intentional community. Residents build spaces together, with private units clustered around common areas. Daily life is designed for connection.

Capitol Hill Urban Cohousing, or CHUC, is a standout example. It’s home to nine apartments and 21 residents, including architect Grace Kim and her family. Her mother recently moved in downstairs.

At CHUC, everything is designed around a central courtyard, which serves as both the heart of the building and the heart of the community. People’s kitchen windows and balconies look out onto it.

Kim says people relax in the courtyard, or along the covered walkways that surround it, all year long, whatever the weather. “If there are more than a couple people sitting here, and they're sitting here long enough, other people will pop their heads out the window and kind of peek out and just hang out and talk, or ask for something, or share something that's important at the moment,” she said.

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What sets cohousing apart is its emphasis on shared spaces and routines.

Retired couple Sheila Hoffman and Spencer Beard, long-time Capitol Hill residents, remember how their old house felt isolating compared to cohousing.

“We owned that house for 20 years just up the street from here,” Hoffman said. “And in 20 years, we only knew one neighbor. I mean, we were not close to anybody. And here, we have meals together three times a week and people have our backs.”

While every resident has their own kitchen, the shared dinners generally draw everyone who’s in the building. They’re on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday one week, Tuesday Thursday, and Saturday the next week.

“I'm on the Tuesday night team,” Kim said. “So, every other Tuesday, I cook. The other nights I just show up. I don't have to do anything. I don't have to pay for anything. I just come eat, talk with my neighbors, and then I go home. And we can work on homework, or I can practice piano, or I can go back to work. It just frees up a lot of time.”

Besides camaraderie, residents share practical resources. They borrow each other’s camper vans and kitchen appliances. They own just four cars among nine families.

“We can choose to not have a car because, when we do need to do something that needs a car, there are people who are willing to let us use their car,” Hoffman said.

For Kim, one of the greatest benefits has been how great it’s been to raise kids there. Hoffman and Beard led a walking school bus for three kids from the building when they were in grade school. Those kids’ needs have changed as they’ve aged.

“Kate teaches math, and my high-schooler is going up to her house pretty much every night to get help with calculus,” Kim said. “So, there’s things like that that go beyond just how much do you pay for housing. ... You can’t put a price on being away, and then having your teenager looked out for and fed while you’re away for a couple weeks.”

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Cohousing’s financial models can vary.

At CHUC, households originally paid $30,000 each to help cover the down payment on a construction loan, which they used to build an apartment building on a property that’s smaller than a standard single family lot. It’s efficient, since land costs less when it’s spread across nine families, much like buying food in bulk for large shared dinners.

Today, they own the building collectively through their LLC and rent it back to themselves. Residents set the rents democratically. At CHUC that means $2,000 to $3,000 a month for a 2-bedroom — a little below the $3,500 average in that neighborhood for a similarly sized apartment. That covers utilities, property taxes, and part of the loan payment. After they’ve paid off the loan in 20 years, they’ll have an option to drop their rents down as low as $500 a month, if they choose to.

There are many different ways a cohousing project can be organized financially, including a more traditional condominium model. A condo structure allows residents to cash out more easily when they leave, but potentially leaves the residents with less control over a development’s long-term emphasis on community.

A group could also choose to focus on affordability as its central goal, prioritizing inexpensive materials and choosing a property in almost any other neighborhood besides Capitol Hill, where land is especially expensive. In this case, the CHUC families prioritized other things over getting things as cheap as possible.

The important thing is that these families are choosing not to move into a more expensive, single-family home. And they’re okay with that because they’re part of a strong social network in this building, and they have shared common spaces that make their small homes feel larger.

Housing expert Gregg Colburn of the University of Washington said cohousing is still a niche market, but it plays an important role in creatively meeting the needs of people who feel isolated by the small homes being built in Seattle today.

“The reality is there's no one housing type that works for everyone,” he said. “So, having diversity of housing types and models, to me, is really good for society.”

Cohousing, while offering some potential savings, is not cheap. It’s expensive to build because all housing is expensive to build. You don’t get a discount on construction materials just because you’re community-focused.

Anything a government does to make housing cheaper in general also brings down the cost of cohousing.

For example, city governments can help housing projects get their building permits faster. Or governments could change zoning laws to allow small apartment buildings on quiet residential side streets. Right now, Seattle only allows apartment buildings in a few places, like on busy arterials or in neighborhood centers. And because there’s limited land for apartments and lots of demand, you end up with giant buildings that try to pack in as many people as possible.

Cohousing works better in a smaller building, because then you have a manageable community size.

If you make it easier to build small apartment buildings in more places, you make it easier to build cohousing, too.

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