our urban village cohousing

sharing celebrations

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summer potluck evenings

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sharing food

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sharing vision for our new home

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summer beach bbq

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membership open for families with kids seeking 2-3 bedrooms!

Please use our contact page and let us know the number of people in your family and whether you are looking for 2 or 3 bedrooms. We will be looking for folks that can pay market rates for new condominium homes.

we have our developer and our site!

Tomo Spaces + Happy City Labs
+ MASStudio Architects

Nearly 2 years after our first information session and after 14 meetings with developers, we are happy to announce that we have found our partner - Tomo Spaces. From the beginning we knew our version of cohousing would only work with a developer who shared our vision of a new housing model for Vancouver.

Tomo has just the model we were searching for. Tomo stands for "together more," a name that reflects the belief that buildings should be designed to support the people who live in them.

Tomo believes that sustainability, sociability and affordability are interconnected. By finding synergies in these three areas, Tomo aims to offer a new housing choice.

We are pleased to announce our new home will be at 5811 Main Street. Read all about it in the August 2017 article in the Globe and Mail.

we're co-housing lite

We are creating a new kind of multigenerational community where we each have our own apartment and our neighbours are already our friends. We are adapting the cohousing model to reflect the realities of high housing costs in Vancouver.

We call our model "cohousing lite." Instead of designing our village from scratch as most communities do, we've found an innovative developer who owns land and wants to create a new housing model for Vancouver. Each of us will buy our own self-contained unit in Tomo House. The plans include a common space with kitchen and dining area for regular shared activities and a guest suite for visitors.

We are a positive, energetic, community-minded people who agree that it takes a village to raise a child and enrich the lives of adults. Our goal is to have 1/3 of our units for young families, 1/3 folks who are still working and 1/3 retirees.

progress report

We've been hard at work. We've:

met with 3 city councillors
met with a city planner
reached consensus on vision and values
met with 13 developers and an architect
held 6 workshops
held 3 public info sessions
hired our facilitator, Kathy McGrenera
been selected as a project by UBC School of Architecture
found our developer with a site (Tomo Spaces)!
participated in City's neighbourhood open house for our project
received unanimous approval by members of the Urban Design Panel
rezoning application unanimously approved July 17 2018!
development permit submitted December 2018

Members to date:

7 Equity households
1 Associate household

Tomo Spaces has partnered with Happy City Labs and creative architechs from MASStudio to create Tomo House for OUV.

Happy City Labs conducts ground breaking research on how to design multi-family housing with social interaction in mind. The research lab is the direct result of Award winning journalist Charles Montgomery book, Happy City, which asks "Can we design cities to maximize interaction and increase happiness?"

The principles in their June 2017 Toolkit will be used by Tomo to inform the design for OUV.

"We’ve gathered evidence from psychology, neuroscience, public health and other fields to identify how design influences sociability in multi-family housing."

Tomo selected Marianne Amodio as their architech for Tomo House. Her firm, MAAStudio believes that:

". . . through creative thinking, we can craft solutions that speak to today's issues of affordability and social and environmental sustainability"

Read all about our partners and cohousing lite's approach on Tomo's website.