Our Urban Village, a Vancouver Cohousing Community

Author: christine

Glory bowls with Rosie Mae

The month of July was a very busy moving month for OUV members. Not only did we move into our units, we now have a common house, lounge and courtyard to organize. Our common house is rather fabulous and equipped with vast amounts of storage cupboards. These next few months will require efforts to organize …

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Unit 11, Studio (494 sq ft)

This apartment feels like a town house with its own entrance off tree-lined Ontario Place, its own front patio and higher ceilings (approx 13′) than the rest of the units, which makes it seem larger. There is no wasted space in this unit. It contains an open-concept kitchen (with dishwasher), living and sleeping areas and …

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Is urban cohousing cost effective?

There is no escaping the fact that housing in Vancouver is expensive. It’s all people talk about here in the city (apart from the rain) so despite all the great positives of living in cohousing it should be no surprise to anyone that market-priced cohousing also has a high entry point. As house prices continue …

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Developer Mark Shieh sees shared living spaces as a way to bring fractured communities together

Mark Shieh understands the power of transformative spaces — he started his career working as an Imagineer for the Walt Disney Company, designing theme parks. “I still have a little of that pixie dust in me,” he says, recalling how transfixed he was by the magic of Disney’s parks and how they felt like the …

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Tomo and OUV — a bit of history

In 2017 Our Urban Village began a partnership with innovative developers, Tomo (formerly known as Take Root) to build a cohousing community using a model that hadn’t been tried before in North America. OUV’s founders were struggling to find a way to build cohousing in one of North America’s priciest housing markets. When the cost …

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