With housing costs out of reach for many people in Seattle, more city residents are thinking about going in with friends to buy homes together.

One group’s members had enough money to build a luxury apartment building.

Another group’s members pledged 60% of their net worth to build themselves housing they could afford for the rest of their lives.

Whether their budgets are big or small, cohousing adherents are finding that by banding together, they can get more housing for their money.

Cohousing is a model that generated a lot of curiosity when we covered it earlier this year: 9 families, 1 roof: Urban cohousing in Seattle.

In this week’s Booming episode, we explore two very different ways some creative Seattleites are making cohousing achievable.

Organizing around affordability

Senait Brown sits outside a collectively run school in Seattle’s Madison Valley / Madrona neighborhood. He son Malcolm goes there in the afternoons.

She recalled a moment, during the pandemic, when she found herself at a crossroads.

“I’m 40 years old and I think most people would have the expectation that I would go get a 30-year mortgage and, you know, carve out a piece of something, that I would keep chasing the living wage and somehow scramble to the next step,” she said.

“And I was like, that is not realistic, especially for me as a Black mother, a Black woman, knowing the pay disparities, knowing the wealth gap. I’m like, what sense does that make?”

Brown has a big network of organizers, elders, activists, and doulas. A lot of them were feeling the same thing. So, they asked themselves: How do we want to live? What’s really important to us?

They kept going back to these principles associated with the holiday Kwanzaa.

One of those is unity — sticking together as a family and community. Another is giving back to that community. Another is believing in yourself and others.

That led to a side conversation between Brown and several of the older women, who she calls “aunties.” They took it a step further.

They decided to go in together on housing. They figured they could build something affordable that was designed to foster that community spirit.

They started their search on Pinterest. And something they saw there caught their attention.

“I have a background in urban planning. I have a lot of feeds for different types of housing. And I saw this beautiful cottage neighborhood,” Brown said. “It was colorful. It was something about the landscaping that stuck out to me. There was just layers and layers of little, like, kind of fairy wooden fences and, you know, all the wildflowers, and lantern lighting, which I really love.”

“And I was just like, ‘What is this?’ I’m like, ‘I bet it’s in Denmark. I bet it’s in Amsterdam. I bet it’s in some European country,'” Brown said. “And I clicked on it, and it was, like, Whidbey Island, uh, Washington. And I’m like, ‘What?’ I was like, ‘There is no possible way.'”

Long story short, they visited a similar project in North Seattle and decided to build one themselves: They’ve put in a bid for a piece of land in Skyway just south of Seattle. And they’ve already had some conversations with Ross Chapin, the architect for those Whidbey Island homes Brown saw on Pinterest.

She says her group’s project will have seven cottages arranged around a green space. On one side of the complex, there’ll be a community room for things like barbecues, workshops for community organizers, and classes where kids like Malcolm can learn these Kwanzaa values. An artist-in-residence will have a loft bedroom there, too.

Right now, they’re estimating $7 million for land and construction costs. But they’ve worked out the financing so that each household will pay only about $500 a month to own and live in one of the cottages.

They had to be creative. Everyone in the group has committed to invest 60% of their net worth. So, if you have less, you’re putting in less — that’s the spirit of the group.

They’ve already started. Members are paying monthly dues, and a couple of the elders who had homes are selling them, to cover their share. The group also got a couple grants from Seattle’s Equitable Development Initiative, which helps them pay for things like development consultants.

They’ve put in an offer on land in Skyway. It’s farther away from Seattle than they’d wanted, but it’s what they could afford.

How to afford a luxury apartment building for the price of a house

Brown’s example shows how one group is building affordable housing with very few resources.

Chad Dale had a very different journey to cohousing.

With more resources, his group came together to build a luxury apartment building. He starts tours on the ground floor, where a little alley runs through the building lined with businesses.

It feels like a cross between an intimate European square and a high-end food court.

“Linus from the Sea Creatures Restaurant Group, Doe Bay Wine Company, Ben’s Bread, and Holy Mountain make up this particular zone here,” Dale said.

Then there’s the gym, with its personal trainers. All kinds of shared coworking spaces, a mother-in-law apartment where your relatives can stay when they visit. A turf playfield for the kids. And a trampoline on the roof (there’s a net around it, it’s fine). The roof deck has five different dining areas, one of them in a greenhouse.

Dale says his family wanted to build a cohousing project so they could have more time together with friends. By living with them. And their plan worked. For example, their kids come home after school, throw their backpacks on the floor and take off to play with other kids in the building.

Dale says there are lots of multi-generational relationships forming, too.

“Shirley, who lives on the third floor, put out Easter eggs for all the kids and, you know, WhatsApp’d us and all the kids go down there, and she’s individually put their names on them,” he said.

The irony is that the thing Dale and his wife are missing now is time alone with their own kids, because they’re so integrated into this building’s community.

Dale did this project with 11 of his friends. It cost $40 million to build. And the group got a loan for most of that.

Each put down an average of $830,000 (some put in more, some less), which happens to be just under the cost of an average single-family home in Seattle.

So why didn’t the group just buy a bunch of houses on the same block? It’d be simpler and they’d still see each other. Dale’s answer is that pooling their money bought them far more amenities than they could get alone.

Dale and Brown have that in common. No matter what your budget is, whether you’re barely scraping by or have a big bank account, they say that going in on housing with others can give you more space, and more perks, than you could afford alone.

They also both know their way around the real estate and developer world: Dale as a developer, himself, and Brown thanks to her urban planning background.

Dale’s project is different than many other cohousing projects in some key ways. It has 35 apartments and only a dozen or so owners.

The rest are renters. And the owners are those renters’ landlords, as well as their neighbors. Rent from the other apartments help pay the mortgage on the building.

Getting the loan was the hard part. They went to banks calling themselves a cohousing group. Dale told them about the dream. Families raising kids together under one roof. He figured banks would love it.

But the banks didn’t love the dream as much as he did. They turned him down 40 times.

According to Dale, Banks don’t know what to do with cohousing. All that storytelling was just distracting them. They like plain, cookie-cutter loans.

So, the group changed its approach. Instead of complicating their story with all those details about cohousing, Dale focused on a simple, straightforward story. He said, “I’m building an apartment building. Would you like to finance it?”

A few rejections later, a bank said yes.

Buying a sliver of a home

So far, we’ve been talking about individuals coming together to make this happen. But there are also some companies trying to turn this into a replicable model, with a whole system to support people trying to do this.

One is a Seattle startup called ReSpace. Their motto is building for people who — as they put it — “refuse to rent their whole lives.”

In a nutshell: They’re selling rooms in houses.

Their model is to take existing homes and carve them up into independent suites, each with its own bathroom. They sell those suites individually and then the owners share common areas, like the kitchen, dining room, and living room.

Seattle Real Estate Agent Amy McKenna says she’s encountered a growing hunger for models like these from members of Seattle’s polyamorous community, who often want to live together without being financially tied.

But she says ReSpace’s model is intended to popularize the idea beyond niche communities. She says it works well for friends who want to live together without all the financial entanglements associated with cohousing.

ReSpace’s first project is an old six-bedroom mansion in Leschi, near Lake Washington. Homes in Leschi can be millions of dollars. Around this home, they usually go for about $1.5 million. But suites in that mansion go for anywhere from $120,000 to $300,000 each.

They’re also building new homes.

Some buyers might bring a group of others with them, purchasing a whole house. Others may rely on the company to set them up with others. The company’s approach will evolve as they get more projects under their belt.

It’s a new model, from a new startup, and so far, it’s untested. But this is homeownership at a smaller scale than you’d typically see in real estate today, making it a bottom run on a ladder that can carry allow renters to stop paying their landlord’s mortgage and start building equity for themselves.

Hear more stories like this on Booming, KUOW’s Economy podcast: