Canada _ (Commonwealth Union) _ Eight years ago, John Mungham and his wife Jocelyne had a vision for where they wanted to age in place with shared spaces but with their own private unit, where their neighbors are their friends. A multi-generational co-housing community.
They spent most of the next decade trying to bring their vision to life. They named the project Mosaic Village and gathered a group of Calgarians who wanted to join. In 2019, the couple bought land in Bowness. They hired Calgary-based developer RNDSQR to build a 24-unit property, had acquired a development permit and were just about ready to start building. But in late December, they decided to shut the project down.
We wanted to get to the point where we could acquire a respectable construction loan, Mungham added, and then we hoped that more individuals would join the project. “It never occurred,” Mungham claimed that although there was widespread support for the proposal, the team was unable to secure enough locals to agree to the costs and the plan. Each unit was expected to fetch between $350,000 and $600,000.
Mungham claimed that the project was ultimately too expensive to proceed given the instability and unpredictability surrounding the property market. We can’t pull it off like way, it was decided internally, he added. “We didn’t want this to happen, in my opinion. I genuinely think that we gave it our all to make progress on this. It just didn’t fly, though.”
The idea of co-housing, which was developed in Denmark in the 1960s, is to live in a neighborhood of privately owned apartments that is centered on shared areas and a few rituals. Every decision is made by group consensus, and members frequently eat together and celebrate birthdays.
In Canada and the United States, senior co-housing has become more common over time, but Mosaic Village wants to develop to accommodate younger members and people with families. Calgary has just one co-housing neighborhood, Prairie Sky Cohousing, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Several others, including Mosaic Village and Dragonfly Cohousing, have advanced through different phases of development but frequently fail. Sarah Arthurs, a lifelong Prairie Sky resident and the creator of Cohousing Connections, says she understands how challenging it is to construct co-housing and feels for the Mosaic Village team.
