Communal living projects moving from hippie to mainstream

The hippies could be proven right. Four decades after they introduced the commune into the industrialised society, pooling goods and saving nature’s resources, sustainability and the sharing economy are on the up. This includes co-housing - where residents have seperate bedrooms but may share kitchen and dining facilities - which is also proving to be a lucrative business model.

“It’s all about living healthy and happy lives without harming the planet,” says Sue Riddlestone, who co-founded a pioneering community of 82 low-energy, water-efficient homes called BedZED in south London more than a decade ago.

Back in 2003 healthy and happy lives with no harm to the planet sounded a bit idealistic. Indeed, before BedZed, Riddlestone and her co-founder social entrepreneur Pooran Desai had pioneered hemp textiles production, a tree reuse station and sustainable mini paper mills in London.

Then came the growing awareness of climate change, followed by the sharing economy, which in 2013 was valued at $26bn and some analysts expect can grow to $110bn. Suddenly communal living, especially of the modern kind where resources are shared but everyone has a separate apartment, looked a lot more attractive.

Brighton, Middlesborough, Oxford... and China

By 2006, Riddlestone and Desai launched a property company, BioRegional, which Riddlestone now heads as CEO, and helped build an 8,000-home eco-village in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. Four years later, BioRegional had completed an eco-community in Brighton on England’s south coast and one in Middlesbrough in Yorkshire. Now, construction of a 6,000-home eco-town featuring both solar panel and a biomass plant, and even an eco-pub, is underway in Bicester, a small town near Oxford.

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“When we started BedZed we were not in the property development business”, says Riddlestone. “The business aspect is something that just evolved. Now we’re developers in some projects and consultants to developers in other projects.”

North America is joining the trend as well. Construction has just been approved for a BioRegional community on the site of an old HP campus in Sonoma north of San Francisco. In Ottawa another one is being built on the site of an old paper mill. And BioRegional is far from alone in having discovered the booming interest in communal living, now usually referred to as co-housing.

In Mountain View (home to Google), the architectural firm McCamant & Durrett is building a co-housing community consisting of 19 apartments and townhouses. St Petersburg, Florida, boasts a new co-housing development that will provide a community for families with special-needs children. And in Ann Arbor, Michigan, one city block now features three co-housing communities, including Touchstone Co-Housing.

In Weimar, Germany, an old hospital will soon house a community of 200 people living in separate apartments and sharing communal spaces. Nationwide, Germany has 545 co-housing projects, and every major city now boasts at least one modern co-housing community.

Commercial interest

In fact, the commune has become a commercially attractive proposition to both developers and residents. “Although the sudden visibility of the sharing economy over the last five years was induced primarily by digital factors, many sharing behaviours will be sustained over time by ethical and social rather than technological considerations”, explains Arun Sundararajan, a professor of information, operations and management sciences at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a leading authority on the sharing economy.

“Often participants in the digital sharing economy try these services initially because of price or convenience considerations, but remain users because of the quality and the community”. Services such as Airbnb, JustPark and Lyft, says Sundararajan, functions as catalysts for larger the behaviour changes required in industrialised countries. Uber and AirBnb have, in other words, made us more open to co-housing.

Irena Bauman, an architect and a professor of sustainable urbanism at the University of Sheffield adds, “The sharing economy is one of the biggest transformational ideas that offer an alternative to the market-led economy. Co-housing and other sharing models are redefining how we can live with a smaller eco-footprint and greater sense of wellbeing.”

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Riddlestone, by now a seasoned developer, points out that taking parking spaces out of the design for a family home to encourage bicycling – co-housing communities usually feature car parking at some distance from the homes – saves money.

“As a resident, you have lower costs in co-housing”, she says. “You can share goods with your neighbours, you have low or no car expenses, and you have neighbours that you know. It’s a low-cost way of having a good life.” At BedZED, the average resident knows 20 of his or her neighbours, though Riddlestone knows 98 of them.

But perhaps it’s not low-cost enough: building or renovating a home designed to the best environmental standards isn’t cheap. “These experiments are prone to becoming gated communities”, notes Bauman. “The big challenge is in upscaling the models and making them mainstream.”

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