When Kate and Jason turned up to look around The Commons, they weren’t looking for a lifestyle change. They were just another hard-working couple wanting an apartment that was close to central Melbourne and wouldn’t cost the earth.

Only after they moved in did the upsides of the building’s co-housing ethos hit them. Built in the Brunswick neighbourhood by a consortium of local architects, the award-winning apartment block is designed with sociability hard-wired into it. About 15% of the property is devoted to communal facilities, including a shared roof garden and laundry room.

“I have lived in multi-residential buildings before and not known a soul … but here we have created genuine friendships,” says 33-year-old ballet dancer Kate. “The communal spaces encourage you to interact with your neighbours – we garden together, we make building improvements together, we go out together, we make dinner for one another.”



The concept of co-housing – where living arrangements encourage co-operation and community – kicked off in Denmark back in the 1960s. The Commons is the first of four co-housing projects developed by Nightingale Housing, a Melbourne-based social enterprise looking to bring the idea to Australia. Seven more are in the offing. So will it work, and can it spread?



One of the apartments in The Commons development in Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Wuttke/Breathe Architects

Demand is high. Nightingale has a waiting list of 1,500 people, says Jeremy McLeod, a director at Breathe Architecture and a co-founder of the scheme. These aren’t hippies looking for a commune, he says. Most residents are professionals who are attracted to city living, but fed up with paying exorbitant rents for the privilege of a soulless apartment.

“It’s not cultish at all,” he says, noting that a high proportion of the 47 adult residents at The Commons are introverts. “People can opt in as they like. So the roof garden, for example, has been designed with a big area where people can come together but also small pockets where people can sit in the sun by themselves.” The idea of a multi-residential building that enables people to socialise but affords them some privacy too holds much wider appeal than a Big Brother-style open-plan design, says Tobias Jones, author of Utopian Dreams, a book on communal living. “With communal living you’re sacrificing an element of personal freedom and privacy,” he says. “But with this kind of co-housing model, you’re not sacrificing anything. You’ve only got gains as far as I can see.”



Such gains aren’t immediately obvious to everyone. In contemporary western society we are “pathologically obsessed” with privacy, Jones says. Overcoming that will more likely arise from economic necessity, rather than lifestyle choice. “Only when we can’t afford a washing machine will we agree to share one,” he says. For millions who want to live in central urban locations but are facing increasingly expensive real estate prices, that inflexion point may be closer than we think. The main sticking point is, as ever, money. The Nightingale model is guided by the notion of affordability. One way to bring down the final price is to cap the developer’s profits: something McLeod and his fellow investors do (at 15% of total construction costs). Another step is smart, economical design. By not kitting out the apartments with marble tiling, say, or the very latest mod-cons, the developers realised A$1.2m in savings on the cost of The Commons (as well as winning a host of sustainable design awards to boot).

Neither approach coincides with the business model of Australia’s mainstream property developers, says McLeod: “All of our housing in Australia is delivered on a short-term understanding to deliver profit, not to house people … As long as the status quo of speculative development and selling to investors is profitable, there’s no reason for industry to change.”

The communal noticeboard in The Commons development in Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Wuttke/Nightingale

Even supposing a change of heart, any new property is still subject to high land prices. As a rule of thumb, land represents about one-third of new-build costs in downtown Melbourne. In Sydney, it’s closer to two-thirds. That makes affordable housing tricky, pushing most projects out to distant suburbs where land is cheaper.

High land prices “can be a killer”, but the problem isn’t insurmountable, says Alan Heeks, founder and adviser to two co-housing projects in the UK. He points to the Danish model, which provides co-housing groups with access to low cost financing as well as government land (where available) at below-market rates. Luck and goodwill can be important factors too, says Heeks. One of the projects he is involved in is an affordable mixed-tenure co-housing project in the UK town of Bridport. “We were able to find a sympathetic landowner who was willing to sell us the land at substantially below-market rates,” he says. Then, because of the project’s affordability objectives, the local council fast-tracked Heeks’s planning application for housing.



Ensuring that co-housing projects remain affordable marks an additional challenge. Again, the European model is instructive here. Many co-housing projects are structured as cooperatives, whereby individual members can buy and sell the leasehold on their own properties but ownership of the land is controlled by the cooperative as a collective. This acts as a break against house price inflation. With long-term affordability, the ownership structure is everything, says Michael LaFond, director at the Institute for Creative Sustainability in Berlin and co-author of a handbook featuring Europe’s best co-housing projects. In this respect, he doesn’t put too much store in mainstream private developers. Better to look to housing associations, community land trusts or innovative self-organising schemes such as Berlin’s Mietshäuser Syndikat.

Even then, making urban co-housing attractive and affordable is still an uphill battle. “Demand is continuing to grow but supply of this sort of co-housing is not [continuing to grow] because of the expenses of construction and having no access to land, and so on,” says LaFond.

If Europe is anything to go by, Nightingale will have its work cut out if it is to scale its innovative co-housing model in Australia. The challenges ahead aren’t dampening Kate and Jason’s enthusiasm one bit. The couple recently made a down-payment on an apartment in Nightingale 1, a new co-housing development set to open right across the road from The Commons in October 2017.

“For us, the typical Australian dream of a big house, backyard and double garage has never been our dream. We love living and working in the city,” says Kate. “So it’s nice to know we will be in a home we want to live in forever, with friends we will most likely grow old with.”