Canada is facing an out of control housing crisis. In our city of Hamilton, ON., the average price of a single-family detached home has risen to 447% since 2000, and now sits at a totally unaffordable average price of $817,283. How can young working class folks ever expect to break into a market like this?
Suburban sprawl is a huge part of this problem. That sort of construction is much more expensive to develop and maintain, and it uses land much less efficiently than more dense housing options. Our municipalities have prioritized suburban sprawl despite this, often due to backdoor deals with shady constructors. The supply of detached single-family homes cannot meet the demand, but more efficiently constructed housing can.
For example, right now in our city there is an apartment building with 9 units of housing for sale for $2.15 million. If that cost was divided across 9 households occupying those units, that would come to a cost per unit of $238,888. For comparison, the average price of a condo in our city is $464,098, plus condo fees. That $2.15 million isn’t even a notably cost effective example, the deal really is just that much better when housing is bought in bulk, and it typically gets better as the buildings scale in size.
This is the heart of our housing alternative. We have a plan to win a better housing deal as a group than we ever could as isolated individuals or families. We can reduce our housing costs drastically by buying a large multi-unit building and managing it as a community.
However, what we envision is about more than just saving money on housing; we want to live in a community where neighbors are friends you can count on, rather than strangers. Shared resources, shared skills, shared tools and equipment, group events, collaborative projects, and collective decision-making all lower the burdens of life on each individual household, and we dare to say make life more pro-social, meaningful, and fun.
Giving into the housing status quo right now would be allowing ourselves to be divided and exploited into giving up decades of extra labor, all just to live in an extra-separate box. We’ve done the math, you can expect to spend 340% fewer hours of your life working to pay off your mortgage using our model than a typical home mortgage. You don’t need a million dollars to own your own home, but it could easily cost more than that if you try to do it alone.
It’s time for an alternative to living atomized from one another. We can secure better, healthier, and freer lives for us all by working and building in cooperation.
Let’s do it.
Cooperation, mutual aid, and resource sharing creates a more affordable, healthy & joyful lifestyle.
Cooperation, mutual aid, and resource sharing creates a more affordable, healthy & joyful lifestyle.
If you are interested, there is a registration form on our website you can fill out, and we will respond as soon as we have looked it over. The founders will be checking the submissions and invite anyone to our next meeting who seems to fit our community’s goals and values.
As we are forming our community, we do not have a physical location to visit, yet. If you would like to meet with the community’s founders, please email [email protected] and we will get back to you ASAP.
A few people (not elected by the broader community) make the major decisions.
Power and responsibility are shared relatively equally among members.
Members contribute a percentage of income to community funds.
Join fee: Yes (amount not specified)
Monthly fees/dues: Yes (amount not specified)
Labor: Encouraged or suggested
On our website, we describe in much greater detail the economic structures we may adopt once our community has formed. This will be decided on later as a group once we develop further and have more members.
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