Santa Cruz Owner Occupied Co-Housing

We’re two families that have been living together since 2022. Both families have young kids and pets – cats, a dog, and a lot of goldfish. We have house dinners and brunches together and host neighborhood parties. We share chores, help each other out with pet sitting, kid care, and other life stuff, and we have weekly house meetings where we make consensus decisions on things that affect all of us. We own our house together through an LLC. As compared to a single family living alone, our house has more personalities and opinions and different habits to navigate. But we have more support, we love seeing our kids growing up together, we’ve developed stronger communication and problem-solving skills, and each of us only do chores that we like to do and only cook dinner once a week! We’re remodeling our house right now with work hopefully finishing at the end of 2025. Once that’s done, the house will have suites for 3 families – each with 2 bedrooms, a living room with kitchenette, and 1 or 2 bathrooms – and a shared common space with a main kitchen, dining room, guest room, living rooms, kids’ playroom, laundry room, and offices. The house has a large yard with a natural playground, pond, and creek, and we’re planning to plant a vegetable garden and fruit trees. The house is a 10-minute bike ride from Downtown Santa Cruz, Midtown, supermarkets, and shops, but far enough from town that we regularly see deer and wild turkeys.