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Everything you need to achieve your dream of living in community.

Now is the time for community led housing. Modern ways of living can leave us feeling alone in our homes and isolated from key resources. Cohousing balances independence and privacy with collaboration and togetherness to cultivate a thriving community. In cohousing spaces, neighbours know one another, and everyone works together to build and sustain a better future.

When cohousing experts Ronaye Matthew and Margaret Critchlow realized the vast demand for their development services, they knew they had to open the door - to everyone. In this in-depth guide, Matthew and Critchlow share their decades of experience on the ground and in the field. They outline the entire development process and break it down into accessible goals and informed takeaways for anyone interested in a collaborative approach to housing.

With their expertise, you'll be prepared to navigate financial and legal structures, to work with your local municipalities and key professionals, and to transition smoothly from the development phase to living in the community. Including a detailed appendix with case studies of past projects and more, Community Led Housing is the must-read handbook that gives everyone with dreams of creating their own community the tools they need to succeed.

Ronaye Matthew is the primary consultant at Cohousing Development Consulting (CDC), an expert development management firm, where she has guided eleven cohousing projects to completion. After earning a degree in Environmental Studies from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba, Matthew spent her early career working with diverse residential developers in Alberta and British Columbia. In 1996, she shifted gears to cohousing development and never looked back. She has lived at Cranberry Commons in British Columbia since its completion in 2001.

Margaret Critchlow spent twenty-five years as a professor of Social Anthropology at York University in Ontario. She first discovered the importance of community led housing through her field research with Vanuatu villagers in the South Pacific. A leading voice in academic cohousing discourse, Critchlow has authored and edited books on housing cooperatives, customary land tenure, colonial history, and development issues. Critchlow is now a community building facilitator at CDC and has lived at Harbourside Cohousing in British Columbia since 2016.