Co-Housing: An Option for Retirement LIving

Anthony Gifford

The current “successful” scenario for seniors is something like this: you live in your paid-off home until you find it too much work, at which time you move into a facility where you will be care-free and healthy. This system is “sold” to us by the providers of these “homes” as the only choice for modern and smart people. It’s working great for the financial backers. It’s a growth industry like few others.

The problems of the above model are many. An increasing number of seniors don’t have homes to sell, nor do they have large (or any) pensions. (For each passing year, about one percent fewer Canadians have pensions. It is estimated that in ten years, the average senior will have a monthly income of only twelve hundred dollars.)

The cost of retirement centres can run from just under $2,000 to well over $6,000 per month. This is simply not a system that most can afford, and the provinces cannot support.

Retirement centres can be deadly. People need to feel needed. We need to feel worthwhile, and to contribute something to the whole. Vacations are fine, for a while. But they aren’t real living. To be put into a facility where you have no purpose for being is completely unnatural and deadly to the spirit and body.

Statistically, there is no benefit what-soever in living in these facilities. While they are touted as “independent living,” they demand complete dependency, and seldom reward the very things that came to be valued over a lifetime.

There is a growing alternative movement, called Co-Housing, or “Shared Housing.” These terms cover any scenario in which people pool their resources and choose to live together in ways that meet their needs. These people recognize that they can live just fine with a limited but well-defined personal space where they have complete control, but that they can share most other spaces, if there are agreed upon rules. Meals are more interesting and fun if shared. Health costs, security, looking after pets, freedom to go on holidays, housing costs, all these things and more are more manageable and fun if shared.

There are many co-housing examples where the individual monthly costs for housing and food are well below $1,000. It can be a fun and adventurous way of living. And you are in control. People must get along and safeguards must be put in place. But it is easily done.

What is needed? Five or six interested people (or couples) are plenty. Money is seldom a problem for a facility can be rented. Does anybody want to join the conversation and dream of possibilities between Tamworth and Gananoque?

Anthony is the author of “Dare to Share.” You can reach him at 613-305-2701, by email at anthonygifford42@gmail.com, and you can visit his website at sharetolive.com.