The RareBirds housing cooperative is perched at the end of Battle Street West and his covered in solar panels.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/ Dennis Owen and Tyler Meade

After more than a decade of communal living a unique and unconventional Kamloops co-housing project is coming to an end.

From its first meeting in 2011 to the residents moving into their purpose-built house in 2014, the residents of the RareBirds Housing Co-operative have now put the property on the market.

"I'm really sad about it," resident Mary Jordan told iNFOnews.ca. "(But) at this point, I'm ready to move on."

Jordan said some members had left and the co-op hadn't been able to sell their shares worth $250,000 each.

The RareBirds Housing Cooperative was a unique venture whereby each of the six residents owned a $250,000 share in the property. The house was purpose-built and each member had their own private room and en-suite bathroom.

But unlike other co-housing projects, which normally consist of individual homes built around a common house with shared amenities, the RareBirds shared a kitchen and all sat down to eat together each night.

When members moved out, the idea was they'd sell their $250,000 share to the next person moving in.

However, finding a buyer hasn't been easy.

Co-housing projects are often pitched as an answer to high real estate prices, social isolation, and a sense of community often lost in suburbia.

Jordan said that the pandemic shone a spotlight on social isolation and she expected there to be more interest in people buying the shares and moving in.

There is no mortgage on the property, and the members each put down cash to buy their shares. Financing isn't available to anyone who doesn't have the money upfront to move in, which has proved to be a significant hurdle.

Jordan said two of the members moved two years ago, and after a year the cooperative has to pay interest on their shares.

At 82 years old, she admits it's been stressful.

RareBird housing cooperative residents Robyn Hines, Mary Jordan, Dan Hines and Kevin Gillcash appear in this 2017 photo.

(KIM ANDERSON / iNFOnews.ca)

While the co-housing principle sounds good on paper, the financial aspect does hold people back.

In 2019, Lumby resident Chris Bauman was adamant she was going to get a co-housing project up and running.

A group got together and found a piece of land to buy which already contained seven cabins.

However, the project never got off the ground.

"We had 15 households but very few of our group had any capital," Bauman said. "We had a couple of opportunities but we just couldn't swing it... financially."

The property they looked at was up for sale for $1.5-million and only Bauman and her husband and one other person had money.

"You need capital and you need people who have expertise in various areas and are willing to learn about those areas," she said. "Another part was people not taking responsibility for various aspects."

Bauman, whose in her late 60s, went back to Ontario for seven months to care for her elderly mother.

"And it just all fell apart which spoke volumes," she said.

After that, Bauman said she went "conventional," although not that conventional. She and her husband bought a rural piece of land outside Lumby and live off the grid. She still plans to build something on the land that's a cooperative.

"You can do the landlord-tenant thing which everybody knows but it's a power differential," she said. "As a long-time socialist, I'm not interested in that."

The RareBirds living room.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Dennis Owen and Tyler Meade

In 2019, as Bauman was trying to launch her co-housing project, UBCO professor Gord Lovegrove was also trying to get one off the ground in Kelowna.

Lovegrove, who is now a Kelowna city councillor, envisioned 30 units, each 1,100 square feet and fully self-contained, centred around a communal clubhouse on a one or two-acre site.

He told iNFOnews.ca at the time that he had eight families in the early discussion stage, they'd talked about each putting in $250 to hire a facilitator. Six months after that $5,000 was due and then $50,000 to buy the land.

It's unclear what happened to the project but its Kelowna Co-housing website hasn't been updated in years. Lovegrove didn't respond to a request for comment from iNFOnews.ca.

The financial implications are ultimately closing the RareBirds Co-operative and Jordan said she's enjoyed the community immensely.

"One of the things that people have often said is that they learned a lot... they sure don't regret the experience and that they learned a lot about themselves and about other people and about community," she said.

And the last decade at RareBirds has clearly been good for her as she struggled to answer when asked what the worst thing about it was.

The RareBirds house on 772 Battle Street W, Kamloops is up for sale for $1.8 million.

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