A CO-OP LOVE STORY

Co-op housing is making a comeback. For all the potential friction of sharing a mortgage with your neighbours, it can be a beautiful thing. Jan Champagne and Miriam Zachariah met, fell in love and merged their families in a co-op. Now they're founding their own

- ANTHONY MILTON

IF THE STATE OF THE CONDO MARKET has taught us anything, it's that it really is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Condos are often touted as an accessible way into the housing market for mid-level earners, but developers tend to build what makes sense for their bottom lines. As a result, Toronto has a glut of easy-to-execute but difficult-to-live-in studio and one-bedroom units. Meanwhile, the housing crisis rages on, and there’s an ever-increasing demand for more diverse options.

One alternative is the condo’s cousin: the coop. In a condo building, a resident purchases a unit and a share of the common areas, then finances their own mortgage. In a coop, everyone contributes to a shared mortgage and gets a share of the corporation that runs the building. There are equity coops—like the upmarket ones in Manhattan—but the majority of Toronto's coops are nonprofits. Residents usually join by buying a stake in the coop corporation for a nominal fee or paying a onetime membership charge, then they pay monthly fees to cover the mortgage, maintenance and taxes. Governance is communal: residents make decisions as a group. Toronto has more than 180 nonprofit coops, ranging in size from five-unit row houses to 200-unit high-rises. Most of them date back to the '70s, '80s and '90s, when housing prices began rising and the federal government started doling out low-interest mortgages to people willing to build their own coops. It spurred a boom: between 1973 and 1995, more than 82,000 coop units were created in Canada. But, after the recession took hold in the early '90s, the feds pulled their support. In 1995, more than 17,000 coop construction projects in Ontario were cancelled. These days, it's nearly impossible to get into the ones that remain—most of them don't even have room on the waiting list.