Home FIRES

Growing trend across Canada is an effort to create affordable housing with built-in community

- DIANA ZLOMISLIC

A group of people embarking on a co-housing project pooled just over $500,000 and purchased a large plot of land in Peterborough County.

Kris Robinson Staveley grew up on this farm but she doesn’t want to grow old here.

Her father, a therapist from California, bought the acreage overlooking Lower Buckhorn Lake in Peterborough County to open what he called a human growth potential centre. He wanted to help people work on their relationships. The country retreat, with more than 40 hectares of meandering trails through relatively isolated woods and meadows, seemed an idyllic setting to do that. And for two years in the 1970s, he ran the site as a commune, complete with a geodesic dome, when Robinson Staveley was just a kid.

When her dad discovered a practical limitation in his vision for human growth — it wasn’t a sustainable source of income — the commune folded but some of the ideas and experiences stuck with Robinson Staveley, who earned a doctorate in social psychology at Princeton University.

Kawartha project members Alan Slavin, right, and his wife Linda walk with Marc Staveley near Buckhorn, Ont.

On a chilly night in late fall, Robinson Staveley is back at the original farmhouse. She casts a hippie vibe in an oversized T-shirt with wavy blond hair that grazes her shoulder blades. She welcomes a dozen guests into the small cottage a few hours before nightfall. Many have just finished a hike on the property and are settling in around a giant octagonal table — a remnant of the commune days — to talk about the latest developments in a new social experiment they’re leading that will soon change the way they, and dozens of others, live.