Property developer Bronwen Newton and architect Jesse Matthews are on a mission to change New Zealand's approach to housing.
The co-founders of Wellington's not-for-profit Urban Habitat Collective will soon start construction on an apartment building designed for co-housing.
The central Wellington site of Urban Habitat Collective's first apartment building Photo: Urban Habitat Collective
Co-housing - in which private homes are clustered around shared space - is a fairly common concept in other parts of the world, Bronwen Newton tells Jesse Mulligan.
“People in Denmark, in Germany and California have been doing it for a long time. It's just on this one thing [New Zealand] seems to be slow to catch up.”
The design of Urban Habitat Collective's development offers individual apartment living with common areas, she says.
“It's apartment living, but with shared spaces. So everybody has their own self-contained apartment with bathroom, kitchen, living room - all of that kind of stuff.
“But we're designing the building so that we have places to meet our neighbours. And just so that we have places to do all the things that you'd expect to do in a normal home like a workshop and a garden and a roof deck.”
The project will also have common rooms for shared meals if residents choose to eat together, she says.
“The idea is to create forever homes for people rather than just storage boxes in the city.”
The benefits of Urban Habitat Collective co-housing include better community connection and high building specs, she says.
“We've done our project with resident's input into design, which means that people have got to put forward ideas about the way that we want to live, and the features that they think are important.
“So that means, for instance, our building has a higher spec of heat insulation and sound insulation because those are the things that the community wants.”
Designing a building with fewer apartments allowed the architects to maximise views and light, Bronwen says.
“Those things are important to residents, but they often are not as important to developers.”
Despite hopes to the contrary, the Urban Habitat Collective build hasn’t worked out any cheaper than a traditional development, she says.
“When we started we really hoped that it was going to be cheaper, we are a not-for-profit organisation so we were completely transparent. Nobody's taking a margin or anything like that, everybody can see what we spend our money on and the bank account and all of that kind of stuff.
“And we make consensus decisions about those things. I think the savings that we would have made by not having to pay a developer margin, we've used up in the features that we really value. And of course, doing any kind of building in this absolutely bonkers market at the moment has meant that prices have gone up.”
The Urban Habitat Collective now has resource consent and a preferred contractor for their project and they are just about to apply for building consent.
“We're hoping that we'll be able to break ground within the next year. We've done the demolition already, but we're hoping that we'll be able to actually start the foundations in about three months’ time.”
The project has been progressing slower than they had hoped, she says.
“Everybody's really busy. It took us nine months to find a structural engineer to peer-review our structural design.”
Urban Habitat Collective are well-resourced for the project so Bronwen is confident a bank will come to the party.
“We have a hefty deposit. And obviously, by the time we're asking the bank to confirm we're going to have a building consent in, a fixed price and cleared site, and probably 30 to 35 percent deposit to put towards the construction finance.
“We're not we're not a super-risky endeavour but I suspect that they still will ask for a hefty guarantee.”
Similar co-housing projects will need more support to flourish, she says.
“Because we're not development projects. And we need to be recognised so that we can be treated in a more appropriate way.
“The impact of that would be more projects and the impact of that would be just better-quality density and more variety, more diversity in the types of housing that we have throughout the country.”
Co-housing is the focus of a hui in Wellington this week organised by The Housing Innovation Society, Victoria University and Massey University.
