Boulder, Colorado · Forming now
What we're building looks something like this — our sister community PDX Commons on a summer evening in Portland. Forty households who hike together, share meals, throw the occasional dance party in the courtyard. We're building one like it here, with the first households who want to help shape it.
Most of them give up before they figure out how. We're building it here on purpose — by design. A community of roughly forty households of active adults — people who hike, who travel, who keep learning, who believe in showing up — where you trade trail recommendations on Saturday morning, where the Tuesday-night meal is already cooking when you get home, and where you actually know your neighbors by name.
We don't have a site yet. We have something better: a model that works, a partner who's helped build more than fifty communities like this, and room for the first households who want to help shape the place they'll live.
What is cohousing?
Cohousing is a housing model born in Denmark in the 1960s and brought to North America in the 1980s by American architects and authors Katie McCamant and Chuck Durrett. The idea is simple: design a neighborhood so that the physical layout makes community happen — without sacrificing the privacy of your own home.
Each household has a fully self-contained home — your own front door, kitchen, bedrooms, and living space. The design simply makes it easy to run into each other when you want to.
Every community has a shared building: a big kitchen and dining room, gathering and recreation spaces, laundry, and guest rooms. It's where community dinners happen, where the book club meets, and where guests stay when they come to town.
Optional community dinners two or three nights a week. A few fewer nights cooking alone, a few more nights laughing across a long table. It's how relationships actually form.
Residents manage the community themselves — not a management company. Committees handle the meals, the maintenance, the events. You're not a customer; you're a co-owner of a shared life. Down the road from where this community will sit, Jim Leach and his neighbors at Silver Sage Cohousing have run their place this way for nearly two decades.
How it works
A cohousing community takes roughly three to five years from seed group to move-in. Here's the path we follow on every one we build.
We begin with five to seven founding households who've decided they want to live this way. They bring the mission; we bring the development expertise.
Next we introduce you to our partner Katie McCamant to clarify goals, outline the scope of the project, and determine feasibility. With your goals clear, we help you expand the group and recruit additional members.
We identify a site that works for about forty households, and begin design with the residents as active participants — not passive recipients.
We co-create with you — a marketing and member enrollment plan. Then recruit members until 80% of homes are under purchase agreement. That is the threshold that unlocks construction financing.
We manage the full build. Residents stay engaged throughout — approving upgrades, preparing for move-in, and building the governance structures they'll use once they're home.
We support the community after move-in as routines, governance, and culture take hold. The goal is a community that's genuinely self-sufficient within a year of opening.
Who's building this
Urban Development + Partners is the development consultant. We structure and finance the project, lead design and construction, and work closely with the resident group throughout the journey. We've built cohousing and other community-focused housing up and down the west coast for 20+ years, and Boulder is the next place we want to do this work.
Our partner Katie McCamant of CoHousing Solutions leads the community formation work. Katie helped bring the cohousing model to North America from Denmark in the 1980s and is the coauthor of the authoritative book on cohousing, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves. A licensed architect and longtime cohousing resident, her firm has helped create more than fifty cohousing communities. We're fortunate to have her as a partner.
Our partner Caddis Collaborative is a Boulder-based architecture firm with more than a decade of experience designing cohousing communities in the United States, Canada, and South Africa. The team at Caddis is committed to "participatory design" and excels at bringing future residents' voices into the design process.
Jim Leach joins us as special development consultant. As president of Wonderland Hill Development Company, Jim has led the development of more than twenty cohousing communities across Colorado, California, Arizona, and Washington over five decades. He's also a resident of Silver Sage Cohousing here in Boulder — one of the people already living the way we're building for.
The division of expertise is intentional: we lead development, financing, and construction. Katie leads community formation, facilitation, and the group process. The hardest part of cohousing isn't building the buildings — it's building the community.
Join the interest list
We'll keep you in the loop — what the community is starting to look like, who's joining, what we're learning. Info sessions when we're ready to hold them, the chance to join the founding group when the time is right. No pressure, no spam.
Questions