Roberts Creek Cohousing is located on 15 beautiful acres in “downtown” Roberts Creek. Located at the end of Emery Road, it is a 3-minute walk to the main commercial centre of the Creek, and less than a 10-minute walk to the ocean.
It is an ideal location for a cohousing project: the elementary school is almost adjacent to us, and public transit runs at both ends of the property, providing good access to Sechelt and to the ferry to Vancouver. “Downtown” means that we are right next to a thriving commercial centre, with a cafe/restaurant (the world famous Gumboot Cafe!), health food store, general store, library, post office, and various professional services.At the same time, the setting is definitely rural. Clack Creek runs to the east of our property, and our homes have been carefully sited into the existing second-growth Red Cedar Forest.
In order to reduce the impact of cars on our community, parking has been kept to the periphery: our main street is pedestrian only (with exceptions made for significant deliveries or emergency access).
Our community is a mixture of single family and duplex houses, clustered closely together to encourage community interaction and preserve the surrounding greenspace. Our community is legally structured as a bare-land strata, with each resident having ownership of their own lot and home, and a common share in the community land and facilities. Individual lots are small by local standards (3800 sq. ft. on average).
The 2900 sq. ft. common house includes a dining room, a large kitchen, a lounge, a guest room, an office, a children’s play room, laundry facilities (although space for a washer/dryer has been included in each home) and a multipurpose room (currently used as a television/movie room.) Other common facilities include a shared workshop, another multipurpose building and an organic vegetable garden.
The community comes together 1-2 times a week in the common house for dinner, cooked by one of our many cooking teams. For many of us, these meals are a key part of building a strong community, and give us lots of opportunities to get to know each other.
Like many cohousing communities, we have adopted consensus as our decision making process. While the decision making process has been challenging at times, it is also an incredibly rewarding experience as we learn how to make decisions that are both positive and completed in a timely matter.