Shared Home Vancouver Canada with Sense of Community seeks Couple or Family

by MacKenzie Heights Collective
Category
Housing For Rent + Shared
Location
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Do you enjoy sharing a sense of community with others? The Mackenzie Heights Collective has been a cooperative household for almost 50 years. Our current household is a group of working professionals with a very easy and respectful way of interacting with each other. We also have a teenager who has lived here since birth, and a seeing eye dog, who both participate in household activities as they are able to. A strength of this long-established cooperative home is that we communicate easily, and resolve issues well. We share dinners a couple of times a week and create a warm sense of community through our social gatherings amongst ourselves and the friends that gather here (when social distancing is not in practise). We really enjoy each others’ company, but we also maintain a balance of group and “solo” space within our large house. Together, we look after our home by sharing household responsibilities. During the “quarantine times” we have felt lucky to have beautiful outdoor spaces to be in, and still a sense of in-person community in our lives. Some of us now work from home remotely, so we balance our individual and group space well with this in mind. We share food, and buy primarily organic and local ingredients.

Our household is going through some changes after years of stability. We have one housemate who is purchasing a new home after living here for several years, and another long-time housemate who will be leaving in December to explore new adventures. This allows for up to three new housemates over the next couple of months. This could be individuals, couples, or with the right match, even a family. We have some flexibility in living arrangements. We have space opening up in January 2021. We have a guest room that can accommodate incoming housemates early if we have people interested in living here before our outgoing housemates leave in December or January. We will have a huge (over 325 sq. ft.) lower level room, which offers lots of combined sleep and work space, as well as a sunny upper level bedroom coming open. Rent will vary depending upon the room and combination of people, but would be approximately $825 + utils for a single person and $500+ each for a couple.

Our older, larger, character home has plenty of common spaces, a living room with a fireplace, a guest room, a large kitchen and dining room and a wonderful back patio where we eat outdoors in summer. Our backyard has vegetable and herb gardens (although the plants in our yard are a bit wild), a patio, a shed, a garage, and composting systems. We have excellent, quick, bus service on the 2 and 25 bus lines, as well as secure, indoor, bicycle storage.

We are not just seeking to fill the space, but are looking for someone who will be an active part in making the house a home. We look for people who are:

-Engaged and involved
-Straight-forward communicators
-Socially available and interactive
-In for house dinners more often than not (we designate three evenings a week for shared dinners)
-Aware of the impact of their actions on others
-Financially stable

If you are interested in our place, please send us an email with a bit about yourself, including your past shared living experience, and let us know what is important to you in your next home.

We usually conduct a brief phone interview before showing our home to prospective housemates. Please include your phone number in your response, so we can reach you, as well, list some good times for us to call you. In times of COVID-19, we will conduct preliminary meetings on the phone or via Zoom. If it seems like a good fit, we can have you over on a nice day for a brief tour and a visit on our outdoor patio.

We are a non-smoking (of all types) household and, due to the seeing-eye dog, cannot accept any furry pets here. Ultimately, we are looking for people who are easy-going, social and communicative, and who would fit well within the current make-up of the household.