Affordable Housing through Intentional Community

For many of us, housing is our biggest and most stressful expense.. Rent and home prices keep rising faster than pay. The usual choices leave many people without security or a sense of belonging. Those choices are renting with no end in sight, buying a home alone, or moving far from work and family.  

Intentional communities and housing cooperatives offer a different approach: sharing space, resources, ownership, and responsibility so that a good home is within reach for more people.

But how does this work in real life, and how do we make affordability last? Models like cooperatives, community land trusts, cohousing, and multigenerational households all take real organizing, financing, and governance to build and sustain. This two-hour online panel brings together four community organizers to talk candidly about what they’ve seen work, what’s been harder than expected, and what it takes to keep housing affordable over the long term.

Meet the panelists:

• Beth Welch, a Land Trust homeowner and Troy Gardens Cohousing resident in Madison, Wisconsin, who has served on the boards of several land trust and cohousing organizations
• Erin Axelrod, a business consultant and worker-owner at LIFT Economy, where she facilitates the Next Economy MBA and co-facilitates the Next Economy Living program, focused on personal life design for building liberatory communities
• Hugh Farrell, executive director of the Indiana Cooperative Development Center, who develops housing cooperatives and organizes community land trusts
• Savannah Fishel, a service designer and Churchill Fellow whose research on intergenerational communal living in the US and Australia led to Beyond the White Picket Fence, a study featuring insights from 54 communal homes
• Sky Blue, a 30-year organizer and consultant in the intentional communities movement who has lived in nine communities and visited more than 150

Whether you’re curious about affordable cooperative living, searching for a community, or working on housing in your own region, you’ll hear practical strategies from people doing this work. The panel includes time for audience Q&A, so bring your questions.

This panel is for you if:

• You’re feeling the strain of housing costs and want to look at alternatives to renting or buying on your own
• You’re curious about cooperative housing, cohousing, community land trusts, or other shared-ownership models
• You’re exploring or searching for an intentional community and want to understand how affordability works there
• You already live in a community or cooperative and want to hear how others keep housing affordable over time
• You’re working on housing affordability in your region, organization, or community and want to learn from practitioners
• You want a realistic, practice-based look at what these models take, including the challenges as well as the benefits