Puyallup Cohousing

Description:

BACKGROUND:
We started to create our forming group in January 2020, only to have covid throw a wrench in our plans. Now, as of May, 2025 we’re almost ready to rock and roll. We’ve just submitted our initial land use plan to Pierce County as of May 16th, 2025! We started out using the typical ‘community led’ model of development for the first few years. But we switched to a ‘developer led’ model less than a year ago and have been pleased with the results so far.

LAND:
We are fortunate that one of our members (the developer) owns a 17 acre farm with 10.75 acres zoned for residential development, removing one huge hurdle for forming groups. We’ve been working with a civil engineer doing engineering studies to verify that a cohousing community could be built on the land. We’ve shared the results of the studies with Pierce County, WA and see no red flags, which led us to submit for permits on May 16th, 2025. This will be the first cohousing community in Pierce County so we’re expecting a lengthy process with the building department!

If we were to completely build out our site plan as drawn, we will have 3.1 acres of impervious surface, or 29% of the total 10.75 acres. There’s a couple of more acres on an adjacent 3rd parcel zoned for Agricultural use only – so there’s a need for at least a few semi-serious folks that like to play in the dirt! Permaculture with food forest anyone? Natives? Insect friendly? The third parcel has ~800 of riverfront on the Puyallup River and we are working with the local Conservation District to evaluate the possibility of developing salmon spawning habitat in the associated wetlands border.

LOCATION
:
The farm is two miles east of downtown Puyallup, which is 35 miles south of Seattle and 15 miles east of Tacoma. The property has a gorgeous view of Mt. Rainier, easy access to the Sounder commuter rail north to Seattle and south to Tacoma and Lakewood. We’re less than 1/2 mile from a 20+ mile walking/biking trail called the Foothills trail. Local plans are to extend this trial to the boundary of our site which would allow off-highway walking access to both Puyallup and Sumner downtowns!

CURRENT STATUS:
You can see our development plans, including site and unit layouts, on ‘The Land’ tab of our website. We’re still exploring what it would take to adopt a ‘Limited Equity Cooperative’ legal structure and are in the process of creating a pro forma to get a feel for pricing. We expect to become more focused on marketing and membership once the legal structure and prices are determined. Our hope is to develop in phases with the first community targeted to be ~45-50 people on 4 acres of land.

We are experimenting with several approaches to address affordability and accessibility issues that have been exaggerated by the crazy runup in prices over the last few years. We’re attempting to address the affordability/accessibility issue on a variety of fronts:
1) Changing the cohousing community emphasis from single family occupancy to shared occupancy
2) Standardized design instead of custom designed by an architect
3) Designed flexibility of the residences to allow people to vary their requirements for living space over time as their needs change
4) An emphasis on ‘number of people’ instead of ‘number of homes’. (Using ‘number of bedrooms’ as a proxy for people)
5) Modular construction instead of stick-built to reduce uncertainty associated with long construction times
6) Choosing a limited equity cooperative as a legal structure, possibly allowing socially responsible outside investors
7) Fewer, larger, residences with more bedrooms instead of more, smaller, residences with less bedrooms
8) Separating site development (horizontal) costs from home (vertical) costs to minimize peak cash outlay
9) Designing the social structure of the community to function with extensive co-living, co-ownership, and rental

GET INVOLVED:
If you are interested in influencing the start of an unusual cohousing community in Puyallup, Washington then go to the website at PuyallupCohousing.org for more information and fill out the contact form – we would love to talk to you! We hold monthly introduction meetings on zoom on the first Sunday of each month.