Santa Cruz Owner Occupied Co-Housing

Description:

We’re two families that have been living together since 2022. Both families have young kids and pets – cats, a dog, and a lot of goldfish. We have house dinners and brunches together and host neighborhood parties. We share chores, help each other out with pet sitting, kid care, and other life stuff, and we have weekly house meetings where we make consensus decisions on things that affect all of us. We own our house together through an LLC. As compared to a single family living alone, our house has more personalities and opinions and different habits to navigate. But we have more support, we love seeing our kids growing up together, we’ve developed stronger communication and problem-solving skills, and each of us only do chores that we like to do and only cook dinner once a week!

We’re remodeling our house right now with work hopefully finishing at the end of 2025. Once that’s done, the house will have suites for 3 families – each with 2 bedrooms, a living room with kitchenette, and 1 or 2 bathrooms – and a shared common space with a main kitchen, dining room, guest room, living rooms, kids’ playroom, laundry room, and offices. The house has a large yard with a natural playground, pond, and creek, and we’re planning to plant a vegetable garden and fruit trees. The house is a 10-minute bike ride from Downtown and Midtown Santa Cruz, supermarkets, and shops, but far enough from town that we regularly see deer and wild turkeys.

We’re looking for people who would like to join our house for the long term. This would mean becoming co-owners of our house and participating in house activities as full, equal house members just like the rest of us. Most importantly, we want to live with people who share our values: caring about the wellbeing of others; being open to others’ different opinions and to changing our minds; valuing inclusivity, growth, and learning; seeking to treat others and ourselves with acceptance, patience, kindness, and generosity; trying to help make this world a bit better where we can.

If you think you might be interested in living with us, please drop us a line at santacruzcooperativeliving@gmail.com. We’d love to hear about who you are and answer any questions you might have.

If you’re interested, we’d then like to get to know you better over a Zoom call or a short in-person meeting. If you and we all think we could be a good fit for living together after that, we’ll spend more time together, show you the house, and talk in more detail about the financial and legal aspects, before you and we all decide if it feels right. We’re hoping to spend a lot of time getting to know potential candidates this summer and then decide after that, but our highest priority is a process that feels good to everyone involved and ends up with a really good fit – so it may take longer. We promise to be open and clear with everyone we talk to along the way.

We look forward to hearing from you!