I Don't Want to Own More Than 1/43 of a Lawnmower Anyway
Where coliving projects break down, what's finally working, and notes on building a sovereign business in a world where the corporate-job container is changing fast.
Midlife Nomads explores how people are redesigning work, travel, and life in our 40s, 50s & beyond.
This week's edition is brought to you by Wise, a preferred partner of Midlife Nomads — the account I’ve actually used over the last 10+ years to move money across borders without getting quietly skimmed on every transfer.
I’ve been in a lot of coliving conversations this week. Some at tables, some over coffee, one that ran long enough that I forgot to eat dinner.
These aren't new conversations for me. Failed projects in Canada. A failed project in Panama. Ten years of versions of this. Some never got a shovel in the ground. Others looked promising right up until they didn't. It would be easy (and perhaps logical) to lose hope.
And yet, the model works. It’s been working for years, in places most people pitching new coliving builds have never actually visited. I just didn't seem to be in the right rooms — with people who were in it for the right reasons, with the will and funding to actually build the thing — until now.
North Americans were trained to accept a particular kind of waste as success. Everyone with their own washing machine, their own lawnmower, their own car in their own driveway. Excellent for capitalism. Not so excellent for the people doing the buying, who at some point stopped being called citizens and started being called consumers, and mostly didn't notice the swap.
Plenty have noticed since. But the people who’d benefit most from sharing some of this often look at coliving with disdain. I could never spend that much time with other people. I need my privacy — as though privacy were something you had to give up to live near other adults.
It isn’t. The communities that actually work have figured out the privacy question; how to ensure there’s privacy when you need it, and community when you crave that, too. That’s part of what makes them work.
Some have been quietly building this for a long time.
In the U.S., Bryn Gweled Homesteads in Pennsylvania has been doing private homes on commonly owned land since 1940. The model that became the modern cohousing movement traces back to Sættedammen outside Copenhagen, which opened in 1972. Sixty adults and twenty children live there now across twenty-seven privately owned households.
In Canada, there are around twenty-four established cohousing communities with more in progress, most of them in BC and Alberta (not because those provinces are better at sharing, but because their Strata Titles Act actually permits cohousing in a way the rest of the country's condo laws don't).
Prairie Sky in Calgary is an eighteen-unit ownership community of about forty residents, diverse in age, income, and occupation, who share weekly meals and manage the place themselves. In Ottawa, four single women in their sixties pooled resources to build Soul Sisters — six thousand square feet, four private apartments inside what looks from the outside like a single-family home, because that's how they had to design it to meet local zoning.
These aren't rentals or membership clubs. They're ownership models structured legally as condos, co-ops, strata titles, community land trusts. People hold standard deeds. They get standard mortgages. They build standard equity. The only thing that's different is that they also own one forty-third of the lawnmower.
These places are full of people who go to jobs, raise kids, retire, host grandchildren, deal with illness, and bury their dead. The model has been working at this scale, with this kind of seriousness, for decades.
It’s just underrepresented in the rooms where new builds get decided.
Most US municipalities define “family” as related individuals, or cap unrelated adults sharing a home at three or four people. The Supreme Court upheld this in 1974 (Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas) and it’s still on the books, meaning in many places a group of friends sharing a home is literally illegal. Texas just moved to overturn this. Washington tried and got watered down. Boarding houses and SROs were a normal part of American cities until zoning made them essentially illegal.
In the U.S., 75% of residentially-zoned land in many cities is zoned for single-family detached homes only. Coliving can’t exist on most residential land by definition. (Wikipedia is blunt about its history: it emerged partly as a tool to keep minorities out of white neighbourhoods.)
In the UK, the political action against shared living is more targeted. Boroughs like Hackney, Camden, Tower Hamlets, Newham, and Waltham Forest specifically removed the permitted-development right to convert single-family homes (C3) to small shared houses (C4). This forces a full planning application with refusal rates of 30–50% in the most active boroughs.
NIMBY objections to communal living are common in Canada, often citing the unfounded concern that "property values will go down" — even when the housing being objected to is residential by definition.
In most Canadian municipalities, the path of least resistance is still the thing it's always been: a thousand small families, each in their own increasingly unaffordable box, each paying property tax, each filling a school catchment, each buying their own everything.
Coliving doesn't generate the same downstream consumer spending, and doesn't produce homeowner voters who'll show up to council meetings to defend it. So it gets zoned into corners, stalled in committee, or repeatedly refused until the money gives up.
This isn't theoretical. I’ve invested in these projects. Served on the board of one, but eventually pulled my investment back when it became clear the local government would simply never let it happen.
So I've sat in these rooms before, skeptical, watching pitches that were really just real estate plays in softer language. The investor-pitch version always has one slide about "community" so vague it's clear they've never actually lived in one. It's the slide with the stock-photo strangers laughing at a long table. Nobody in the photo is doing dishes. Nobody is figuring out the laundry schedule, or having the awkward conversation about the person who keeps leaving their stuff on the kitchen counter.
In much of the real estate investment world, this concept of “community” has been reduced to glossy photos and a few adjectives. Vibrant. Connected. Intentional. Just put people in a space and they’ll work that stuff out (except they don’t… it actually takes effort).
The conversations I'm in now don’t sound like pitches. They sound like people who understand what they’re getting into comparing notes and making plans that could actually work.
The people in these rooms already know coliving works. They’ve built it, and lived in it. Adults and multi-generational groups can absolutely share a life together — with well-defined private spaces, shared amenities that are actually maintained, and someone whose job it is to hold the community together rather than just hold the keys.
So the questions in the room aren’t whether it’s possible — they’re how, here, with these particular people, on this particular piece of land.
What does the guest policy actually say? How do you handle the season when half the residents are away? Who’s the person who notices when somebody’s gone quiet at dinner three nights in a row? What happens to your space when your mother gets sick and you have to leave for two months?
These are not the questions you ask if you’re trying to assemble a deal. They’re the questions you ask if you’re trying to build something you intend to live in, with people you actually care about.
And I think that’s the thing I’ve been waiting for, across ten years of these conversations. Not better arguments for coliving; I’m convinced.
But better company. People who know it's possible because they're already doing it. People doing it for the right reasons, figuring out the next version with the kind of care you can only bring to something you see as the future for yourself and your family — not just your investment portfolio.
And here’s something I didn’t expect, which would probably surprise the naysayers most of all. In all of these conversations, I haven’t met a single person looking for a free ride. Not a hippie in sight.
Just productive, creative, capable people — most of them well into careers and families of their own — who’ve looked at the current setup and decided they want something more from the next thirty years than a mortgage and a lawn to mow.
I’ve met so many people in recent years who’ve given destination coliving a try and learned the “sacrifice” isn’t near what they’d braced for. You give up a second bathroom. You get back a dinner table where the conversation is worth staying for.
So I'm hopeful this week. Ten years is a long time to wait for the right room. But the right rooms exist. The right people are out there too, looking for coliving that actually works for the people who'll live in it.
You just have to keep showing up until you find them.
✌🏻 Miranda
Our partner: Wise
ICYMI on Midlife Nomads
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Coastal landlords prefer short-term tourism income to year-round rentals, summer prices have climbed sharply, and locals are increasingly ambivalent about the whole arrangement.
Also worth your time this week:
"Employers Are Hiring Freelancers To Fill Gaps As 2026 Layoffs Hit Pandemic-Era Levels" in Self Employed — a useful snapshot of how the corporate-job container is actually changing right now. Layoffs at pandemic levels, freelance demand at record highs, and tax policy quietly tilting toward independent work. This is the structural argument behind every conversation about going sovereign.
"Bosses take remote work less seriously when it's geared toward parents, study shows" in Fast Company — the study confirms what a lot of people figured out on their way out the door: flexible policies framed as parent perks get penalized, and the penalty falls hardest on the people who actually use them.
"The $2,700-a-Week House We're Staying in For Free" by Jo Barnes — house sitting is one of the most useful and underrated strategies for long-term travel, and Jo lays out exactly how she and her husband use it as their main accommodation across multiple continents. The free portion sets up the case; the paid section walks through how to actually get your first sit.
"More Women Are Starting Businesses Than Ever but Many Are Doing It Alone" in Inc. — honest data on the cost of solopreneurship, and an even more honest argument for building your support system before the business depends on it.
"I don't think I'll ever be able to retire" — BBC interviews with three Britons in their seventies and eighties still working, for very different reasons. A useful counter to the binary framing of retire or grind, and a reminder that the more interesting work is figuring out what kind of work you'd actually want to be doing at seventy-five.
That’s it for this week. Whatever rooms you find yourself in until we meet again, I hope they're the right ones.
✌🏻 Miranda
This was a fascinating read for me and obviously made me realize how naive I am about our zoning policies. I never expected this would be so difficult to build. I guess I assumed that as long as it meant the size requirements and setbacks, how many people who live in a home and how many kitchens or living rooms is not relevent. I guess I was quite wrong. Thanks for this informative read!