Not All Community Is the Same: Co-Living, Cohousing, and Communal Living Explained

When people hear that we’re building Killick Ecovillage on 57 acres of coastal farmland in Portugal Cove-St Philip’s, the questions come quickly — and one surfaces more than almost any other: “Is that like a condo development?  Or – on the other end of the spectrum – a commune?”

The short answer is: no. The longer answer is worth exploring, because understanding the real differences between co-living, cohousing, and communal living can help you understand what we’re actually building — and why it might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

Co-Living: Convenience with Community on the Side

Co-living is the newest of the three models, and it’s largely a creature of urban real estate. Think of it as a hotel that decided to become a neighbourhood: furnished rooms or small apartments, shared kitchens and common lounges, maybe a rooftop and a weekly social mixer. These are scattered throughout Canada in major metro areas, targeting young professionals priced out of major cities.

Co-living is fundamentally a product. You pay a company a monthly fee, and they manage the building, organize the events, and handle the amenities. The community that forms is real — and often meaningful — but it’s incidental to the business model. Residents come and go. Leases are short. A landlord extracts profit. The space is designed to be transient by nature, serving life stages rather than anchoring a life.

There’s nothing wrong with co-living for certain seasons of life. But it doesn’t ask anything deeper of you, and it can’t offer anything deeper in return. At Killick, there is no landlord and no investor exit strategy — just neighbours who have chosen to build something together.

Communal Living & Intentional Communities

At the other end of the spectrum sits communal living — an intentional community model. Here, residents share nearly everything: income is sometimes pooled, meals are almost always communal, and the group makes collective decisions about money, membership, and daily life. Classic examples include the kibbutzim of Israel and many of the back-to-the-land communes of the 1960s and 70s.

Communal living demands deep commitment and a high degree of ideological alignment. It can be profoundly fulfilling — people who thrive in these settings often describe it as the richest relational experience of their lives. But the level of interdependence also significantly raises the stakes: economic autonomy is limited, and compatibility with the whole group is essential. Many communal communities have stringent joining processes precisely because the bonds are so tight that a poor fit affects everyone.

Killick is not a commune. Members retain full economic independence and their own private homes. We share a vision and a location, not a bank account.

Cohousing: The Generous Middle Ground

Cohousing was developed in Denmark in the 1960s and arrived in North America in the late 1980s, championed here by architects Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett —the same Charles Durrett who consulted on our cohousing design at Killick. The model was built to recapture the village-scale belonging that modern suburban life had stripped away, without asking people to surrender privacy or economic autonomy.

In a cohousing community, each household has a fully self-contained private home — its own kitchen, bedrooms, and front door. What residents also share is a robust common infrastructure: common houses with large kitchens and dining spaces, workshops, fitness and yoga rooms, libraries, and outdoor land for growing food and gathering. Crucially, in most communities, residents participate in their shared governance through consensus-based decision-making. There are no landlords. The community belongs to the people who live in it.

Common meals happen regularly, not because they’re mandatory, but because people genuinely want to show up. Neighbours know each other’s names, kids, and stories. Help is offered before it’s asked for. Cohousing sits in the generous middle: more private than communal living, far more connected than co-living.

Where Killick Ecovillage Fits — and Goes Further

Killick is ecological cohousing — all the relational depth of the cohousing model, with ecological intention layered on top. Our 51-home community sits on 57 acres of heritage coastal farmland and forest in Portugal Cove, just 20 minutes from St. John’s. The land itself is as much a part of the vision as the buildings on it: chemical-free farming, wetland and forest restoration, solar power, natural wastewater treatment, and shared food production from the farm to the table.

But perhaps the most distinctive thing about Killick Ecovillage isn’t our land or location — it’s how we are approaching housing affordability. We use a model called the Mutual Home Ownership Society (MHOS), pioneered by LILAC Cohousing in the UK in 2013. Under this model, monthly housing fees are capped at 30-35% of each household’s net income, regardless of family structure or income level. Members contribute an initial equity payment and a monthly loan to the co-operative, which are repaid with a return upon leaving.

This means a young person starting out, a single parent, a retiree on a fixed income, and a dual-income family can all live side by side in the same high-quality, energy-efficient homes — and all feel that what they’re paying is fair. It is the first ownership model of its kind in Canada.

The result is a community that is genuinely mixed-income and intergenerational — ages 1 to 80, diverse in background, culture, and life stage, united by a desire to live with intention and connection. Two common houses offer spaces for crafts, fitness, music, children’s and teen activities, and a large kitchen and dining area where neighbours share meals five nights a week. Smaller private home footprints are made possible — and desirable — because so much of what you need is already available just outside your door.

We are not a commune. We are not a co-living startup. We are neighbours, in the oldest and best sense of that word — choosing together to build a life and a place that reflects our values around sustainability, equity, and genuine human connection. On unceded Beothuk and Mi’kmaq lands that we hold with care and responsibility.

We’re currently in the permitting phase, with construction beginning in Summer 2026 and move-in estimated for late 2027. If what you’ve read here sounds like the life you’ve been looking for, we’d love to hear from you.