Cohousing near Montpellier

Cohousing is an intentional community of private homes clustered around shared space. Each attached or single family home has traditional amenities, including a private kitchen. Shared spaces typically feature a common house, which may include a large kitchen and dining area, laundry, and recreational spaces. Shared outdoor space may include parking, walkways, open space, and gardens. Neighbors also share resources like tools and lawnmowers.

Households have independent incomes and private lives, but neighbors collaboratively plan and manage community activities and shared spaces.

CASALEZ is a villa with swimming-pool and garden, in the North of Montpellier (Prades-le-Lez). Three households are living here at the moment.
We already live like a cohousing structure : we share the laundry, the pool, the garden with some home-grown vegetables, child care and carpool. Community activities feature regularly-scheduled shared meals, meetings, and workdays.
Soon, we will be allowed to build on top of the villa, and our project for 2017 includes: 4 private homes, a couple of small flats for guests or rental, indoor and outdoor common spaces.

As far as the legal structure is concerned, an interesting recent French law helps us creating a coopérative d’habitants, or Housing Cooperative. This makes things easier for accessing financing and creating more affordable models. Self-management empowers residents, builds community, and saves money.
A cooperative has easier access than individuals to a loan program, which asks, of course, financial commitment to the members, but also provides the opportunity for individuals, foundations and public funding sources to invest in cohousing and promote our housing model.

Without being extreme, we want to adopt green approaches to living. We care about environmental benefits as much as social and economic ones. But actually the 3 things boost each other.
So, if you plan to live in France for a long long time and you are interested in this life-style, please feel free to get in touch with Marilina at ilfautoser@hotmail.com or 06 03 26 38 15.

We will present our project next November the 19^th, all day, during a workday to which you are invited. You can see the progress of our previous work on the blog:
http://casalez.blogspot.fr/

This pamphlet is written in English because we want to open our project to non-French people, reckoning that an international environment could be interesting and stimulating, for the kids and for ourselves.