Cohousing offers a vision of connected, community-based living – but the path to realising the dream can be far from smooth
“Welcome to the site of hope and heartbreak.”
With these words Bronwen Newton greets visitors to a quarter-acre gravel carpark between two industrial buildings in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington. Still visible are the foundations of a sheet-metal workshop that once stood there; not visible is the cohousing project that Newton and 23 other families hoped to build, but now never will.