4/27: Financing Your Cohousing Development

Katie (Kathryn) McCamant

Katie leads CoHousing Solutions. She brings the depth and diversity of her experience as an architect, developer, and cohousing resident to her clients. She lived in Doyle Street Cohousing in Emeryville, CA, for 12 years, and now lives in Nevada City Cohousing in the Sierra Foothills. Both communities she founded.​“What drives me is the desire to develop neighborhood models where we can live a better ‘good life’ while reducing our impact on the earth’s limited resources. Americans currently uses 24% of the worlds’ energy while we make up only 5% of world population. If we are to ‘save the world,’ we must strive for more sustainable market-driven models that are attractive to the American middle class.” Katie is a licensed architect and coauthor of the authoritative book on cohousing, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves, which introduced this housing model to North America. Katie co-founded McCamant & Durrett Architects / The CoHousing Company with Charles Durrett, in 1987, and partnered with developer, Jim Leach, on numerous projects. Since then, Katie has designed and developed dozens of cohousing communities in the United States and Canada. In addition to pioneering cohousing in North America, Katie has designed a variety of other building types, including numerous affordable housing communities and a sustainably designed (LEED certified) Unitarian Church. For the past decade, Katie has focused on the development side of cohousing projects. She has worked on all aspects of developing cohousing from project kick-off to move-in. Her expertise includes setting up project budgets, structure financing, and facilitating planning approvals, finding construction financing, contractor selection, construction management, marketing efforts, and community policy creation. She also works with groups to find appropriate development partners, and then assists in structuring those partnerships.

4 Sessions