Tomo on Main
Multi-family housing collaboration
Can we design multi-family housing to nurture strong, supportive social relationships? Hundreds of hours of research led us to believe the answer is Yes. Tomo House brings this idea to life.
Tomo House has brought Happy City into a unique collaboration with an enlightened developer (Take Root), a creative design team (Lanefab and MA+HG Architects, and a group of future residents determined to find an affordable, pragmatic path to cohousing (Our Urban Village).
Our Urban Village is a group of families who wanted the benefits of cohousing without the crippling financial and time burdens that often come with traditional cohousing approaches. They invented a phrase, “cohousing lite,” to describe their dream. Happy City introduced the group to Take Root, who offered to help make that dream a reality.
Tomo, which stands for “together + more,” reflects the project’s guiding ideals. As housing prices rise faster than income, many families cannot afford traditional single-family homes. They are looking for new housing choices somewhere between single-family homes and high-rise condos. We believe that affordability, sociability, and sustainability goals are interconnected and work together in a virtuous cycle.
The project embodies lessons from hundreds of hours of Happy City research on the wellbeing in multi-family housing. Thus, it combines a small cluster of homes with indoor and outdoor social spaces. It will house twelve families under one roof, with a common house and courtyard. It reduced parking burden, because folks who share don’t own as many cars. It reflects the aspirations of a deeply committed community of future residents. And it will offer deep affordability to a third of those residents, through reduced purchase price or guaranteed rental rates, over the long term.
Tomo House offers a new housing choice – in its building form, tenure model, and social wellbeing approach – that we think is scalable and reproducible in many neighbourhoods.