How it would work.

This page describes how membership and residency would work under the vision. It is a plan, written in the conditional on purpose — no applications are open, and none of this is final.

The basic structure: private homes, shared infrastructure

The model is straightforward and borrowed from proven cohousing practice: you have a private home that is fully yours — your own kitchen, your own bath, your own front door — and you share the surrounding infrastructure with your neighbors under a written agreement. The homes are private property or private long-term tenancy; the commons (shop, community building, garden, shared utilities) are held and maintained by the community. Cohousing communities have run exactly this arrangement for decades in the United States.

On the private-home / shared-commons structure and resident self-management: The Cohousing Association of the United States.

How you’d become a resident

Under the vision, the path looks like this — each step clearly a plan, not an open door today:

1. Join the list. The only live step right now. It’s how you hear when anything real opens.
2. Conversation, not just an application. Because residents share space and self-manage, fit matters in both directions. The early stage is a real conversation about what you’re looking for and what you’d bring.
3. Read and sign the community agreement. Everyone commits to the same written rules about shared space, private space, contributions, and decisions — before moving in, not after.
4. Secure your home. Depending on the final legal structure, that means owning your small home, holding a long-term lease on it, or a hybrid — the exact instrument is being worked out with proper counsel and is not yet fixed.
5. Move in and take part. Residency includes a share of the light work that keeps the commons running — the garden, the shop, the common house.

What residents would share — and what stays private

Private to your household	Shared by the village
Your home and its interior	The common house & kitchen
Your own kitchen & bath	The workshop & major tools
Your income and work	The garden & its harvest
Your furniture & belongings	Guest room, shared utilities, common grounds

The line is deliberate: enough shared to make the economics and the community work, enough private that it never tips into a commune. The village is not a shared-income arrangement — cohousing practice is explicit that the community is not a source of income for its members, and we adopt that principle.

On the “no shared community economy” principle: The Cohousing Association of the United States.

How decisions would get made

The plan leans on resident self-management: the people who live there run the place, using the written agreement as the operating manual and a consensus-oriented process for the decisions that affect everyone. A small resident board or set of rotating roles handles day-to-day operations. This mirrors how established cohousing communities govern themselves — distributed responsibility rather than an absentee landlord.

The honest cost framing

We won’t print a price, because there isn’t one yet, and inventing a number would violate the entire premise of this project. What we can do is frame the costs honestly:

• Your home is the big number, and it tracks the market figures on the small-homes page — broadly $30,000 to $150,000+ to build, land separate, per independent 2025 data.
• The shared infrastructure — land, roads, septic, the common house, the shop — is a real up-front cost the partnership carries and that residents contribute to through whatever structure is finalized.
• Ongoing costs — utilities, maintenance, shared-tool upkeep — are split, which is precisely where the village saves money versus everyone going it alone.

Cost ranges are general market data (HomeAdvisor, “How Much Does a Tiny House Cost?”), not a Small Home Village offer. No pricing, financing, or residency terms have been set or advertised.

The roadmap this sits inside

Residency only becomes real as the build phases progress. In short: Phase 1 is land and permits (choosing the parcel, perc testing and OSSF design, the electric and water plan, drafting the community agreement, county submission). Phase 2 is a first three demo homes plus the shop and common-house foundations, and the first residents moving in. Phase 3 is the full village — the remaining homes, the finished common house, a resident board operating under the agreement, and a documented playbook others could copy. The homepage lays out the phase timeline in full.