If the state of the condo market has taught us anything, it’s that it really is possible to have too much of a good thing. Condos are often touted as an accessible way into the housing market for mid-level earners, but developers tend to build what makes sense for their bottom lines. As a result, Toronto has a glut of easy-to-execute but difficult-to-live-in studio and one-bedroom units. Meanwhile, the housing crisis rages on, and there’s an ever-increasing demand for more diverse options.

One alternative is the condo’s cousin: the co-op. In a condo building, a resident purchases a unit and a share of the common areas, then finances their own mortgage. In a co-op, everyone contributes to a shared mortgage and gets a share of the corporation that runs the building. There are equity co-ops—like the upmarket ones in Manhattan—but the majority of Toronto’s co-ops are non-profits. Residents usually join by buying a stake in the co-op corporation for a nominal fee or paying a one-time membership charge, then they pay monthly fees to cover the mortgage, maintenance and taxes. Governance is communal: residents make decisions as a group.

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Toronto has more than 180 non-profit co-ops, ranging in size from five-unit row houses to 200-unit high-rises. Most of them date back to the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, when housing prices began rising and the federal government started doling out low-interest mortgages to people willing to build their own co-ops. It spurred a boom: between 1973 and 1995, more than 82,000 co-op units were created in Canada. But, after the recession took hold in the early ’90s, the feds pulled their support. In 1995, more than 17,000 co-op construction projects in Ontario were cancelled. These days, it’s nearly impossible to get into the ones that remain—most of them don’t even have room on the waiting list.

But, now, amid calls for more secure and affordable housing options, the feds have announced $1.5 billion in funding for new co-ops. The City of Toronto is already working on a 612-unit building at Eglinton and Kennedy, and anyone interested in starting their own co-op can apply for low-interest financing. Like any kind of housing, co-ops come with a unique set of pros and cons. Units aren’t owned by their residents, so they don’t accrue value and can’t be sold. Inevitably, communal decision-making causes friction between neighbours. The upsides, though, are substantial. Co-ops aren’t subject to the vicissitudes of the market, and without profit-motivated landlords, they have some of the cheapest rents in the city. On average, co-op units in most major Canadian cities cost 30 per cent less than comparable rentals.

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Then there are the intangibles. Co-ops offer a sense of community and shared purpose that’s hard to find in most condo buildings and single-family neighbourhoods. Just ask Jan Champagne and Miriam Zachariah. Their kids, Micah and Joshua, became fast friends while they were all living in a co-op near Christie and Dupont. Pushed together by play dates, Jan and Miriam got to know each other and quickly fell in love. But, as they merged their families, they outgrew their unit and were forced to move out. Since then, they’ve missed the community they used to have. Now that the government is providing backing for co-ops once again, the family is banding together to open one of their very own. Here, they tell us their story.

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Jan Champagne, 73, a retired social worker

Jan: My former partner Lois was one of the first residents of Constance Hamilton, a 31-unit co-op in a three-storey brick building near Christie and Dupont. When we met, in the 1980s, I had been living in a shared house with a couple of other women. They decided to move to a farm near Kingston, so I moved into Lois’s one-bedroom. I was a bit trepidatious. I worried about being the new person in a well-established group, but the community was so welcoming. People relied on their neighbours for more than just the occasional cup of sugar. For example, there was a single mom with a teen boy—everyone made a schedule for visits with the son to give his mom a break. He had a regular dinner with Lois and would sometimes crash on our couch.

After a few years, we upgraded to one of the co-op’s two-bedroom units and decided to have a child. I went into labour with Micah over a week early, in April of 1993. We’d bought all the furniture for the nursery but hadn’t built any of it! Our midwives arrived in the nick of time.

Micah Champagne, 32, production manager at Theatre Passe Muraille

Micah: I always joke that I’m a true child of Toronto because I was born in the co-op—and a home birth no less!

Jan: Just two months later, Lois and I were in a car accident. She died, and I was severely injured. I desperately needed support, and the co-op was there for me. For weeks, I couldn’t lift my arms or hold Micah. My neighbours created a schedule and took shifts caring for her. I had never planned to be a single parent, but the Constance Hamilton co-op had been founded with single women and single parents in mind. As Micah got older, I could let her play outside, knowing there were always other parents around. The co-op truly saved my life.

Miriam Zachariah, 61, a retired TDSB principal

Miriam: I was also a single mom. Joshua’s father was in the picture, but we’d split up when Joshua was 20 months old. After that, I had been raising him in a house we rented with another couple, their kids and a single guy. Living in a communal household was great, especially for child care. For example, I commuted for two hours on the TTC every day, but Joshua needed to be in daycare from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. One of the dads in the house had a flexible job, so he would drop both kids off in the morning. I would pick them up when he worked late. When the couple’s relationship began to fall apart, though, we needed to move. We lived in a house with just the two of us for a bit, but I couldn’t really afford it. So I put my name down on the waiting list for every co-op in my neighbourhood. Six months later, I got a two-bedroom at Constance Hamilton. We moved in mid-October of 1999.

Jan: By then, I had lived in the co-op for more than a decade. It worked the same way that most Toronto co-ops do: residents pay a one-time membership fee and then monthly co-op fees in lieu of rent. For a two-bedroom unit, it was around $1,000 per month. There were also subsidies available for people who needed them. I qualified for one after the accident, so I paid only around $400 a month.

Miriam: Those fees covered the mortgage, staff and maintenance costs.

Jan: Membership came with responsibilities. Everyone had to attend general meetings, participate in group decisions and sit on at least one of the committees that managed various aspects of the building. For example, the membership committee decided who got to move in. I worked on a number of the committees, and I even served on the board at one point. My favourite was the gardening committee. We hired a landscaper to redesign the courtyard.

Miriam: We paid a building manager who would draft a budget every year, and then the board would review it. The Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto has experts who help board members navigate big issues, like renovations or roof repairs. We also had a system for complaints. Anyone with a problem could bring it up to the building manager, who could escalate it to the board.

Jan: We tried to make decisions through consensus, but it wasn’t always possible—sometimes we’d resort to a vote. It could get hairy. There were a few hot-button issues. For example, there was the question of whether mothers with husbands should be allowed in. At first, the policy was no, they should not. Eventually, one couple applied and really challenged us on it. We went back to the rules the federal housing agency had set out, and it turned out we couldn’t deny them entry. We eventually changed the policy so that those kinds of families were allowed.

Miriam: Big maintenance issues, like installing a new roof, were challenging. Co-op members don’t want their fees to increase, but they also want things fixed. If you’re coming from renting, you have to shift your mindset. There’s no landlord to take care of that stuff. At the co-op, we were all our own landlords. It took some getting used to. Another member once told me that living in a co-op is like living in a university dorm, but as an adult. It’s true. You live very closely with everyone, regardless of whether you get along. Everyone knows one another and has a lot of opinions about their neighbours. At first, I found that a little unnerving, but meeting Jan helped a lot.

Jan: We first met at Joshua’s birthday.

Miriam: It was just days after Joshua and I had arrived. My mom had a habit of throwing Joshua elaborate parties. For this one, his seventh, she hung a piñata in the central courtyard.

Jan: The co-op was horseshoe shaped—all the main-floor units backed onto the courtyard, and the upper units had balconies that faced it.

Miriam: The piñata became a magnet for every kid in the building. We’d invited 15 kids, but a horde of others descended.

Jan: I asked if Micah could come to the party even though she hadn’t been officially invited.

Micah: I didn’t have a gift, so I ran into my bedroom and grabbed this ninja bunny toy. When I got to the party, I gave it to Josh.

Joshua Zachariah, 33, a senior economic adviser at the Ontario Ministry of Transportation and the owner of Danu Social House

Joshua: As soon as Micah walked through our door, the two of us hit it off. We made an agreement to go to each other’s houses every night. After that, I got fully enmeshed in the kids’ scene at the co-op.

Micah: We were part of a three-block area that was full of other co-ops, plus there was government-subsidized housing across the street.

Joshua: All the kids would meet up in Marian Engel Park for crab apple fights or large-scale games of manhunt. One year there was a huge amount of snow, so we built tunnels and snow forts in the drifts.

Micah: We’d also hang out in the courtyard—until the busybodies turned it into a garden. It was great for the adults, but it was a bummer when we wanted to play tag and were told not to crush the petunias.

Joshua: We spent so much time outside and got to have a lot of independence. Everyone could trust that there would always be someone nearby if we needed help.

Micah: Except for when we snuck onto the nearby train tracks. Don’t tell my mom.

Micah met Joshua at his seventh birthday party in the co-op courtyard. After that, they were inseparable, and Micah introduced her new friend to the co-op’s thriving social scene. Family photos courtesy of the subjects

Miriam: There was one day when Micah and another child went missing. No one could find them for hours.

Jan: I was completely panicking. But half the co-op came out and searched for them, going down every street and looking in every park. That was the spirit of the community. People rallied around one another’s problems. We eventually found them hiding up in a tree.

Miriam: After the kids became friends, Jan started coming over every day around 6 or 7 p.m. to find Micah.

Jan: We both spent a lot of time going back and forth between our units to retrieve our children. We’d constantly be walking across the courtyard to knock on the other’s door, asking, “Is my kid in there?” So, after a little while, I started inviting Miriam and Joshua to dinner.

Miriam: I remember Jan making corn chowder the first time we came over. She had obviously put a lot of care into it, and her place looked extra clean.

Jan: The more Miriam and I talked, the more we liked each other.

Miriam: Within the first two months of knowing Jan, I knew I’d likely spend the rest of my life with her. I saw how hard she’d worked to cope with her grief after Lois had passed. She was the kind of person I could really commit to.

Jan: I invited Miriam over to celebrate New Year’s in 1999—a whole new millennium. She was super sick, so she came over in a fuzzy one-piece pyjama outfit.

Miriam: Our first real date was 10 days later. Jan took me out to see Girl, Interrupted.

Jan: We started arranging playdates and sleepovers for the kids that could double as dates for us. One night, the kids were really acting up. They refused to go to bed. I threatened them: “If you guys don’t cool it, I’ll take Micah and go home. Then you won’t have a sleepover!” And Joshua, being astute, said, “But then you won’t have a sleepover with my mom!” And I said, “Yes, and I will be very angry about that.” The fact that the kids had bonded so much sped up our relationship. At one point, Joshua said he wanted us to get married so they could be siblings.

Miriam: We essentially adopted each other’s children as our own. Before long, Jan and Micah were spending a lot of time in my unit. Less than a year after we’d started dating, I suggested that they officially move in.

Joshua: Classic lesbians.

Micah: U-Haulin’.

Joshua: The transition from friends to siblings wasn’t entirely smooth, though. I’m only six months older than Micah, but we still had an older-younger dynamic. Micah got a lot of shit from me, much more than a friend would have.

Micah: Still, Josh is my best friend to this day.

Jan: After two years, we decided to have an unofficial wedding ceremony. It was in June of 2002, a couple of months before gay marriage became legal. We held it at a friend’s place near Yonge and Finch that backed onto a ravine.

Joshua: Like at any good hippie wedding, Micah and I were given significant roles.

Jan: The kids acted out their meeting at the birthday party. Then Miriam got up to sing a song for me: “Power of Two” by Indigo Girls.

Miriam: For a few years, my two-­bedroom unit worked well for us. The kids shared the bigger bedroom—we painted a big Harry Potter–themed mural on the wall—and we took the smaller one.

Jan: As the kids turned 12, they started to need their own space.

Miriam: But the co-op’s three-bedroom units had an awful layout. The main bedrooms faced the courtyard and had sliding glass doors. Who wants the whole building looking straight into their bedroom? I was on the wait list for larger units at other co-ops, but they’re hard to get. People tend to hold on to them even after their kids move out because they have better accessibility features for older residents.

Joshua and Micah’s friendship accelerated their moms’ relationship. Soon, the foursome was doing everything together

The newlywed couple at Toronto Pride in the mid-2000s

Jan: To add to that, I was starting to feel some frustration with the co-op governance. I’d been there for a long time and seen a lot of turnover. There were always new people, so we’d talk about the same issues over and over again. We were constantly fighting the same battles. And it felt too much like living in a small town. Everyone always knew your business.

Miriam: I’d never wanted to buy a house. I always thought that it just isn’t how people are supposed to live—no one needs that much private space—but I started seriously considering it.

Jan: I had to spend time getting used to the idea. A house! Do I really want a house? But there weren’t many three-bedroom condos in those days, and why rent somewhere else? The kids needed the space, and in the end that was the deciding factor.

Joshua: We had also just gotten a dog, Phoenix. He was a mutt, and Micah and I loved him. We needed more space for him too.

Micah: We had to contain him every time we opened the door. He was a real runner. He’d just take off.

Miriam: We wanted to stay in the area because Micah’s school was nearby. The houses right by the co-op were too expensive, but we eventually found a semi north of Vaughan Road.

Micah: The move itself was miserable. Ever try to do anything with two 10-year-olds and a puppy? Those poor women. At the new place, I quickly noticed a real absence of other kids.

Joshua: I definitely felt lonelier after we left the co-op.

Micah: I was so used to borrowing stuff from neighbours. In the co-op garden, if someone left tools out, they were free to use. No one was petty about it. I distinctly remember our neighbour at the new house being super pissed that I used her rake without asking. I didn’t know better.

Jan: There’s a sense of isolation living in a house. Even if we did connect with our neighbours every now and then, we mostly kept to our separate spaces.

Joshua: I lived in that house for my whole adolescence, yet I don’t feel like I ever became part of that neighbourhood. I moved out when I was 18, and since then I’ve mostly lived as a renter in shared houses.

Micah: I got married, and my wife and I moved to a rented house in the east end. Josh calls me a traitor to the west. It’s not that far! But everyone acts like they have to give their passport to armed guards at River Street before they can cross over.

Joshua: In 2020, I was renting a place with two roommates near St. Lawrence Market. I’d enjoyed living with others, but roommates come and go. I was starting to want some consistency and maybe even my own bathroom. Then my friend told me that he’d seen a call-out on Facebook for people interested in building co-ops. We reached out, then formed a group called the More Cooperative Housing Collective, which met regularly on Zoom. The idea was to start our own co-op, and every member of the group would become a founding resident.

Miriam: Josh told Jan and me that he had started working to get a co-op off the ground. I had retired shortly after the start of the pandemic, and as older adults, Jan and I had started to miss communal living. We’re still in the same house, and isolation and loneliness only get worse with age. Engaging with people is crucial for physical, mental and emotional well-being. I wanted to help create housing that would let that happen, for myself and for others, so we joined the group as well. These days, the More Cooperative Housing Collective has around 20 active members.

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“We have to densify our cities, but intentionally—not just decide to live together but to live together *well *”

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Joshua: After we did extensive research, our next order of business was to decide what our ideal co-op would look like. We all agreed that we wanted to provide equitable and secure housing, organize by consensus, and prioritize climate-­conscious, anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist ways of thinking.

Jan: It was important for all of us, right from the beginning, to be very intentional about conflict resolution. One of the frustrating things about Constance Hamilton was that we never quite knew what to do when there was an argument. We even had to bring in a mediator at one point.

Joshua: We’ve had disagreements among our membership, but everyone has been willing to work it out. The biggest initial friction was how we wanted to divide up communal and individual living space once we had a property. How much space would be shared versus private? It was a very personal, fierce debate. Miriam did a lot of work to help the group through that.

Miriam: In the end, we decided the ideal scenario would be a mix of studios and one-, two- and three-bedroom units. Each would have a limited-utility kitchen, large enough to make a meal but not big enough to bake 50 muffins, for instance. There would be one shared industrial kitchen for that kind of thing. Likewise, each unit would have a small living room, but each floor would have a much larger communal one for people to gather and hang out for movie nights and the like. That’s the mindset shift: less personal space, more community space.

Joshua: Financially, we’ll have three streams of funding. First are membership fees: everyone will pay one per cent of their yearly salary, after tax, per month. Everyone has agreed to start paying these, with the understanding that, if we never get the co-op off the ground, they’ll get the money back. Then there are loans. Lots of our members are young people with parents who have put aside money to help them buy houses. Our pitch to their parents was: “Even with the money you’ve saved, your kid still can’t afford a house in Toronto. If you give it to us as a loan, they can get housing and you’ll get your money back.” The idea is that we’ll pay back our loans slowly, like a mortgage, using the co-op fees we collect. Right now, we tentatively have access to about $2 or $3 million.

Miriam: We’re providing a lot of the seed money by selling our house, which we intend to do as soon as we can move into the co-op. It benefits us as well. Jan is starting to have mobility issues, and I will too someday. Living in a three-storey house with no main-floor bathroom won’t work forever. By loaning that money, we’ll get a place to live in the co-op until we die, plus we’ll get community at no added cost.

Joshua: The third form of funding will be government loans and grants. This is how most co-ops in Toronto were started: back in the 1980s, Pierre Trudeau’s government gave out low-interest mortgages to just about anyone who wanted to start one. The residents’ co-op fees—rent, ­essentially—went toward paying down that mortgage. Now, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is starting to provide funding again. We’re hoping to replicate the old system.

Miriam: One of Toronto’s huge problems is that there’s no housing for people in the middle. Obviously, folks with very high incomes have places to live, and then there are land trusts and assistance for people who are chronically under-housed. But mid-level professionals who can’t afford a detached house need secure housing too.

Joshua: Co-op housing isn’t necessarily cheaper than market housing, but it has huge benefits. There’s no landlord trying to maximize their profit, so the fees never increase significantly. So even though they will be comparable to market rent at the beginning, they won’t change much, which means they’ll eventually be very cheap.

Jan: Right now, we’re just waiting for the right property to make it all happen. That has been a huge obstacle. In February of 2021, we thought we’d found our spot, a building down in Parkdale. We were about ready to put in a bid when a condo developer beat us to it.

Joshua: What we’ve heard is that the developer didn’t bother doing an ­inspection—and as it turns out, the building is full of asbestos. We would have run into the same problem. Bullet dodged!

Miriam: Now we’re thinking about a new build.

Joshua: Even if we got a mortgage with the federal housing agency, it likely wouldn’t cover the cost of land in Toronto—it’s expensive here. The exciting thing is that there’s an opportunity to get a chunk of land for free. The city has a program that lets councillors evaluate underused parking lots and ask council to allot them to people building affordable housing. At one point, we were in talks with then-councillor Mike Layton about taking over a lot in University-Rosedale, but the plan got killed when he resigned. Now, we’re looking at a lot in Parkdale–High Park.

Miriam: We’re starting to have enough cash to access the kind of funding we’d need for all of this. We don’t need a downpayment, but we do need to be able to show the government that we’re serious. That’s where our bank account, filled with membership fees and loans, comes in.

Micah: I’m happy to support the idea, but I don’t think my wife and I will be joining the new co-op. She loves her space. Constant interaction with people would just feel like work for her, so I think we’d find it hard to live in a group situation. But that’s okay! Obviously I’d come around and do handyman stuff, which is what I do for my moms now. I’d happily contribute if it meant building something for them and Josh.

Joshua: I really believe that we need more co-ops in this city. We need community, especially in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. Public outdoor space is great, but during a Toronto winter, that’s out of the question. Communal indoor space is crucial. And we don’t all need a three-bedroom house to ourselves. We simply can’t fit everyone into the city that way.

Miriam: We have to let go of this idea that we can all live in separate boxes. We have to densify our cities, but intentionally. Not just decide to live together but decide to live together well. There are so many things that I can’t change in this world, but I hope that through this work, I can create a few more housing options.

Jan: As I get older, I want to live in a community of children, adults and seniors, all coming together. That’s how I want to spend my time.

Micah: I truly believe that everyone deserves somewhere to live, and they should get to choose what that looks like. I often think back to 2001, when there was a huge blackout at Constance Hamilton. The fridges went down, so it was either cook the stuff or let it spoil. Everyone pulled their barbecues out into the courtyard, then shared everything and ate well for days. I remember it fondly, because that’s what community is: strangers coming together to sit and eat. And really, we wouldn’t have ended up as a family without a co-op, and I couldn’t be more thankful that we all met. This has been the best possible version of events.

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This story appears in the October 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.