For these seniors, co-housing offers autonomy rarely found in long-term care homes | Canada Voices

Brian Fernandes recalls growing up in India surrounded by kin. “We lived with extended families – grandmother, grandfather, uncles, auntie, all in the home.”

Now, the 57-year-old Torontonian is planning to replicate that collective life for his own retirement. Single and childless, in 2015 he bought a 17-acre property near Bancroft, Ont., with the dream of turning it into a home for 40 other LGBTQ seniors.

“Co-housing is where people of all different backgrounds come together and see how we can age well together and how we can support each other,” Fernandes said.

In a culture that assumes the companionship of living with a roommate is only for the young, researchers and residents of collective housing have found it offers seniors a sense of belonging that can lead to higher life satisfaction.

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Fernandes worked for years as a facilities supervisor in long-term care and learned how lonely those spaces can be without visitors. He worries in particular about LGBTQ seniors.

“Who’s going to take care of this whole group of LGBT2SL people because they don’t have their children to take care of them?” he asked. Despite the drawbacks of institutions, “a lot of people get pushed into that because they don’t have nowhere to go. There’s no social network.”

In planning for his Bancroft property, Fernandes took inspiration from other co-housing projects across Canada, such as WindSong, a multigenerational community launched in Langley, B.C., in 1996. Another is set to open in Langley in 2026, and similar places are popping up across the country. Two seniors’ co-housing projects, Harbourside and West Wind Harbour, have opened in Sooke, B.C., over the past 10 years, while Vancouver Cohousing opened in 2016. A co-housing community focused on sustainability, Treehouse Village Ecohousing, opened in Bridgewater, N.S. in 2023.

Fernandes connected with OCAD University professor Sarah Tranum to imagine options for the Bancroft compound. Together with some other members of LGBTQ outdoor social club Out and Out, they assembled a working group to explore what living arrangements would make sense for them as they age. The group collaborated with Tranum’s participatory design students last fall to fill in speculative details for Fernandes’s vision.

Tranum said her students, accustomed to the inclusive environment of OCAD and the acceptance of their own generation, were surprised to encounter the fears of their older working group collaborators, who remember fighting more severe homophobia than most Toronto students today have witnessed.

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Many LGBTQ elders fear that living in nursing homes could send them back to those days, Tranum explained. “I’ve lived this whole life out. I want to make sure I’m in a space where I’m not just safe, but I’m celebrated for the diversity and community I’ve created,” she said, describing the perspective of many of the working group members.

For her, such concerns strike close to home. She and her partner opted not to have children and are now caring for their own elderly relatives.

“Our succession plan is going to look very different than what we’ve been doing for our parents,” she said. “What does a nursing home look like for a lesbian couple?”

She explains that the social design of co-housing projects is as crucial to their success as their architecture. They need to be built with a shared understanding that people are free to grow and change within the group – that they have autonomy within the collective setting – and that takes thought and planning.

Such communal life may prolong seniors’ healthy years, according to Simon Fraser University social epidemiologist Kiffer Card. He explained that people feel best when “they exist within social networks that support their autonomy.”

In a 2022 brief, Card and his colleagues concluded that seniors on their own become frail more quickly. Yet care homes, because of the nature of their services, don’t always offer the feeling of independence that residents still need and crave.

Unlike living alone or in long-term care, collective housing can offer elders some healthy social churn, particularly, Card said, when the roommates “are interested in supporting each other’s autonomy and belonging needs.”

Feeling part of a group can actually increase your sense of independence, Card realized: “When you have more autonomy, you also have more belonging and vice versa.”

With co-housing, Fernandes said, “this is friends taking care of friends,” where chosen families are looking ahead to becoming caregiving families, too.