When the home I loved went on the market in 2021, a friend suggested I start a collective to buy it. I said, “Oh come on, that’s ridiculous.” But the idea stuck in my head.
HEIDI WOODLEY
9 FEBRUARY 2024
Before I was born, my dad started a commune in a lovely old (long-gone) lodge in Snug Cove on Bowen Island. That’s where my parents connected. They then became part of an underground circuit that sheltered American draft dodgers. So I grew up with tales, both hilarious and cautionary, about trying to create a different way of living. Through their stories, my parents taught me that you should live your dream, and that it’s okay if it doesn’t look like everyone else’s.
In 2020, I was a stay-at-home mom in the North Vancouver suburbs. Our two kids went to school near Horseshoe Bay, and my parents-in-law lived there too, so we were in the area all the time. People in Vancouver just know of Horseshoe Bay as the home of the ferry terminal, but I had noticed this group of eight adorable little cottages that sat on the hillside just a block up from the bay.
The idea of living there seemed kind of nuts. Horseshoe Bay is in Átl’ḵa7tsem/Howe Sound—the southernmost fjord in the Northern Hemisphere—and the weather is wilder than in Vancouver. I figured it would be cold and dark and wet all the time. But a mom at the school lived in one of the cottages, and she loved it. As I learned more about them, I heard that lots of people dreamed of living in them. Soon, I became one of them.
When my marriage ended that year, I started looking for a new place to live. Of course, budget was a major factor: I wouldn’t be able to rent a standard-sized house in the area. But I’d heard that there might be a vacancy in the cottages. I liked the idea of going small and living the minimalist dream.
At first, the owner, Jim—who had bought the cottages nearly 30 years earlier—said he had work to do on the house. A former tenant had damaged the appliances and there were holes in the walls. It’d be weeks until anyone could move in. I kept stopping by, though, and it just seemed to make more and more sense: there was a recreation centre nearby, the cottage was on a bus route to schools and downtown, and Horseshoe Bay was a close-knit neighbourhood. I doubled down on bugging Jim about the cottage. After five weeks of that, he finally said he was done and I could rent it. The boys and I moved in during the first COVID winter. We had to meet our new neighbours outside in the freezing rain.
That spring, I fell in love with the place—everything about it. I loved the action in the harbour. I loved the alpenglow on the mountains. I loved the Squamish name for the bay, Ch’axáý, which refers to the sizzling sound the water made when vast schools of herring used to come near the beach to lay their eggs. After the boys would go to sleep, I’d sit in my kitchen window with a cup of tea and watch the ferries sail in and out of the harbour. I could hear them from our new home. Every ferry’s horn sounded different, and every captain had a different way of tooting it.
My ex and I had recently sold our house, so I had a little bit of money. However, homes in Vancouver had become so expensive, and I thought my only hope to own again was to buy further away—perhaps around Powell River, which is five hours and two ferries up the coast. But my father, who’s a retired building inspector, looked at my little house and said it had really good bones. We dreamed about buying it and building a suite in the basement so a tenant could help with the mortgage. I figured it was worth a shot to ask.
At the beginning of 2021, I talked to Jim about buying my house, but he said he didn’t want to parcel the cottages out. If he sold the property, he’d sell all eight cottages together. They were the last vestige of the rough-and-tumble settlers who worked in logging and fishing 110 years ago, and he wanted to make sure they were preserved as a whole. Jim is from the Maritimes, and the cottages reminded him of the houses back home. That’s why he painted them in bright colours. They’re very simple structures—little square buildings with pitched roofs—but he turned them into a cluster of jewels. All day long, people would come to take pictures. Even tour buses stopped by.
A few months later, Jim put all eight cottages on the market for $3.8 million. Every week for months, tours of potential buyers came by—some of them builders or developers. I was shaken by the thought of having to move. It felt like a forever sort of place. A friend suggested I start some kind of collective to buy it. I said, “Oh, come on, that’s ridiculous.” But the idea stuck in my head.
Original Story: https://macleans.ca/society/horseshoe-bay-cottages-cohousing/
