How a man built a co-housing apartment complex for friends and family

Nearly a decade after pooling money with friends to buy a cramped vacation farmhouse on Whidbey Island, developer Chad Dale turned that failed experiment into a new approach to urban living. In 2023 he opened Shared Roof, a 35-unit co-housing community in Seattle’s Phinney Ridge designed to give people private homes alongside shared amenities and collective governance.

Dale and 13 friends and family members financed the project, investing between $50,000 and $5 million and taking ownership stakes in the building’s LLC proportional to their contributions. The structure eliminates typical HOA fees; residents pay monthly rent that goes directly to the ownership group rather than a conventional landlord.

Ray Johnston, a founding partner of Johnston Architects, called the arrangement a business model more often seen in office buildings than in mixed-use housing.

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