He didn’t want to move away from his friends, so he built them an apartment building. Now, they all own it.
ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN BUSINESS JOURNAL ON MARCH 15, 2026
BY ALCYNNA LLOYD
Shared Roof / Photo by Andrew Storey
Nearly a decade ago, real estate developer Chad Dale made a purchase that changed the way he thought about how people live together.
Dale and a small group of his friends had decided to pool their money to purchase a vacation home on Whidbey Island, about an hour from Seattle. With five families with young children cycling in and out of the four-bedroom, one-bath farmhouse sharing meals, splitting chores, and weathering the inevitable frictions of living in close quarters, Dale realized that sharing property was a great idea in theory, but not sustainable in practice.
"There were a lot of people sharing an intimate space — it was a little too intimate," Dale told Business Insider. "There were lots [of things] about that place that were great, and lots that weren't great."
The vacation home experiment's shortcomings sparked an idea for something bigger and more permanent.
For years, Dale turned over the same question: What would communal living look like if it were designed to last?
He found his answer in co-housing, an arrangement where people have private homes but share amenities and collectively manage common spaces. Not to be confused with co-living, which is when people have private rooms in shared homes, co-housing is unlike a typical rental setup in that residents also often have an ownership stake or governance role in the housing community. It's a housing model that is gaining traction as people seek more sustainable, community-oriented housing.
Shared Roof / Photo by Andrew Storey
An 'adult version' of a co-op community
Dale is the developer behind Shared Roof, a 35-unit community that opened in 2023 in Seattle's Phinney Ridge neighborhood.
Dale financed the project with the help of 13 other friends and family members, each of whom invested in the building. Contributions ranged from $50,000 to $5 million, and ownership stakes in the building's LLC are proportional to each person's investment. At Shared Roof, there are no HOA fees; residents still pay monthly rent, but it goes directly to the LLC rather than a traditional landlord.
"It's a business model that you see sometimes in office buildings, but I'd never seen one done in a mixed-use building," said Ray Johnston, who helped lead the project as a founding partner of Johnston Architects. "The things that Chad and his friends came to the table with were exciting."
Shared Roof / Photo by Andrew Storey
Designing the building took careful planning
Shared Roof is meant to feel more like a European block than a typical new build in Seattle. Dale points to places like Amsterdam, where design encourages neighborly interaction and sustainability, as sources of architectural inspiration.
The five-story building wraps around an interior courtyard, with underground parking below. No two units are alike; residences range from about 2,000 to 5,000 square feet.
"One of the more interesting challenges in the project came on the fourth and fifth floors, where many of the long-term investors live, and the units were highly customized to serve the needs of different families," Johnston said. "It required thoughtful, more detailed spatial planning than in typical multifamily projects to make those individualized layouts fit together under one roof, but it also presented an opportunity to create spaces that reflected how the residents wanted to live."
While residents have private homes, they share a suite of amenities, including a library, an art room, and a rooftop greenhouse. Street-level retail — such as a café, a brewery, and several restaurants — help keep the community connected to the surrounding neighborhood.
For Dale, co-housing was a way to get the community and amenities he and his friends craved without paying peak city prices or having to move away entirely.
Still, living at Shared Roof isn't cheap. Some larger units in the building have a monthly rent of $8,000. To ensure affordability, Shared Roof participates in Seattle's Multifamily Tax Exemption program (MFTE) and has set aside about 20% of units for moderate-income renters.
"It was incredibly important for us to have as much diversity — including income diversity — in the building as we could," Dale said. "We're huge supporters of infill diversity, rather than separate diversity. In my opinion, that's not the correct approach."
Shared Roof / Photo by Andrew Storey
It's a multi-generational building
Nine of Shared Roof's investors live in the building, including Dale, who lives with his wife and their three kids in a 1,800-square-foot, three-bedroom unit.
Dale views being surrounded by a mix of younger couples and older residents as a unique plus to their living arrangement.
"There are groups of people that benefit from being together, and our model was really about a generational, family-oriented approach," he said.
"My folks and my wife's folks are all in Michigan, so my kids didn't get a lot of interaction with older people. To see my neighbor with Parkinson's interacting with my 7-year-old — they're both winning."
The kids also have plenty of other children their age in the building, and with so much to do there, from hanging out on the rooftop trampoline to playing on the 5,000-square-foot turf soccer field, hangouts are often — sometimes more than parents would prefer.
"They come home, crack the door, toss their school bag inside, and then leave because all their friends are around," Dale said. He added that "while that's really cool, and exactly what I was hoping for, it's an unintended consequence."
Read more about co-housing life at Shared Roof on Business Insider!