Seattleites are sharing housing costs and getting more for their money
ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN KUOW ON JUNE 4, 2026
BY JOSHUA MCNICHOLS
With housing costs out of reach for many people in Seattle, more city residents are thinking about going in with friends to buy homes together.
How to afford a luxury apartment building for the price of a house
Shared Roof / Photo by Andrew Storey
With more resources, his [Chad Dale] group came together to build a luxury apartment building. He starts tours on the ground floor, where a little alley runs through the building lined with businesses.
It feels like a cross between an intimate European square and a high-end food court.
“Linus from the Sea Creatures Restaurant Group, Doe Bay Wine Company, Ben's Bread, and Holy Mountain make up this particular zone here,” Dale said.
Then there's the gym, with its personal trainers. All kinds of shared coworking spaces, a mother-in-law apartment where your relatives can stay when they visit. A turf playfield for the kids. And a trampoline on the roof (there's a net around it, it's fine). The roof deck has five different dining areas, one of them in a greenhouse.
Dale says his family wanted to build a cohousing project so they could have more time together with friends. By living with them. And their plan worked. For example, their kids come home after school, throw their backpacks on the floor and take off to play with other kids in the building.
Shared Roof / Photo by Andrew Storey
Dale says there are lots of multi-generational relationships forming, too.
"Shirley, who lives on the third floor, put out Easter eggs for all the kids and, you know, WhatsApp'd us and all the kids go down there, and she's individually put their names on them," he said.
The irony is that the thing Dale and his wife are missing now is time alone with their own kids, because they're so integrated into this building's community.
Dale did this project with 11 of his friends. It cost $40 million to build. And the group got a loan for most of that.
Each put down an average of $830,000 (some put in more, some less), which happens to be just under the cost of an average single-family home in Seattle.
Shared Roof by Andrew Storey
So why didn't the group just buy a bunch of houses on the same block? It'd be simpler and they'd still see each other. Dale's answer is that pooling their money bought them far more amenities than they could get alone.
Dale's project is different than many other cohousing projects in some key ways. It has 35 apartments and only a dozen or so owners. The rest are renters. And the owners are those renters' landlords, as well as their neighbors. Rent from the other apartments help pay the mortgage on the building.
Getting the loan was the hard part. They went to banks calling themselves a cohousing group. Dale told them about the dream. Families raising kids together under one roof. He figured banks would love it.
But the banks didn’t love the dream as much as he did. They turned him down 40 times.
According to Dale, Banks don’t know what to do with cohousing. All that storytelling was just distracting them. They like plain, cookie-cutter loans.
So, the group changed its approach. Instead of complicating their story with all those details about cohousing, Dale focused on a simple, straightforward story. He said, “I’m building an apartment building. Would you like to finance it?”
A few rejections later, a bank said yes.
Read more about other cohousing models in Seattle on KUOW!