Happy together

Group’s housing plan could be cure for high cost of living and social isolation

When Doug and Mardi Tindal moved into a west-end condo around the start of the pandemic, they posted a sign on their apartment door — “Hi, we’re Doug and Mardi. If it wasn’t for the pandemic, we’d have you in for a drink. Meantime, if you ever need to borrow a cup of sugar, just knock.”

Within 24 hours, the building management ordered them to take down the sign.

If it was a test of the idea that knowing your neighbours helps you live longer — something Doug had been reading about — “that community has an important lifegiving function,” the condo had already failed.

It has taken nearly seven years and a three-hour drive north of Toronto to finally plant the community that the Tindals and their longtime friends, Hillary Arnold and Ted Addie, have been seeking since before the move into that condo.

They are among seven people … and counting … ranging from their 50s to their 70s, who, starting in June, are transforming a Haliburton-area inn and marina called the Oakview Lodge, into a shared home that offers private space as well as a common kitchen, dining room and living areas.

The pioneering venture is an experiment in a lifestyle some experts believe could help alleviate two urban afflictions: the high cost of housing and social isolation that is especially prevalent among seniors, particularly women. Sixty-eight per cent of older adults living alone are women, an increase from about 30 per cent in 2017, said Raza Mirza, director of national partnerships and knowledge mobilization for HelpAge Canada, which supports vulnerable, isolated and lonely seniors.

“Simply living alone increases the risk of mortality by 32 per cent (and) an almost 50 per cent increase in dementia risk,” he said. Socially isolated, unmarried men have an almost 90 per cent increased risk of cardiovascular death. Many of us glimpsed social isolation during the pandemic, said Mirza, who is also an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Life Course and Aging.

For the Tindals, COVID-19 offered a new perspective on urban living, said Doug Tindal.

“We spent COVID just with each other and discovered that was good and also discovered, in a new way, a sense of the importance of community,” he said.

When the lockdowns ended, community felt more important than the city and, the passage of years has added to that perspective.

“Toronto is still the toy that it al

ways was, but perhaps we don’t play with it quite as energetically as we used to,” Tindal said of their willingness to decamp to the edge of Little Hawk Lake.

The lodge’s website spells out the broad common ground on which the community is being built — “personal and environmental health, affordability and sustainability.”

All seven individuals are excited about the living arrangement they envision — a lakeside house with a full veranda ringing with laughter, with opportunities for boisterous and quiet conversations, shared meals and wine.

Anna Schmiegelow and Greg Herbert, the couple who have owned and operated the Oakview for the past seven years will carry on living in the lodge’s three-bedroom, third-floor apartment, but will no longer spend their days and nights catering to tourists. Toronto artist Grethe Jensen is the only single member of the founding community.

She describes the move as an adventure.

“It’s about building a really good living situation and enjoying life to the fullest as a group rather than just doing it all independently,” she said, adding that, “If you want to go and do something by yourself, there’s space to do that too.”

“The pandemic showed us that if you’re living on your own, you really are on your own during a time like that. Yes, I figured out how to use the technology and it was fine. But I also realized I don’t want to do that again,” Jensen said.

Space remains for up to six more occupants in the three remaining suites. Priced from $345,677 to $360,834, they are not condos. There are no private kitchens. Two of the remaining suites are bedsitting rooms and one is a tworoom unit with a bedroom and separate living room. All have ensuite bathrooms.

The marina will continue to operate under a separate commercial corporation. It will be up to community members whether they want to work in the business that Herbert has been operating since they bought the place, said Doug Tindal.

“A co-owner is either one or two persons so every co-owner has a seventh share of the whole property, including the commercial corporation. We estimate that the net profits from the (marina) will cover much of the operating costs,” he said.

The co-living arrangement is about caring but not caregiving, although it supports aging in place. The Oakview Lodge founders say they are aware that they won’t necessarily live there to the end of their lives.

“Let’s face it, we are getting a year older every year. But that’s not the primary focus. If we start needing care beyond needing assistance and that type of thing then we need to look at how to move on for that,” said Jensen.

“We are not responsible for one another in that way. I’m totally aware of that. But I also feel like it’s an opportunity to hold onto the help that we are starting this project with,” she said.

Jensen met Addie, Arnold and the Tindals about the same time they were featured in a 2018 Star story. The two couples had formed a coliving community called Wine on the Porch, which they had legally incorporated as an equity co-op.

The idea of shared home ownership had been gaining ground as a solution, not only to the high price of GTA real estate, but to the issues that can afflict an aging and sometimes alienated urban population.

Doug Tindal, a retired writer, acknowledged that the Wine on the Porch proposition was “countercultural.” The idea initially appealed to many people. But when it came down to actually making a move, prospective community members would hem and haw for a bit before inevitably backing away.

There was enough enthusiasm, however, that the two couples took a leap of faith and bought a spacious $2.2-million ravine home in the west end that already included three separate apartments. They moved into two separate upstairs units, hired an architect and made plans to renovate to accommodate more members.

But on Jan. 1, 2019, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority gained jurisdiction over any house on a ravine. That meant Wine on the Porch would have to get its approval before it could even talk to the city about zoning and variances. That meant adding time, cost and uncertainty to the project.

There was no way of telling prospective members what the shared costs of remodelling would be or how long it would take, said Doug Tindal.

It felt like the end of a dream when the two couples finally sold the house in the same condition in which they had bought it.

While no one ever said it, Mardi Tindal believes that the long-standing friendship between the two couples that founded Wine on the Porch, may have put some people off joining that first effort.

“At some level people looked at the four of us and said, ‘Well, you’ve been friends a long time. How will we ever break into that community with you?’ ” she said.

Oakview Lodge incorporates a different mix of people. The Tindals, who had been spending time at their son and daughter-in-law’s nearby cottage, only met Schmiegelow and Herbert in August.

The couple, who bought the lakeside lodge with no prior experience, had spent five years working morning through late night managing the place for a mostly European clientele. Then COVID hit and they decided they didn’t want to return to the frantic 18-hour days.

The Tindals told them about their interest in co-ownership and followed up with an email asking if Schmiegelow and Herbert might consider converting the lodge to such an arrangement.

“It meant we could do the thing that people talk about doing. We wouldn’t lose our jobs and we wouldn’t have to move. So it seemed like a logical thing to do,” said Herbert.

“The people were right too,” said Schmiegelow. “We wouldn’t have done it with just anyone.”

Since then, the group have visited back and forth at the lodge and in the city. They have become true friends, said Mardi Tindal.

“One of the best pieces of advice I’ve had about getting older is to make young friends. I have young friends and in this circumstance obviously Greg and Anna are considerably younger than me, like about 15 years younger,” she said.

Places around the globe where more people live to be over 100 and have little chronic disease tend to be more multi-generational societies, “where we’re a little bit more of an individualistic society and that is problematic,” Mirza of HelpAge Canada said.

“The next generation of older adults is going to be a lot more amenable to this sort of shared housing economy. It’s because people like myself are growing up in this sort of world where we Uber-ize things like my car or house where we can share things. And that’s just part of pooling resources and sharing. It’s just a culture shift that has to happen for us to consider these all that ways of living,” he said.

Beyond compatibility and companionship there are other practicalities the Oakview Lodge group know they will face, including health care in a rural area. But no one seems worried.

Another outcome of COVID has been the change to how medicine is practised, say the Tindals. Most of their contact with their Toronto doctor since 2020 has been by phone or videochat. They can see themselves still going into the city for things like annual physicals.

“None of us at this stage needs significant medical intervention. We need transient kinds of care when something arises and we can get that here or anywhere,” said Doug Tindal. “There are hospitals in Minden and Haliburton. There’s a very well-regarded health-care clinic run by a nurse practitioner in Dorset. We’re halfway between Minden and Dorset. So there are options.”

Jensen said she refuses to restrict her life because of the possibility she might one day get sick.

“I just don’t want to go down that path,” she said.

One thing that does preoccupy her is how she will hang on to her city connections. Arnold talks about the same thing.

It is a running joke among the group that Arnold, a dedicated downtowner, would never live beyond the boundaries of the city’s bike share stations.

Recently, she’s decided to retire because her employer went to an entirely remote workplace, something she doesn’t enjoy and she is anxious to maintain her passion for urban pursuits, restaurants, cinema and theatre. But she will visit Toronto two or three times a year for a week at a time and cram in those activities with friends.

She stresses that she also enjoys swimming and hiking.

“I can imagine it’ll be easier to get to Toronto from here than it was to be in Toronto and get out to do these kind of things,” she said, noting there’s a bus that runs once or twice a week between the city and Haliburton.

Jensen says transportation is an issue. She is among those planning to move to Oakview Lodge without a car. She gave hers up years ago because she hated driving in city traffic. How the group gets around is something they still need to discuss in more detail, she said.

But trying to anticipate every possible problem and scenario hasn’t worked in previous attempts at cohousing, said Mardi Tindal.

“There were so many questions that we tied ourselves in knots trying to answer. People would go down the what-ifs road and we kept saying, ‘OK, we’ll figure that out.’ It was just a lot of work,” she said.

Joining Schmiegelow and Herbert has deepened “a sense of joy and commitment” to the co-housing community they are trying to build, said Mardi Tindal.

“We can do what we have longed to do in this place and with these people and with more to come,” she said. “We’re confident we will find hospitality here like that. We will be hospitable to new people.”