When Lexie Gonzalez was growing up in public housing, she believed that she would never own a home.
"It wasn't a value instilled in me that I could own my own house," she says.
Her partner Mark Doonan feels the same: "All I've ever done is rent," he says.
The couple is talking in the Kempsey region, about an hour north of Port Macquarie, with the sound of birds chirping in the background.
Doonan had been renting in Mullumbimby in the Byron Shire when his job folded and he could no longer afford it. "It made me feel vulnerable," he says.
But then Doonan and Gonzalez discovered Goolawah Cooperative, a neighbourhood-to-be that would become their home.
The Goolawah Cooperative is an example of a Rural Landsharing Community (RLC), an alternative and typically more affordable form of home ownership.
An RLC is similar to Multiple Occupancy (MO), in which a company or a cooperative owns a block of land. Instead of residents then purchasing a divided lot, they purchase a share within the company or cooperative and then build a home on the land.
RLCs and MOs typically end up costing less than buying individual lots and only one set of rates is required, which also keeps costs down.
Gonzalez and Doonan paid $25,000 to join Goolawah, including $7,000 for a share, then an additional $70,000 to build their off-grid home.
Members of the collective come from all walks of life, with just about every trade represented across the 68 shareholders.
Nurses like Gonzalez, IT professionals, photographers, school children and the retired come together regularly for activities such as book club, Men's Shed and yoga.
When conflict occurs across the 1600 acres, residents will do mediation and with a group of like-minded individuals with the goal to find a solution as quickly as possible.
"Living in community is so different from living in the suburbs," Gonzalez says.
"I can name every person who lives here as we are all involved in looking after this beautiful land together.
"I don't know of anyone living in the suburbs who knows the names of their 68 surrounding neighbours."
Where did this come from?
Multiple Occupancy rose in popularity in New South Wales following the Aquarius festival in 1973.
Groups of "hippies" from the Australian Union of Students travelled to Nimbin in Northern New South Wales for the third part of the festival.
Following the festival, the Tuntable Falls Co-Coordination Co-operative was created and purchased 486 hectares for $100,000 and sold 500 shares in the co-operative for $200 each.
At the time, there was no legislation for communal land sharing and it wasn't until 1980 that the Lismore City Council introduced interim RLC legislation.
Eight years later, the State Environmental Planning Policy (SEPP) 15 — Rural Land sharing Communities was established and now there are more than 100 RLCs around NSW.
Housing becomes environmentally friendly
Shane Sylvanspring was unlikely to be able to afford a home in the Byron Shire if he didn't look to alternative ways of buying.
The average two-bedroom house will set a buyer back more than $2 million in Byron Bay, but just minutes out of town, Sylvanspring's MO share cost him $150,000.
"Basically, a 100-acre rundown cattle farm becomes an affordable housing development for 12 families, as well as conservation and revegetation for bad land practices and enough space for agriculture as well," he says.
"So we're going have more healthy production than before. It's a win, win, win."
He'll contribute another $50,000 towards the community infrastructure, such as roads, and will still have his own building costs.
But compared to the residents paying $800,000 for 500sqm of land in nearby Mullumbimby, he's got a much more affordable deal.
Sylvanspring is a town planner and part of a global collective of alternative living and an advocate for the MO model.
He says it should be more widely available and believed it could be easily executed in urban and suburban areas, as well as regional.
"It just needs to be fit for purpose," he says.
"You need to be able to have multiple apartments or things like that, so everyone has their own independence."
It's also important to buy collectively and equally, Sylvanspring believes.
"If you don't buy equally and collectively in the collective arrangement, I found this creates a lot of power issues."
It takes an eco-village
The saying goes it takes a village to raise a child and for Melinda Lyons, a single mother of two, that couldn't be more true.
Co-housing was a no-brainer.
"I could see that I would get support, I would learn new skills on home maintenance and gardening," Lyons says.
She jumped at the opportunity to be involved with DeCo village in Denmark, Western Australia, about 400km south-east of Perth.
Co-housing, unlike MOs or RLCs, still have individual titles.
However, owners part-own common facilities and are typically involved in decision making processes.
"When you're living in a co-housing, you have a commitment to participate, whether you do busy bees and chores, be part of the strata management team, check the meters, do secretarial and billing," she says. "They're just daily life tasks that you have to step up for."
A home at the DeCo village isn't necessarily cheaper up-front than other Denmark property, but Lyons explains the ongoing costs of the 9.2 star energy rated home are significantly lower than average, with solar, recycled water and battery power all part of the design.
But the real benefit comes from living in close quarters.
"One of the beautiful things about living in community is you actually get the opportunities to continue to reflect, look at your own stuff.
"I think they are skills we've lost by living in nuclear families and thinking that we're autonomous because we're not. We all need each other."
Not just for the regions
Alex Fearnside was searching for community in the regions, but he knew he didn't want to leave the city.
Urban Coup was developed in Brunswick, 5km outside of Melbourne's CBD, with a group of like-minded others.
"We're very, very connected, but also very, very private," says Fearnside.
Like DeCo, residents aren't just purchasing an apartment, they're buying into shared spaces and facilities.
"They're outdoor spaces and indoor shared spaces," he says. "One is a kitchen and dining room where we have community meals."
The 29 households at Urban Coup are made up of a diverse group aged between three and over 70, with people from overseas, professionals and multi-generation families.
Fearnside says one of the benefits of knowing your neighbours is conflict resolution.
"The noise that Barbara's making versus the noise that some bastard over there is making is a very different context," he says.
"Knowing people and the fact that you have interaction in the community helps manage that experience."
Similar to Lyons, Fearnside believes the real value comes from living in close quarters.
"I think living in a village is a very, very important thing to be able to do as we go forward into more uncertain times, including economic uncertainty, environmental uncertainty, climate change uncertainty," he says.
"People in this community have all gone through a little bit of a journey where you kind of have to give something up, something has to shift before you can really, really live in community.
"But it's the joy of helping somebody in your community, knowing that that fable will come back to you."
Some of the downfalls
Getting a loan for an RLC is one of the biggest issues for the model, Sylvanspring believes.
"Current financial institutions and banks don't recognise collective ownership models and it's hard to finance," he says.
Another downfall is developers exploiting the MO policy for profit, he says, by converting the land into Community Title — where the key difference is lots are individually titled.
While this solves the problems of financing it creates other issues, Sylvanspring say.
"But the problem with that is as soon as it's converted to community title, [the property] becomes unaffordable. Because it is a separate title it can be sold or bought on the open market," he says.
Sylvanspring believes some developers are making money from buying MO sites, converting them to CT, and selling off the blocks.
"They kind of exploited that a little bit," he believes.
Intentional communities don't always work
A study by Warwick Fisher from Southern Cross University shows several intentional communities that started following the Aquarius Festival in the 1960s failed to last when they were unable to attract younger generations.
New RLCs can also struggle to get off the ground.
In August 2021, a mega-commune promoted by controversial celebrity chef Pete Evans on the New South Wales Far North Coast was rejected due to environmental concerns.
The same year, the Tweed Shire opted out of SEPP 15 and no longer allows new RLCs.
And despite all the benefits, Fearnside says living in an intentional community doesn't work for everyone.
"Living in community is not easy," he says.
"So there is conflict, but it's about how you address it. Not everyone can live in community, for whatever reason they're not able to compromise."
Gonzalez agrees.
"A lot of my friends and work colleagues will come here and they love it," she says. "However, when it comes to how we run the community, they find that very challenging, in that we make our decisions based as a group.
"Some people don't like to be told what to do, some people like living in a box in in their own private homes where no one can tell them anything about how to run their own homes."
But in an intentional community everyone must share ideas and decision.
"And that's definitely not for everybody," Gonzalez says.
