A $12-million co-housing project in Nova Scotia that’s been a decade in the making is a step closer to completion following a groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday. 

About 130 people gathered at the site on Pearl Street in Bridgewater, N.S., for the event. 

Treehouse Village is expected to be completed by fall 2022 and will include 30 private dwellings, a community centre and shared amenities on a 15-acre lot. It claims to be the first co-housing development in Atlantic Canada. 

The project was conceived by Cate and Leon de Vreede a decade ago, when they realized there were no co-housing developments in Nova Scotia or the region.

“So we figured if we wanted to live in co-housing and stay in Nova Scotia, we would have to try to kind of make it happen,” said Cate de Vreede.

According to de Vreede, co-housing means there are private homes on one property with shared amenities.

The Treehouse Village project, like most similar projects in Canada, is legally classified as a condominium, but other legal models can be used for co-housing, de Vreede said.

She said the core values of Treehouse Village are “living lightly on the earth,” and living collectively as neighbours in homes that are comfortable and safe.

Homes in the community will be passive house certified, meaning they will have high degrees of energy efficiency. 

De Vreede said the heating bill for each home should be about $100 annually. 

In order to minimize the impact on the ecology of the area, de Vreede said most of the development will be clustered in five acres at one end of the compound and the remaining ten acres will be left forested.

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