BOULDER >> It was Charlie Huntington and Ylva Kroke’s turn to make dinner.

Hot pizzas fresh from the oven, salad, and eggplant pasta were dished up around a crowded kitchen table, where about a dozen people from all walks of life straggled in.

ABBA blasted from a record player. The front door was ajar, welcoming folks inside. Chatter filled the room as people debriefed on their days.

“There’s always someone wandering in,” Huntington said after a Denver Post reporter made cautious entry through the open door and was surprised to find none of the residents batted an eye at the stranger in their living room. “That’s what’s so great.”

The lively gathering wasn’t a party. It was a weekday night at the Chrysalis Cooperative in Boulder.

The co-op is one of four created under the Boulder Housing Coalition, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to establishing permanently affordable cooperative housing in Boulder County.

The Chrysalis co-op is a big, purple house in the heart of Boulder with seven bedrooms upstairs, four downstairs, one in the basement, an accessory dwelling unit and a shared kitchen, living room and eating space on the main floor.

As of last month, 12 people called Chrysalis home, but the co-op is more than a house with an abundance of roommates.

The coalition’s co-ops are funded with grant assistance from the Boulder’s affordable housing program.

Unlike a typical roommate situation, the co-ops come with rules, organization and oversight focusing on shared resources, communal decision-making, division of labor and educational opportunities like social justice trainings.Co-op » Page 9

The ordinance imposes a limit of 12 to 15 residents depending on the density of the neighborhood, and must provide 200 square feet of living space per person. If the co-op is permanently affordable, like those with the Boulder Housing Coalition, they could be allowed to have higher occupancy limits if recommended by the city’s Planning Board after a public hearing.

Boulder now has five active, registered co-ops, according to city officials.

Lincoln Miller, executive director of Boulder Housing Coalition and one of Boulder’s original cooperative housing advocates, said the next goal is pushing for Colorado’s city and state governments to make it a less arduous process to establish co-ops, which Miller and other advocates view as crucial for addressing the state’s affordable housing crisis.

Miller was used to fielding objections to co-ops moving into neighborhoods — concerns about an inundation of cars taking up parking space, elevated noise levels or other nuisance complaints — but said that their regulations provide an oversight for house behavior that addresses such issues.

“Because we’re an organization, it’s easier to deal with us than with neighbors randomly living together,” Miller said. “If there’s a problem, we have the systems in place to handle it and we want to talk with you.”

With Gov. Jared Polis’ sprawling land-use bill — which would have blocked limits on how many unrelated people can live together, among other pro-density measures — dying Monday in the final hours of the 2023 legislative session, affordable housing advocates are looking to demystify Colorado’s housing cooperatives and educate the public about the alternative living situation.

“The basic idea is you’re living together like a family,” Miller said of co-ops. “You’re eating together and buying food together and you do chores that are set by the chore system to maintain the house and there’s a house meeting every week and you’re making decisions using a consensus decision-making model.

If there is a conflict, we have professional mediation. You have to have a job, you have to income-qualify and you have to participate — come to the meetings and do the chores and cook and clean and be part of it.

“It’s not for everybody, and we get that.”From Page 1

Nate Nickrent, 26, and Robin Amoruso, 30, optimized the tight quarters of their adjoining upstairs bedrooms in the Chrysalis house. The couple has managed to create a meditation space, a lounging area, a lofted bed for guests, their own sleeping area and some closet and storage space.

Amoruso, who works with toddlers at a daycare, and Nickrent, a medical assistant, couldn’t afford to live in Boulder without cooperative housing, they said.

Rent for a room at the Chrysalis ranges between $520 and $940, utilities included, plus $145 per month for shared groceries. The median rent for a one-bedroom property in Boulder County as of May 8 was $1,881, according to Zillow. In exchange for financial support from the city, the Boulder Housing Coalition requires nearly all of its residents to income- and asset-qualify.

No resident of the Chrysalis house can make more than $70,240 annually, and about half of the residents must make below $43,900, according to the co-op’s bylaws.

“But it’s about so much more than cheap rent,” Amoruso said.

If someone in the house isn’t feeling well, there are plenty of people around to offer medicine, Nickrent said. Some days, you get a meal cooked for you or your bathroom cleaned for you, depending on the chore schedule. The housing arrangement provides the chance to meet people from all backgrounds who you may not otherwise get the chance to know, Amoruso said.

“It feels like the way humans were meant to live,” Nickrent said. “Sharing resources and working together to keep things running smoothly.”

“We had this opportunity for co-ops to become legal”

While Nickrent and Amoruso hung out upstairs, Huntington and Kroke cleaned up the post-dinner mess in their well-stocked kitchen.

Though people can buy individual food items if they want, a monthly grocery bill keeps the fridge and pantry stocked with foods everyone can eat. The house buys staple items like lentils and flour in bulk, and big jars of spices line the walls waiting to be drafted for dinner plans.

Huntington, 33, has lived in Chrysalis for almost three years. The University of Denver graduate student said he sought out co-op life because he realized living alone was not beneficial for his mental health.