Sarah Wells is a partner at LiveWork Denver. Photo courtesy of LiveWork Denver.

Sarah Wells has spent the last eight years exploring, developing, and educating others about “co-buying,” an alternate approach to affordable housing. Caddis Collaborative principal architect Bryan Bowen serves with Sarah on the board of the Boulder Housing Coalition. Given Caddis’s long-standing interest in affordable housing models (such as Boulder’s recent Bedrooms Are for People campaign), we recently checked in with Sarah to see what she is up to in the Denver-area real estate market.

In 2015, Sarah and her partner, Stephen Polk, bought a Capitol Hill mansion to create Queen City Cooperative. They were the owners of the property, with co-op members renting from them, until August 2022, when the house was transferred formally into the co-op’s name. Through that experience, Sarah learned that devising a legal structure to buy real estate without individual ownership wasn’t as simple as she thought it would be.

“At the time that we started the project, I thought surely someone else has done this before and we can just copy them and have agreements about how to share ownership in a property,” Sarah says. “For several years, no one that we encountered had done it. And so it took us a long time and a lot of money with lawyers and a lot of conversations and a lot of learning about housing to be able to adapt a limited-equity model to share equity that people are earning on their bedrooms.”

“I realized through the Queen City Cooperative experience that there wasn’t a real estate agent really speaking the language of cooperatives in Denver, and there wasn’t really someone making the case for them,” Sarah says. “So I set out to be that person because the experience of this cooperative has been transformative for me, and I want people to have access to those experiences and also to attain that level of stability and empowerment around their housing.”

Sarah is a broker associate at Live Work Denver, which offers classes in “co-buying” real estate and assists those who are interested in making the same kind of cooperative real estate investment she, Stephen, and the other members of Queen City Cooperative pursued.

Part of what Sarah shares in her classes is purely financial. “A lot of our messaging in the co-buying class and in our outward-facing advocacy is around cost savings and creating affordability,” she says.  “People need affordable housing, and I believe that co-ownership is a way to make that entry point more accessible.”

Sarah thinks of equity building in real estate as the fire escape ladder that is up too high so that people can’t reach it to climb up. “Our job is to either lower the ladder or get you a step to it,” Sarah says. “Access to affordability and stability is really one part of what we do with Live Work Denver.”

Housing has become an investment model and is viewed as a way of building wealth and intergenerational wealth. Society has created this problem in which the bottom of the ladder is no longer there. The out-of-reach ladder has always been a problem, but the ladder has gotten higher and higher up in recent generations, especially in the last 10 years.

“We offer equity to people who would otherwise be renting,” Sarah says. “Our model is intended to be one of those very first steps in equity building.”

While addressing the urgent financial issues around unaffordable housing, Sarah’s firm goes beyond these economic aspects. As you peel the onion of cooperatives, the next layer is the capacity for community connection and how that can enrich people’s lives. It also gets into everyone’s own experience of how they did or did not feel connected in their lives.

“It’s very personal,” Sarah says. “As the parent of a young child, living in community has been extremely helpful to me. I’ve dodged a lot of isolation as a result of living in community.”

One of Live Work Denver’s current initiatives is organizing affinity groups around co-buying. For example, they might bring together artists who have similar needs and who thus might want to buy together, or they might organize a group of parents.

“Single parents totally get it,” Sarah says. “They don’t need more explanation because they have that lived experience of extreme isolation and difficulty, and they have a desire for a shared experience.”

Currently, Live Work Denver offers free, online, no-obligation classes on co-buying:

• “Inclusive Solutions to Home Ownership: Homebuying 101”: This introduction and orientation to home-buying teaches in a nonjudgmental way the process of purchasing a home and then also talks about the different tools that are out there, co-buying being one. Other approaches that are taught in the class include land trusts, affordable housing cooperatives, and the various down payment assistance programs that are available.
• “Co-Buy Curious: Introduction to Co-Buying Real Estate”: This class is specifically about shared ownership and the structures of shared ownership and looking at different properties that are ideal for sharing.
• “Co-Buying Commercial Property”: This class is intended to empower small business owners to buy property together. Owning your place of work is another way to stabilize your income and your access.

People can come together around sharing a house in two primary ways. One model is “people first,” where you put the group together and then they find a property. The other model is “house first,” where there’s a property and then the people come together to buy it or organize shared ownership after the initial purchase has been made. House first tends to be a lot faster because you have a very specific offering with a specific property on a specific timeline.

Live Work Denver has started a program with Gary Community Ventures, a foundation in Denver. They are helping Sarah’s firm acquire properties and match them with co-buyers. This will help speed up the process.

“Our work with Gary Community Ventures feels really exciting,” Sarah says. “The hope and the intent with those properties is to organize those affinity groups and then match them with the properties.”

The model of sharing that Sarah and Live Work Denver is pioneering represents a profound shift. What if we shared ownership? What if we shared a kitchen? What if that gave you something where you could do this for two, three, or five years and then move on to something else? Or maybe you decide this is a really great way to live permanently.

Sarah says, “I serve a lot of people who are in that mindset of this door is shut for me. It’s not possible for me. So some of what I end up doing is deprogramming around that idea of this is not possible or this is not for me.”

Sarah finds that people are hungry for knowledge of how real estate works. “It’s super challenging that we don’t teach about home ownership in public schools,” she says. “People are not handed down that information. Unless you come from a family that talked about money and come from a family that invested in property, the barriers to entry for the housing market are extremely high – not just in the amount of money that you need to purchase a property but also psychologically in what you have grown up with.”

“A lot of the work that we do,” Sarah says, “is reigniting that hope and encouraging people to think about ownership in lots of different ways and providing some examples that hopefully inspire people to know there are some things that I could possibly do that would give me more stable access to home or set me up for this dream that I didn’t think was possible.”

Reflecting on her work, Sarah says, “I think it’s really dangerous for us to still prop up the original American dream of having a house in the suburbs and two kids on one income. That’s just not possible anymore. So our job is to talk about what is possible.”

One of Sarah’s favorite examples of what’s possible is two women who bought a house together and turned it into a community house. They held it for two-and-a-half years, and they each walked away with $40,000. That was enough to set them up for the next stages in their lives. One of the women had the goal of buying property. The other one had different goals around becoming a documentary filmmaker. The profit she made was able to fund the starting point and equipment purchase for what became her new career.

“There is a cultural implication that individualism is success,” Sarah says. “On the other side of that is the assumption that sharing is failure. And it’s just not true. At the core, we’ve been programmed to believe that we have to make it on our own. But I think what we actually want is to feel connected to each other.”

Co-buying provides a way to reach financial goals and to build deep connections. Reflecting on the work she’s doing, Sarah says, “In some ways, it can really feel like you’re swimming upstream because we’re trying to build community and connection and trust in a system that is built on individualism and distrust. So you have to dig deeper with people. But I also think culturally we’re at a place where people do want to feel connected. It’s part of what makes us feel safe.”