In a unanimous vote, the planning commission approved a planned unit development, conditional-use permit for the 21-unit complex on 7.87 acres at the end of West Fairview Avenue. 59¼ North also includes a workshop, a greenhouse, a community bath house and a common house with office, studio space and guest rooms.

59¼ North is Alaska and Homer’s first cohousing project, said Kenton Bloom, one of the project’s partners. His company, Seabright Survey + Design, designed the project. Legally, it’s a condominium, but that’s where the similarity ends, said Tom Laing, another of the partners.

Because 59¼ North wanted to have some professional offices, it asked for a conditional use permit under the Residential Office District zoning provisions — the reason the planning commission had to approve the project.

Laing said 59¼ North began a dozen years ago, when some families who’d always gotten together for Thanksgiving began thinking about what they would do when they retired. They decided they wanted to live closer together in a diverse community with not just retirees, but with young families, couples and single people.

About three years ago, Bloom, Tom and Chris Laing and Susan Arndt created a limited liability corporation, 59¼ North LLC, and began working seriously on the project. They even had a Web site linked to www.cohousing.org, and got interest from people in Fairbanks, New Hampshire and Arizona, Laing said. 59¼ North LLC bought its site from the Pioneer Land Company in the Rangeview Subdivision.

Cohousing projects are designed and managed by the residents, with development capital coming from them. Members buy building lots, but some buildings and the site are owned in common. According to the Cohousing Association of the United States, cohousing began in Denmark in the 1960s and spread to North America in the 1980s. There are now more than 100 such communities in the United States and Canada.

The project uses some of the ideas of the New Urbanism movement, such as inviting front porches, Bloom said. The street to the houses will be more like an alley, with houses on the south side and separate garages or carports on the north side.

“They’ll be an inviting place to go into,” Laing said. “You won’t have to go up to the garage door and hunt around for where the door is.”

Although it has as many units per acre as nearby subdivisions, 59¼ North puts those units in a cluster on a terrace at the Fairview Avenue end. About three acres are open space and trails, Bloom said. The site plan gives each house a feeling of privacy, he said. Private trails link the homes with common facilities and connect with public trails in the area.

With some units for offices and studios, 59¼ North is different from other cohousing projects, Bloom said.

Residents can walk from home to a separate office or studio, or work out of their home. If an artist needs a break, she can walk down to the common house and have lunch with others.

“It breaks down this whole structure of isolation where you don’t have any life, don’t have any neighbors, and guess what, you’re lonely,” he said.

The residential office use was the only aspect planning commissioners had trouble with. After some research of the city transportation plan, commissioners and planning staff determined Fairview Avenue was technically classified as a local street and not as a collector — the classification necessary to allow residential office use. Fairview Avenue is planned to be a collector street, though, so commissioners amended the permit to prohibit building the residential office phase until that happened.

Those offices also raised questions about parking. Commissioner Ray Kranich made a motion to amend a staff recommendation to make it clear the project would have 22 spaces in addition to spaces in the parking garages and carports that go with each home. That motion passed. Bloom said the site plan identified enough parking spaces to meet that condition.

Laing said once development costs are calculated, 59¼ North will figure out the purchase price for each house site. He envisions a range of options, from sites for houses as small as 600-square-feet to larger homes — but no McMansions.

“We don’t want to cater to these people coming up from California with a big wad of cash,” he said. “We want to make it affordable for people who live here.”