Welcome to
Shadowlake Village Cohousing
in Blacksburg, Virginia

Shadowlake Village Cohousing is located in Blacksburg, Virginia, a university town in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains of southwest Virginia.

Our community is fully built out and no new homes will be constructed.   Any homes currently available for sale or to rent for one or two years are identified on our Available Units page.   We maintain a notification list, and if you're interested in the possibility of living in Shadowlake Village Cohousing as a homeowner, renter, or flat-mate, please contact us.

Our 33-acre site has a rural feel with mountain views and is within easy hiking and biking distance of Jefferson National Forest, yet we are only five minutes from shopping, Virginia Tech, and downtown Blacksburg.   The project's homes are clustered on a small portion of our site to preserve several acres of green space and 17 acres of mature woods.   Our community consists of 33 homes in a mix of townhouses, duplexed pairs, and detached single-family homes.

What is cohousing?

Cohousing is a planned neighborhood of privately owned homes that offers residents a sense of community and personal connection with their neighbors that is hard to find in standard neighborhoods.

The goal of cohousing is to promote easy and frequent interactions among residents and to provide many opportunities to socialize and form bonds of friendship across a wide variety of ages (from toddlers to old folks) and backgrounds.   Community is promoted by the layout of the homes, facing each other across a pedestrian lane, by the overall design of the site, and by many planned and spontaneous activities that bring us together.   There are substantial common amenities.

A parallel goal is to help people live more simply and conserve the earth's resources as much as possible through environmentally sensitive design and construction and through sharing of various kinds.

A fundamental defining aspect of cohousing is that the project is wholly managed by its residents.   Just as fundamentally, as much as possible of the physical maintenance is done by residents, partly to reduce costs but also to strengthen our sense of mutual responsibility and stewardship of our common property.

There is no ideology and no cultish leader-and-followers situation in cohousing.   What members have in common is a desire for a life that offers many more possibilities to enjoy satisfying human connections than in typical American neighborhoods.   Within this setting, members lead their own independent lives, participating to the extent they wish in community-based activities.

To find out more about cohousing and Shadowlake Village, please click on the topics below.