Cohousing is an intentional, self-governing, cooperative community where residents live in private homes often clustered around shared space. The term originated in Denmark in the late 1960s. Families live in attached or single-family homes with traditional amenities, usually including a private kitchenette. As part of the communal orientation, shared spaces typically feature a common house, which may include a large kitchen and dining area, laundry, and recreational spaces. Walkways, open space, parking, playgrounds and gardens are common examples of shared outdoor spaces designed to promote social interactions. Neighbors also often share resources like tools, babysitting and creative skills.

Neighbors collaboratively plan and manage community activities and shared spaces while maintaining their own income and private lives. The legal structure is typically a homeowner association or housing cooperative, and some use community land trusts. To promote the common good, cohousing members regularly share meals, attend meetings, and participate in community work days. As part of cohousing's social nature, neighbors gather for parties, games, gardening, musical performances, movies, sports, and celebrations. Living in cohousing makes it easy for residents to form clubs, organize child and elder care, share information, free cycle and carpool.

Cohousing facilitates interaction among neighbors and thereby provides social, practical, economic, and environmental benefits. With democracy in action in their cohousing community, residents also tend to be more active in civic affairs in the broader community.

Cohousing requires active participation by residents, and communities are usually structured – in principle and often in architecture – to encourage interactions and the formation of relationships among their members. Neighbors are encouraged to cooperate within the community and to care for each other. Community involvement promotes an interdependent village-like experience where neighbors know each other. Cohousing developments are usually limited to around 20–50 homes and often have large common areas where residents interact. While cohousing developments are designed to encourage community, residents can also have personal privacy. Residents are able to choose how much they engage in order to find the right balance between their privacy and community involvement. Decision-making in cohousing communities is often based on building a consensus within the community. Residents work together to maintain the shared space which they can all use, usually saving money. At the same time, residents manage their own private space.

Although most cohousing groups seek to develop multi-generational communities, some are also based on sustainability, others create supportive communities for senior living. Cohousing proponent and architect Charles Durrett wrote a handbook on creating senior cohousing while the cohousing leader and architect Kathryn McCamant created the 500 Communities Program to train professionals to support groups building sustainable cohousing. Although all cohousing communities are intentional—including many ecovillages (such as Sawyer Hill in Massachusetts and Los Angeles Ecovillage in California)--the broader term of intentional communities encompasses alternative forms of living, ranging from communes to ashrams to monasteries which are not always managed collaboratively and do not necessarily include the privacy and individual living space of cohousing. The collaborative democracy that distinguishes cohousing generally provides a foundation for a range of beliefs and ways of understanding, however some cohousing communities are instead based on shared religious beliefs or philosophy.

Cohousing can be considered related to co-living as the concepts appear to overlap. Both co-living and cohousing have shared areas that benefit all, such as spaces for events or communal meals. Cohousing provides self-contained private dwellings (often houses but sometimes apartments), often owned by the resident, but sometimes rented. Co-living on the other hand may have independent units within the same building (apartments or rooms), which are often rented. However, none of these are exclusive, thus the potential overlaps. The key distinction is that cohousing embeds collective resident control and stewardship into its legal form and decision making whereas co-living is typically owned and run by external investors or operators, although the owner sometimes also lives in the co-living space.

In response to increasing affordability challenges in high-cost housing markets, co-homeownership emerged in the 21st century as an alternative homeownership model that allows multiple buyers to collectively purchase and manage a property while maintaining financial independence through individually held mortgages.

Unlike cohousing, which emphasizes community-driven governance, or co-living, which is often rental-based, co-homeownership ensures that each participant owns and occupies a private suite while sharing common areas such as kitchens and living rooms. This model is designed to lower financial barriers by distributing costs such as down payments, mortgages, and maintenance expenses while enabling each owner to build equity independently.