Tamara Knox and Josh Morrison are the innovators behind Frolic, a cooperative ownership model designed to take advantage of upzoning policies in Seattle while helping anchor current residents and ensure they benefit from expanded opportunity.
In Seattle, the dominance of single-family housing, coupled with longstanding discriminatory practices, has historically excluded residents from many neighborhoods. To promote more inclusive housing, the City rezoned certain areas from single-family to multi-family housing. However, zoning changes alone are insufficient to fully address displacement.
When a neighborhood is rezoned from single-family to multi-family housing (i.e. upzoned), the land’s value increases. With the potential to accommodate more units or diverse developments, the property can generate higher income, leading to increased assessed property values and, consequently, higher property taxes. These rising taxes impose an additional burden on existing residents.
Selling is not always advantageous to these homeowners, many of whom have built significant equity over the years. Home equity is a highly illiquid form of wealth. So, when rising costs or a sudden need for cash forces them to sell, whether driven by upzoning or life events like retirement, homeowners rarely get a price that reflects their home’s full value. In hurried sales, especially, homeowners typically recover only a portion of the financial value, while losing the security of a home and social ties to communities. As more people reach retirement age, the problem only gets worse.
Tamara and Josh, a pair of thoughtful innovators from MIT, designed a solution—the Frolic model, born out of their research at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and the MIT Center for Real Estate. Today, Frolic is a small company with five fulltime staff that works with upzoned property owners facing displacement to develop formerly single-family lots into multi-family housing cooperatives. The homeowners get to stay on their land, but instead of just a single housing unit on the property, they develop multiple units and communal spaces, creating opportunity for spontaneous connections and community.
“We design the projects to create moments of human interaction,” says Tamara. “You have a fully private home, which is your own. At the same time, you have all these beautiful common spaces that allow neighbors to share moments of daily life.”
The name “frolic” was borrowed from the Amish practice of barn-raising, where many families come together to build a large barn in just a week. The Frolic model takes a similar collective approach by helping a community take the assets it already has (land, capital, and interested homeowners) to build their future and plant roots in their neighborhood. Together, they build multi-family developments of six to ten households on formerly single-family lots.
Frolic works with homeowners to design and permit the multi-family project for much less upfront capital than would be required on their own, creating affordable homes and higher density in an intentional, community-oriented way. Partnering with property owners eliminates the need to buy property and drives Frolic’s costs down too, cutting the amount of upfront capital, risk, and time required to build the project, compared to conventional development.
To keep down payments low, Frolic uses a cooperative model, where the co-op owns the project, with one share for each unit. A resident buys their share, which gives them ownership of a specific unit within the project. The homes can be purchased with down payments of $10,000 – $40,000 (average down payments in Seattle are about $140,000), and monthly payments are at or below market rent, enabling families who have been renting for generations to buy a home and build wealth.
“What’s unique about co-ops is that they allow for multiple layers of debt,” says Tamara. “The co-op as a whole can take out a loan, called a blanket mortgage, and each resident can take out a smaller loan to purchase their share. Co-op shares in our projects cost between $100,000 and $400,000, and a resident can purchase them for 5% down. Each month, residents pay off their personal mortgage and a monthly co-op fee, like a homeowners’ association fee. The co-op fee pays off the blanket mortgage, utilities, and other shared expenses.”
The multi-family properties feature shared spaces, including a common house with a communal kitchen and dining area, and a guest suite. By sharing these common areas, each resident gets the benefit of a larger home, but without the underutilized space and higher cost of a large single-family property.
The Seattle projects underscore Frolic’s interest in serving communities and neighborhoods threatened by displacement. The 10-unit Corvidae Co-op opened this summer, a project developed in partnership with Allied8, a small team of architects and land use planners leading innovative design across Seattle to bring density to single-family property. Corvidae is a forested courtyard community perched on a hillside in Columbia City, a close-knit neighborhood with a long history of cultural diversity and mixed income. Corvidae provides housing for single mothers, healthcare workers, and educators, along with a diverse community of children, adults, and seniors.
The 9-unit Cedrus Collective, set to open in 2026, is being built in Seattle’s Central District, a neighborhood with a history of redlining. Meanwhile, Marra Commons, opening in 2025, sits adjacent to a park and urban farm in Seattle’s South Park neighborhood, a diverse working- and middle-class area that still reflects its industrial roots.
Securing the financing to develop such unconventional housing structures presents a unique set of challenges. “Anything that deviates from the traditional, like a co-op or community-based housing with shared common spaces, is often devalued during the appraisal process for construction loans,” says Josh. “Appraisers rely on comparable projects in the area, but for new or unconventional developments, there often aren’t any. This puts appraisers in a difficult spot, and due to appraisal methods and consumer protection laws, anything unfamiliar is usually devalued.” This tendency often leads to an inaccurately low valuation of housing co-ops, leaving a financing gap—not only for construction but also for ongoing project financing, even with a high loan-to-value ratio.
Fortunately, Tamara and Josh are finding a few organizations that see the opportunity in financing unconventional development projects. The New England-based CDFI, Local Enterprise Assistance Fund (LEAF), for example, has deep expertise in co-ops and understands that they are often devalued. LEAF stepped in with 100% loan-to-value financing and provided a portion of the construction loan for the Corvidae Co-op, effectively lowering the risk for other lenders to participate in Corvidae’s financing.
“As the appraisal industry catches up and more comparable projects emerge,” note Tamara and Josh, “it will become easier to secure financing, but that will take time and more examples in each geography.”
The Frolic team is spreading their motto, We build homes that everyday people can afford, in spaces that we dream of living. They are scaling the Frolic model to other cities facing similar housing challenges and upzoning legislation. They have attracted the attention of major funders such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is enabling them to expand the Frolic model into California. There, Frolic has created a special-purpose vehicle that lets them scale their work by isolating the risks of individual projects and using grant funding as first-loss capital to lower risk for other investors involved in their projects.
Frolic is also evolving its model by integrating cooperative structures with a community land trust, forming a hybrid approach based on the Frolic model. As Tamara and Josh explore new opportunities to adapt the model to various contexts, they are uncovering possibilities to redesign capital flows, blending financing to create mutual gains while reinforcing communal bonds.
Designing a financing structure is both essential and challenging, but Tamara and Josh find encouragement in one key aspect of Frolic’s work that has taken root swiftly—building trust with local groups. Often, pro-development efforts face friction with local racial justice organizations, as traditional development frequently overlooks how large-scale projects can harm local communities. However, Tamara and Josh have experienced something different with Frolic’s pro-development—and pro-community—approach: “It’s been incredible to see how quickly both groups come to understand each other’s goals, find common ground, and build trust. The progress that’s come from that trust has been remarkable.”
As the team scales the Frolic model, they remain committed to fostering close, human connections. For Tamara and Josh, preserving this crucial dynamic is both a challenge and an opportunity.
“There’s often this notion that scaling up should exclude relationships because they aren’t scalable,” they explain. “But in our experience, trust creates momentum. The deeper the relationships, the greater the trust, and that trust spreads. For us, authentic relationships are essential—not only for doing meaningful work but for redefining what’s possible.”
Valuing Homes in Black Communities
Homes in Black majority neighborhoods are undervalued by 23% on average compared to similar homes in other neighborhoods. Structural innovations that redesign our markets could create a more equitable housing market. To support new ideas, Economic Architecture and Brookings are mapping innovations across the US and will soon invite innovators to step forward and apply to the Valuing Homes in Black Communities Challenge.