Green Party trip to visit cohousing communities 

On May 21 sixteen members of the Green Party of New Jersey visited two cohousing communities located in the Potomac River watershed bioregion west of Washington, DC - Ecovillage of Loudoun County and Liberty Village. Most participants on this carpool trip had previously visited the EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI), so an interest was to compare the development and experiences of the different communities.

Ecovillage of Loudoun County, Virginia (ELC) was our first stop. This project is just getting off the ground. Eight units are built and two are under construction in the northern neighborhood cluster. A second neighborhood, located on the southern part of the 180-acre tract, is planned for development during 2006-2007. There will be 25 houses in each neighborhood. A shared Common House will be located near the first cluster and a complementary shared recreational area will be located near the second.

The ELC project is reminiscent of EcoVillage at Ithaca in many respects. Both are on a very large piece of land (nearly 200 acres). Both are committed to restoring biodiversity through careful planning, management and stewardship. Construction practices preserve existing forest, and protect wildlife, soil, and water. Both incorporate a multi-neighborhood concept. EVI already has a working organic farm on premises and ELC has plans for one. The principals of the Ithaca project have mentored the initiators of the Loudoun community to some extent.

Ecovillages are a sub-set of the broader grouping called cohousing communities. Liberty Village, Ecovillage/Loudoun, and Ecovillage/Ithaca are all part of the Cohousing Association of the United States (http://www.cohousing.org). ELC and EVI are also part of the Global Ecovillage Network (http://gen.ecovillage.org).

Cohousing is a type of collaborative housing that fosters community interaction through resident management, participatory process, common facilities, and neighborhood design (residences clustered around a Common House, cars parked on the periphery, etc.). The Common House may include a large dining room, kitchen, lounges, meeting rooms, recreational/cultural facilities, library, workshops, children’s space, guest rooms, and other shared facilities. Residents usually have several optional group meals in the Common House each week. If you participate in, say, twelve group dinners in a month you might be obligated to help with the cooking twice a month.

Cohousing communities are managed by their residents. Residents also do most of the work required to maintain the property. This, in combination with sharing of things and trading of services (like childcare) keeps living expenses low.

While there is no formal definition or line of demarcation, ecovillages tend to be cohousing communities that pay particular attention to fostering ecological consciousness and green praxis. “Living lightly” is a key value. An effort is made to keep expenses low, though EcoVillage/Loudoun encountered a problem in that respect after the initiators had purchased the land for the site. Zoning laws intended to constrain overdevelopment in Loudoun County prohibited duplex-unit residences and the extent of clustering which is found at Ecovillage/Ithaca. It turned out that each unit at ELC had to be on an approximately half-acre lot. This, in combination with the current inflation of land and home prices in the D.C. area, has made prices of units in ELC’s first neighborhood higher than desirable for a cohousing community. They are examining their options in terms of keeping prices down when the second neighborhood is built.

Liberty Village, located on 23 acres outside of Frederick, Maryland, is comprised of duplex units. Eighteen homes have been completed out of a planned 38. The homes are clustered on eight acres around a green, pedestrian common area. The remaining fifteen acres are a mix of fields, woods, gardens, orchards, and wetlands. They are fortunate to have a 105-acre public park adjacent to their property.

Both Ecovillage/Loudoun and Liberty Village are anticipating the construction of their Common Houses, planned in each case for the 2007-2008 timeframe. Both benefit from being part of the Mid-Atlantic Cohousing Network (MAC). By coincidence, MAC had scheduled for May 22 (the day after the Saturday GPNJ carpool trip) a bus tour of all the cohousing communities in the D.C. area. So I stayed over in Silver Spring that night and took the opportunity on Sunday to visit five other communities (in addition to re-visiting Loudoun and Liberty Hill). They were: Catoctin Creek Village in Taylorstown, VA; Eastern Village in Silver Spring, MD; Takoma Village in Washington, DC; Wheatland Village near Leesburg, VA: and Blueberry Hill in Vienna, VA. Of interest was the variety in terms of scope, type, cost, stage of development, etc. Some are urban cohousing complexes, some are rural, and some are part of small towns.

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One type of social transformation will be to change the extant political, social, and economic institutions of our society toward a Greener direction. But another type will be to directly “build the new society within the shell of the old.” Robert Gilman described the significance of this latter type of work in a 1991 article, The Ecovillage Challenge (excerpts below from In Context Magazine, Issue #29, Summer 1991):

There is hardly anything more appealing - yet apparently more elusive - than the prospect of living in harmony with nature and with each other. A particularly powerful approach to achieving this dream of harmonious living is the ecovillage, which, for the purposes of this article, we will define as a human-scale, full-featured settlement in which human activities are integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.

* Human-scale refers to a size in which people are able to know and be known by the others in the community, and where each member feels he or she is able to influence the community’s direction.

* A “full-featured settlement” is one in which all the major functions of normal living - residence, food provision, social life, commerce, etc. - are plainly present and in balanced proportions.

“...in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world...”

* This idea brings the “eco” into the ecovillage. One of the most important aspects of this principle is the ideal of equality between humans and other forms of life, so that humans do not attempt to dominate over nature but rather find their place within it. Another important principle is the cyclic use of material resources, rather than the linear approach (dig it up, use it once, throw it away forever) that has characterized industrial society.

“… in a way that is supportive of healthy human development...”

* I see this as involving a balanced and integrated development of all aspects of human life - physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. This healthy development needs to be expressed not just in the lives of individuals, but in the life of the community as a whole.

“… and that can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.”

* The sustainability principle brings with it a profound commitment to fairness and non-exploitation - toward other parts of today’s world, human and non-human, and toward all future life.

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Reference:

http://www.ecovil.com
http://www.libertyvillage.com
http://www.ecovillage.ithaca.ny.us
http://www.cohousing.org/regions/midatlantic

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