230 People LIVING COMMUNALLY: TOUR of Ithaca EcoVillage — Ep. 051

i actually think that the co-housing model is perfect for what we need in this world which is more connection founded in 1991 the eco village at ithaca began as a radical notion to create a more earth-friendly human habitation centered on 176 acres at the foot of cayuga lake and just two miles from ithaca new york the eco village houses three neighborhoods a co-housing community of 230 people and four on-site organic farms which are integral in producing food for the region though we're just starting out on our own communal living exploration at flock we turn to examples like the ecovillage at ithaca to see what we can learn for our own journey i am here with liz walker at the eco village ithaca ecovillage and yeah tell me a little bit more about where we're standing because this is such a special place yeah we're standing in front of the common house you see the earth flag flying the common house is like a community center for us and we gather here for meals in non-covered times we have a children's playroom we have eight home offices so people who are working at home can actually get out of their houses we have high-speed internet we have laundry community laundry for 30 households we have i'll show you over here we have solar panels on the roof so this is just one of many villages at the eco village we call them neighborhoods neighborhoods okay yeah so we have three neighborhoods we have a total of a hundred households you'll be seeing a lot of solar panels but it's kind of cool to have them on the common house we put them up about i don't know maybe 15 years ago 20 years ago yeah yeah so we have three uh neighborhoods that are each have their own character they were built at different times we tried to use the the latest greenest building technologies so this is our very first neighborhood we designed and built it in 1996 and 1997 and we have 30 households here this is the second neighborhood and we have these cutesy nicknames for our neighborhood so this one is frog first resident group and you might have heard the frogs in the background yeah this is second neighborhood group this was designed and built in 2002 to 2005 also 30 households and then as we walk around you'll see tree which is the third residential eco village experience i see so you're giving an acronym to frog song and then tree that's right right okay and we joke about tree frogs yeah [Laughter] one of the funny things is hey there cheryl yeah so we have people of all ages living here we have newborn babies we had two babies born during the pandemic wow and then we have people in their 80s who live here and many of them are still very active and we try to create a really cross-generational very inclusive environment here so it's all about earth-friendly living that's really what we're aiming for here and then how did it all start like where did it all begin oh it's a long story maybe come up here and just show you these maps yeah absolutely and then we can go for a walk so we have a hundred seventy-five acres here i just love the view up here for one of you is beautiful and i when we were walking there's ducks that don't even scatter they're just yeah part of the whole mix you know it's true we all we all love seeing the ducklings grow up yeah so back to your question about how this all started we when i say we uh my friend joan boker and i were the co-founders and one of our projects before we started this was we created a walk we organized a walk for the environment back in 1990 and we gathered together 150 people of all ages from different countries and we walked from los angeles to new york city over the course of nine months oh my gosh yeah so it was it was actually great training yeah wow [Laughter] yeah we were we were walking 15 to 20 miles a day did you find like uh connecting trails or did you have to walk on highways no we we walked on highways we walked on secondary roads um we were stopping in you know we stopped in 200 towns and cities across the country amazing and we did educational workshops in the schools we planted trees we started recycling programs because that was really early on yeah we talked about global warming back in 1990 and our our real motivation was just wake up people it's time to do something for mother earth so we learned so much from that experience and during the course of the walk joan started saying well hey you know we're having this real impact because everywhere we went we got tons of media attention we were working with local groups we were uplifting the work that was already happening in these communities and how about if we created a community that just stayed in one place what a radical concept and then we wouldn't have to walk 15 to 20 miles a day and we could still accomplish some of the same goals right so that was really the beginning of the germ of an idea for this eco village there were other models out there like this correct or had you known of them before so the term eco village was coined in 1989 okay the co-housing model that we're using which is based on community oriented living it started in denmark in the 60s but it it only became popularized in the united states in the 90s so there was at the time we had heard of the term eco village and there were a few around the world but very few we had heard the term co-housing but never seen one right and it's different than like a homeowners association or community land trust right yes okay yes because those existed right right so so part of the idea behind this place was to utilize models that already exist in different places around the us and also you know around the world and just say hey we don't have to reinvent the wheel but let's take the best of what's working from you know csa farming was brand new back then so we adopted that uh co-housing was brand new so we adopted that the the idea of an eco village a village where people come together and really consciously try to live by their values of being more earth friendly we adopted that all kinds of experiential learning opportunities that's really part of the eco village model that is also part of our model here so we are now part of the global movement of ecovillages which is thousands strong and that's really exciting i love being connected with all these people around the world and then we're part of this national co-housing movement and we have i think it's about 175 co-housing communities now in the united states but we're we're probably one of the most well-known eco villages in the country and even we're one of a handful of you know maybe 10 eco villages in the world that are really quite well known yeah and why do you think that is is it the how you've grown over the years is it your you know your ability to get out into media is it the programs that you run what do you think it is combination thereof i think it's a combination but we started out with a really big vision we were just incredibly naive um joan was a kindergarten teacher i was an anti-nuclear organizer and we just gathered a lot of people together and we fundraised we had no money i was a single mom with two young kids and we got we raised the money four hundred thousand dollars to purchase this beautiful piece of land 175 acres and uh i think the vision attracted people who were motivated smart really community conscious people did you come from this area or did you you do some research and say okay we want to be here because i think it's important when you're starting an eco village or any kind of co-housing for that matter that you're within some sort of vicinity that people could have access to jobs and other things if you're not producing your own materials or jobs on-site yes yeah actually that speaks to this piece of land because we had at the very beginning back in 1991 we looked at different parcels of land in the ithaca area and we chose ithaca because this was where joan lived and she had a connection with cornell university so we automatically had some respect from the very beginning because of that affiliation with cornell we were part of and still are part of the center for transformative action which is a non-profit affiliated with cornell so when we looked at land in this area we chose six different parcels and really studied them and one of the parcels was free it was in bricktondale oh yeah and which has become really hot now has it really it's become like yeah the trendy place to go but it's in a little bit more of a valley and you have a bit more of a a trip you know ahead of you exactly yeah so we consciously chose not to accept free land in brooklyndale because we knew if we were building an eco village of at the time we thought about 500 people it's ended up being half of that everybody would have to commute to work in those days people didn't work at home people would have to go to school they would have to go shopping you know entertainment everything involved the car and the ideal would have been to be in downtown ithaca but we wanted farming and food production to be a big part of what we do so we chose the next best thing which is two miles from downtown ithaca and it's turned out to be look at this i mean this is absolutely gorgeous i think [Music] do [Music] we built that pond that was the very first thing that we built and it actually was very easy because we just excavated and we didn't even have to put in a liner of clay or anything it's just 16 feet deep it's wonderful for swimming we have fish in the pond we have ducks we use it for kayaking we skate on it in the winter it's pretty cool and then this is uh so you said 175 acres and you just got that right from the beginning the get-go 175 or did you add on along the time uh we bought the whole piece of land it it actually we raised the money in two weeks and i can't believe this i mean it was really before the days of the internet it was before cell phones yeah i remember my ear got so sore from talking on the phone holding that to my ear i mean what was that what was the deal where you're saying like hey is was it a return on investment or was it like this is a donation to get us up and running we we actually asked people for loans and at that time we were offering you know interest it was compounding interest which was a mistake but it was three and a half percent interest and we talked to people and said this is our passionate vision will you join us and so the people that invested they were amazingly supportive they really loved the idea of an eco village that was brand new in this country at the time yeah that's not something that you always see in a place you know the zoning laws everything i would imagine that some towns you have that up against you because you're you're building many homes on a jointly owned piece of land but there's different families on it right so it could cause a little bit of disruption i would imagine from banks and anything else you know you're looking at insurance everybody i mean even the state attorney general's office was involved so yeah we had a lot of legal hurdles at the beginning because we were essentially you know creating disruption in the mainstream exactly and trying to figure things out you're a rabble browser and then they asked you what did you do before and you're like i'm an anti-nuke activist and they're like [Laughter] so here is what we did we partnered with a local architect who is also a builder and low-income housing developer and he and his wife were great jerry and claudia weisberg they had lived in ithaca for 20 years they were part of a local co-op housing co-op and so they really knew the ropes right and they were able to help us navigate and one of the first things we did after purchase in the land was we hired jerry weisberg for six thousand dollars and we said here's our vision of creating this eco village what would you recommend how do we do infrastructure how do we work with the town how do we navigate this is a totally foreign language for us now even before that which by the way it's a great tip because you're partnering with somebody who knows the ropes of like building building and zoning and codes and all that other kind of stuff yeah however how did you did you legally incorporate and and if so how did you do it before you actually went out and got the uh the funds because i'd imagine you'd have to present yourself as professional when right before you go out right so we we put together a team of people who were all volunteer somebody who was a banker somebody who was a real estate developer i forget who else but yeah a number of local people who were really smart about money and about the local real estate and we had to um we had to have the investors prove that they were sophisticated investors meaning that if they put in 130 000 which one couple from st louis did that they could lose that and not be totally bankrupt or bereft or whatever and so we had to prove that to new york state that these people knew what they were doing and uh that it was all reasonable and we incorporated as a 501c3 nonprofit got it and so that was the entity that we used to create the land to buy the land and so we actually incorporated as a non-profit in the first six months i got it and i remember writing the bylaws oh my god so many details you know getting consensus on this clause and that clause and really trying to think ahead about what do we what do we want to be when we grow up as an eco village so we still have that non-profit and uh it's served us well so let me show you this land so the land is as i mentioned it's just two miles from downtown ithaca so this is route 79 also called mecklenburg road and this way is to downtown ithaca two miles and so you came in on the entry road rachel carson way and when we purchased this land it was owned by lakeside development corporation they went bankrupt they had planned to subdivide this 175 acre parcel of land which is was abandoned farmland at the time and they were going to chop it up into one acre lots lots of driveways lots of roads lots of infrastructure and that's what traditionally what people do yeah yeah yeah and so this is totally typical american development um they were gonna leave 10 of the land as open space so here's an open area and actually you wouldn't be able to build on it because it's a wetland and there's another open space here and you couldn't really build on that because that is so sloppy yeah and here's another open space and there's this intermittent stream going through it and it's very steep so this is typical american development 90 development 10 open space which is required by the town of ithaca now first 10 open spaces required by the town of ithaca as you what you're saying yeah yeah yeah and so here's where the first well one of many many miracles in the development of this place happened um we we actually saw this piece of land some of our neighbors told us that it was available when these people went belly up and when they went bankrupt it reverted to the bank the bank sold it at auction and we made a bid at half price wow it was four hundred thousand dollars you know they were offering it for eight hundred thousand dollars one of the people on our board of directors is really great at getting bargains yeah and she said we can get it for four hundred thousand so because there was no infrastructure on it there was nothing it was abandoned farm fields yeah so it wasn't really quote unquote like worth much but you'd have to pay cash wouldn't you have to because there is no infrastructure so you gotta yeah so that's paid up so that's why we had to raise that four hundred thousand dollars and then it took us two weeks for joan and i to raise the money just by calling up people all over the country that anybody we knew that had money because we sure didn't have any and all these people came through and then it took a year to put the legal infrastructure together wow okay so here is this way of doing development once we purchased the land um which happened a year after our very first meeting we we had a five-day meeting to kick things off in june 1991 we called it our envisioning uh gathering and we drew about a hundred people from all over the country i was living in san francisco at the time and um so a year afterwards we were able to close on the land on the summer solstice of june 1992 and then we started planning for what we wanted to create this looks like a lot of our maps were like you get the overhead map orthographic map and then you start like drawing on top of it right so this is actually what we have created so here is the route 79 the main road to ithaca here is rachel carson way here are the three neighborhoods and what we chose very early on is we said we can do so much better than that first development plan we want to model something exactly the opposite so how about if we build on 10 of the land and leave 90 as open space so here we are each of these neighborhoods is 5 acres and that includes green space around them and we densely clustered the housing that is not typical in many eco villages people tend to spread out just it's the american way yeah elbow room but this is the co-housing model and the whole concept is creating community and one way you create community is like traditional villages anywhere in the world so i actually give tours to people from all over and i have had literally had people from china from south america from different countries in europe from africa from nepal and they go through they walk through our village and then they say this reminds me so much of home and i just get this wonderful feeling because what we've managed to recreate here is like you know this is quintessential human community [Music] [Music] [Music] and part of it is that people are living close to each other you know go figure this is this is the traditional way of living you don't have cars disrupting every move you make kids can play in the street people can eat together every time i go out my front door i see a neighbor a friend and it's just it's a great way to live so the streets are all pedestrian and we'll walk through them but i just wanted to make this point with the map but just to point out we have these three neighborhoods a hundred households all densely clustered on ten percent of the land we have um four organic farms this map was actually created before we had our fourth farm which is three-story farm which is quite large here and are they leasing the land or how does it work yeah okay we really value our farmers they do such hard work and it is so hard to be a farmer and you probably know about this or are learning about it through your homesteading and so we we want it to be as easy as possible for them so what we do is we lease the land to them and we lease it for the cost of the taxes on that acreage which is almost nothing because it's agriculturally sound so yeah that really helps them a lot and then how does it um work and how does it benefit the community like do you is it a benefit that you could go to the berry patch or have your csa here or how does it how does it work yeah so i i love tuesdays because that's the csa pickup day and about half of us who live in the village are part of west haven farm and we just take our little cloth bags and walk over here around groundswell and over to west haven farm and pick up our food for the week and the csa is pretty big i mean they feed a thousand people a week during the grind season actually i should say west haven farm feeds a thousand people a week they do half of that through the farmers market half through the csa yeah which is really impressive outside yeah because it's like you're your own village yeah but you have these almost you know community programs that reach outward into ithaca and the surrounding finger lakes and that was a key part of our vision from the very beginning we we didn't want to be isolated we didn't want to even be self-sufficient we have always seen ourselves as part of a broader ecosystem both environmentally and socially and economically so we we really are part of the region and we strive to be more and more integrated as we go along i wanted to just show the contrast between these two so this is typical suburban development this is the exact opposite this is 10 development this is 90 development this is 90 open space used for agriculture wildlife wetlands meadows forest and this is a little tiny 10 so that is what i i think that's one of our bigger environmental statements and when planners come to visit here or architects or developers this is what i really like to point out we have this really interesting interface with the natural world and uh nature is all around us and we love it and then we have these little battles with the geese you know we have muskrats in the pond sometimes that are burrowing into the pond and making it leak so we have to figure out how we how we interface with nature and you must have to agree upon that right yeah because like you might you must have to go back to your board and talk about that i i wondered about that because you have to have some type of internal zoning or policies like can everyone have a dog you know are are people resistant to having dogs yapping like when you start to live so close together i wonder how that changes things well those are really excellent questions so um yeah we we make a lot of decisions about a lot of things and we actually use consensus in two of the neighborhoods and then we use what's called dynamic governance in the third neighborhood which is a little bit more zorin dynamic governance is perhaps more sophisticated than consensus it is more of a business-like model but also very participatory so our governance model is each neighborhood has its own board of directors but the boards mostly are doing the will of what the 30 to 40 households want in that neighborhood then we have tons of committees and working groups and then we have spontaneous groups that come together for all kinds of purposes and so we strive for agreement on all these levels and sometimes it's really tough yeah and then i mean when people think about consensus though oftentimes people think of like well everybody has equal say but that might not always be true too because some people might not always be as engaged so they could potentially stand back and say okay i know that my opinion might not be as weighted as yours because you are far more engaged in this so consensus has a lot of nuance to it as well that's true that's true and and the same with dynamic governance and so we also have a village-wide um meetings once a month and yeah we we have very different levels of participation and it depends on where somebody is in their journey in life like if somebody is uh a single parent with young kids and working full-time they're not going to be able to participate in the same way that many of us retired people are so we actually really value our retired people because frankly if you don't have a full-time job you have so much more time on your hands and really want to make a contribution so often it's the elders that are leading things this is your 30th anniversary yeah so how did eco village not and excuse my language but age out you know what i mean because you're attracting people who are your peers how did you keep it relevant yeah yeah that's a good question so when we started this place in 1996 we were mostly young families and singles and and some older people we had about 60 children and frog when we started in the whole village now we have 42 kids wow you know this is up to the age of 18. yeah so we uh some of the 20 somethings have come back to live here which is kind of cool um in the same houses or how does it how does that work well during covid frankly a number of young people didn't have jobs you know they lost them due to covet and so they came back to live with their parents many times temporarily but sometimes they moved in on a more permanent basis some of them have their own places here so there is some of that but in addition to that we really want um an intergenerational community here so we attract young families in different ways there's a special family facebook that gets a lot of traffic about living at eco village we have parents who you know they just share some of what it's like to raise kids here and this is an amazing place for kids my granddaughter is visiting for the first time she's seven she's lived in india most of her life during kovid she was locked up in this apartment you know fifth floor apartment in delhi for like nine months i couldn't even go outside much and here she gets to play and you know meet other kids her age and she's just having a total blast she's learning how to swim for the first time so i think we met her actually the other day yeah she's very social she goes up to everybody hi my name is devic is that who it is yeah yeah she's really cute so you had mentioned that um you know the the farmland is leased when people get a home is it like a 49 or 99 year lease or how does it actually work do they get to buy their own home they buy their own home but they're actually buying shares in the co-op i see okay so this this uh neighborhood frog is a new york state housing cooperative and we have shares for the houses based on what size they are and you can tell the houses look pretty similar they're all duplexes so they share an exterior wall so this is two houses here but they are um they're different widths yeah that's one of the ways that even though they have the same interior design pretty much some houses are one bedroom some houses are four bedrooms and they're they vary in price and shares accordingly got it and then are each of the communities built that way or is there different uh models for different communities there are different models for different communities so i thought we could walk through this neighborhood a little bit and you could get a feel for it and then we can go over to the other neighborhoods the gardens are glorious here oh i'm glad you like them [Music] does each individual home keep up with their own garden and have their own landscaping ideas okay yeah is there any restrictions of that or not really uh we cutting down a tree all that other kind of stuff so cutting down trees is kind of a big deal somebody once cut down a tree without asking permission and uh there was quite an uproar when that happens i call it a kerfluffle and i think of it like chickens you know how if you walk into a pen of chickens and they all go so that's what i think of as a you know a kerfuffle where people get their feathers all fluffed up and then it dies down after a while so each neighborhood is based on a co-op model and so everybody is doing the share thing and that means that the co-op has a certain amount of power over you know decisions like who moves in who gets kicked out or whatever in fact we we basically never kick anybody out and we really like as much diversity as we can get yeah but if there were somebody who turned out to be an axe murderer we would have legal power to say no to that person well you it's so funny that you say that because when we were kind of developing and there's only a few of us who are on our own land yeah when we were developing our bylaws and our rules and how would we come together and how do we even make decisions yeah we were like well what happens if your child becomes a murderer you're you are literally creating these completely different scenarios like really off-kilter scenarios exactly just to try to get an answer to the issue that you're even if it might be a small chance very very easy bitsy chance you're really trying to look through every single problem that you could address right in advance yes you're you're describing it very well summer because that's how a lawyer has to think yeah and so what we found in in developing this whole project is we had to start thinking like planners like developers like architects like lawyers like insurance people we actually i'll tell you a funny story we actually had our insurance canceled because somebody somebody filmed we have a annual polar day um a polar bear uh where you run from where you ran out into the lake naked some people do it naked some people with bathing suits but you break through the ice on new year's day yeah go swimming so that's an annual tradition here yeah and somebody put a photo of it on our website and the insurance got canceled so it's funny but it actually you know it had real repercussions yeah we just we have to live in the real world the mainstream world but also show as many alternatives as we do well you did not read that fine print and that insurance that's funny so do you want to see the inside of a house we would love to yeah you can come into my home so this is like the early home then yeah yeah so this is the it's got a great channel creation yeah of homes this is i mean lots of great light it's got a loft like yeah yeah so we have 14 foot high window walls on the south side and these are passive solar homes and these are triple glazed windows which was wow really unusual in 1996. that is deluxe [Laughter] we actually what fiberglass fiberglass wow and so these are actually from a factory in winnipeg and we got a deal on them because that was one of our affordability strategies was to design and build everything fairly similar to each other yeah and so we ordered pallets many pallets of windows from them and they kept their factory open during the winter just for us wow and they came to our opening ceremony wow so you have to be really you know what you're really intimating is that you have to be really organized thoughtful and really think a lot of these things through it kind of reminds me of like our trip to greenstar and how they had the buying club and you have to organize people in order to buy bulk in advance in order to get that lower cost price you're doing the same for windows and building materials yeah you need to be on it in order to be able to do that you said you come in naive but you really learned a lot along the way yes yes and and we had great mentors uh yeah yeah do you have are those walking irises they are ah look at that i unfortunately haven't taken great care of it recently but yeah this is a plant that my son jason brought home from school like when he was five and now he's visiting with his daughter from india and he's now 38. oh my god so this is the mother plant and then i have given away so many irises which is so great they're very cool i just started um to grow grow those maybe a year and a half ago just as an alternative to the uh the chlorophytum camosun which is the spider plant oh yes you're familiar with yeah which is more common but you know those are so cool they propagate in a very similar manner yeah and what i love is they smell like um gardenias and they look like orchids and they only come out for one day yeah and i i just you know i track the days like some days i'll have 13 blossoms and i'll just watch those little blossoms start out like this and then they gradually gradually open up and then they release their fragrance and i just i love it and i used to stay home from work on days when i had that many blossoms it was just like such a special day i i thought okay this is going to be a really cool day something great is happening here colin you call in and you're like i have to stay home from work really sick really you just wanted to smell the flowers but in my case i'm working for the eco village so people understand [Music] [Music] so really when you were planning this whole location with the architect or the landscape designer you're planning for 500 people right so initially were you going to do more densely clustered communities of like say like 50 to 100 or are you were you always just going to do communities of 30. we were thinking communities of 30 and the the reason for that is that in co-housing they've done a lot of thinking about what makes for an optimal group of human beings who can really relate well to each other yeah and so 30 to 35 you know 40 at the top yeah is kind of like the seems to be a good number okay if you if you have a really small group like some co-housing communities are as small as 10 households people can perhaps not get along with each other you know if you have disruption in that size group it's going to hurt more in a group of 30 households it's small enough that everybody really knows each other and so there's more there's just a little more slack around social relationships um people know each other but they there's also room for people to you know not everybody loves each other but they may um feel like extended family so it might be like an extended family where you have a cousin that you don't particularly care for but then you have three cousins that you love and so you just learn how to get along and i actually think that the co-housing model is perfect for what we need in this world which is more connection and connection including with people who are very different from ourselves and who may have somewhat different values and you know as human beings living on this planet we're in crisis we're in terrible crisis environmentally politically socially economically and we have to figure out different ways of living and so this is one attempt one experiment in trying something that allows for people to work through their differences as best we can and really craft a way of living that is very intentional and you mentioned that you try to do things by consensus or dynamic governance before but what are some of the other softer skills like have you had to have a mediator on site or like to come up with like when people do really have significant differences like what are some of those soft skills that you've had to to learn and execute yeah oh communication is huge we have some people who live here who have been teaching non-violent communication for decades so that's really helpful we all have to learn how to communicate well and what we found is people need to be able to understand themselves and be able to speak out from that place of accepting themselves and knowing what their needs are and listening is huge you know so many people i think in this culture live in a very fast world where everything has to get done and it's all about me me me and this is about we and so in order to get to that place you just like need to slow down listen feedback did i hear you correctly what would you like to do this is what i need what do you need and so it's in some ways very simple skills and in other ways it's it's kind of complex hey and the other thing you mentioned is that you start off as a nonprofit have you stayed as a non-profit or have you had to come up with like different forms of structure as you've evolved and grown um we have so many different structures here really we we have an on-site lawyer who's great um who lives here who lives here okay yeah bill goodman and he's a really good man and um we haven't we've had a chat with him too have you yeah oh great yeah so he is uh very skilled at kind of thinking through legal issues and um looks like we're having a bike consultation yeah um and what he and other lawyers advised us very early on is to have different legal entities for different purposes and so we're not traditional developers those of us who created the first neighborhood we we couldn't put all of our life savings on the line to create the second neighborhood what if it went belly up we we couldn't afford that so by each uh neighborhood having its own co-op structure people had to put in their own money do their own decision making and they were somewhat insulated from disaster from each other then we have the village which is a not-for-profit as well the village association i think it's aviva and so that owns the land surrounding the neighborhoods not a lot of land but about 20 acres and so our joint infrastructure like our road our ponds our parking areas are owned by the va and we all have decision making over that so each entity has its own legal structure its own board of directors its own budget so we approve annual budgets for each one and then in most cases the neighborhoods have separate committees and those have their own budgets and they have their own leadership structure depending on which neighborhood and we have some village-wide teams like i'm on the village cook team we're the ones who cook dinners for 30 to 50 people once or twice a week and so we each have systems in place for how we're going to do everything you know it can get kind of complicated but particularly for newcomers but it all makes sense so it's it's pretty organic and i also think of it in permaculture terms that there is there's a lot of overlap in functions um and that there's some redundancy which is also helpful yeah and then is everybody who serves on those committees and um who's advising you is it from coming from internally from the eco village or is there some people who can actually serve on those boards and everything outside the ecovillage that's a good question hi looks like you just got some help with your bike and then you know you had mentioned some of the budgeting and the communal spaces the communal road do people have to pay into uh like a monthly rate or yeah to be able to maintain some of that yeah absolutely in each neighborhood we pay a co-op fee on a monthly basis and when i tell you what it is you'll think it's kind of high but it includes all the taxes for the unit and for the land surrounding the neighborhood and for the common house and then it is the taxes it's the electricity which we pay for at least in frog from our communal solar panels um what else does it include oh it's all it's snow removal it's all the village associations yeah we hardly pay for anything we do most of our own work volunteer but we do pay for snow removal we contract for that and let's say you know there's an issue with somebody's boiler um or a boiler in the common house that has to be repaired so we we do hire electricians and carpenters and things like that when we need them plumbers so in our household jared and i pay about 900 a month and that includes all of that the taxes the infrastructure upkeep and a bunch of money that goes into a capital fund for future repairs and that's actually a very clever way that co-ops are legally required by the state to plan ahead into the future for 30 years so we start putting in you know even at the very beginning of the neighborhood we were saving for our roof repairs 30 years from there got it yeah so it's unusual for us to have an experience where we have out of pocket costs that exceed that and compared i've been told i don't have experience with homeownership outside of here but i've been told that compared to what a typical homeowner would pay in taxes and insurance and maintenance costs and let alone setting aside a future savings account for repairs that it's actually pretty inexpensive so is is somebody when they come in and they if a house goes vacant yeah how do you post in order to show that there's a home available we post it on our website there's a place that is rentals and sales so our website is divided into three parts live learn and grow hey there good morning good morning i just want to say hi to my grandfather and then you said you also have rentals is that new yeah or is that something that you implemented in the beginning so at the beginning we didn't have any extra money to create extra housing um but over time a number of us have rented out rooms in our homes as a means of getting extra income so when my two kids were in college for instance jared and i rented out their rooms and even to one of my friends dan right yeah that's right i had forgotten that yeah he lived here for a while like a year and a half yeah yeah it was great to have him so we create little communities within the community and one of the houses here this house here um the woman who built it uh she rented out like most of the rooms in her house so it has been a changing communal house um different people different years but um in the third neighborhood we built that at the time we were organizing it and getting people from all over the country to commit and then the great recession happened in 2008 and a lot of particularly young families had to bow out because suddenly they're you know maybe they owned a house in california or you know florida or someplace else and a lot of those places they you know all their equity disappeared overnight so they were not able to come anymore so at that point those of us who were older in some cases people were able to purchase an additional home and then make that available for rent so in the third neighborhood tree we have i would have to count it up but i think it's like 10 rentals now out of 40. so that seems like a really good thing it brings in more a more diverse population frankly we don't have nearly as many people of color as we would like and as you probably know in this country so many people of color particularly african americans have been really disenfranchised over the generations and so they have much less working capital so rentals make um a more you know it make it more accessible for younger people for single people for single parents for people of color so we it adds a lot of vibrancy and then i think you you said that you're you attempted to do this with the farms as well you know west haven farm didn't they get a new owner as well yeah yeah and then was that somewhat financed to a certain degree or so um jen and john vocare smith uh this is joan strauder and son-in-law okay started west haven farm back right when we bought the land 1992. and developed it into this amazing farm the first csa in this area of new york and so it was huge for them to retire from farming they're still working but doing other jobs and they they looked literally for years for the right people and then when they decided to sell their farm there was a wonderful mexican family carlos and lorena who had grown up in a small town in mexico and had been working on various organic farms in this area and carlos and lorena could afford to buy the farm but they couldn't afford to also buy a house here and so jen and ellen over here who's like grandma for the kids took on fundraising for them and a number of us put in really significant funds either no interest or low interest to help carlos and lorena buy their house and there were also lots of smaller donations and that allowed them to purchase a home at eco village so they could be right there as farmers which is important yeah and also they're such a wonderful family yeah it's really lovely to have them here and they're such great farmers too they're producing all this wonderful food i think that's important because in some cases you could have it's almost like homeowner fine it's financing but you that's what you could get with co-housing or community is that you guys could pull your own resources to say okay well somebody's yeah somebody's you know not doing as well this time around or this person wants to invest in something can we give like a micro loan or some type of loan low interest like you said no interest loans two people in order to be able to make that happen that's you wouldn't usually get that in like a suburban right all american community like you're making mention of before because you don't have that community center you don't have that communication with one another yeah yeah when you have trust between people all kinds of things are possible and i love that about our community and you know there are times when we really have a lot of tension here and there's fallout about different things but underlying it all is an amazing sense of real community cohesion that allows for these kinds of experiments and allows people to step out of their comfort zone a little bit and say you know my well-being is actually predicated on other people around me having well-being right and our well-being as a community is actually predicated on some of our low-income neighbors in ithaca being well-fed and so during the pandemic we've had a number of people here who have been really proactive about getting food extra food from our farms and from our gardens and donating the produce and and sometimes cash donations to buy other food and distributing it so we're currently supporting about 350 low-income people in the broader ithaca area around us both through the uh mutual aid boxes yeah yeah and then food pantries i was going to say they started to do like those blue cupboards i don't know have you seen them yes yes yeah yeah so um through those and then also there's other pop-up food distribution hubs yeah and last summer i organized a food hub in which i just collected produce from people's gardens you know many of us are part of the csa at west haven part of the berry csa yeah then we have our own community gardens and then we are just like overflowing in this a bounty of amazing food and feeling guilty that we put the kohlrabi and the compost because we are not as familiar with it so so i revived something that had happened before which was this evi food hub so i ended up collecting about four coolers worth of food every week and then taking it to this pop-up food distribution and we were some of the only fresh produce because you know mostly it was um canned goods or yeah snacks and things right right very unhealthy stuff a lot like white bread and donuts yeah so this community looks different from the others and this one's using i would imagine more state-of-the-art but then is this also more affordable homes so this is a combination we this is our third neighborhood nickname tree and we finished building this in 2015 so six years ago and yes it uses passive house building technology which is a german method of building it's not as aesthetic i would say but it is incredibly energy efficient so the houses and this common house which also includes a number of apartments 15 apartments was designed for sustainability and affordability and accessibility and aging in place in other words and and also for people with disabilities right and so because the um the houses are designed with these foot thick walls you can't do a lot of angles and you know fun things but in many cases the houses are operating at net zero energy which is phenomenal so we made a choice in organizing the tree neighborhood many years ago to have all electric homes and at the time that was considered totally radical yeah and the reason that the group chose that was it was a political choice we didn't support fracking and even though we used natural gas in the first neighborhood because at that time that was considered wow that's a great transition fuel right and and now with fracking we were just so against using natural gas that we decided to do everything all electric and people had not really tried that much in this climate so by choosing to go all electric it meant that we had to be incredibly energy efficient we were already thinking about passive house and by adding the solar panels on the roofs um you can basically offset the heating any cooling most of these houses are built without cooling but now they're adding it with global warming yeah um and all the appliances all the plug load they call it anything you plug into the wall so so all of the energy needs are taken care of even hot water through either solar electric or solar thermal like on that porch roof yeah that's solar thermal so fascinating yeah and then this is i guess more of like how do members interact within different neighborhoods like do people have a tendency to just hang out in their neighborhood and call it a day or do you have ways for people and i know you have like shared communal areas but even when you're like what i'm thinking like when i was on campus at cornell you had west campus in north campus and mary did anybody from west campus ever go up to north campus and north campus come to west campus so i'm just wondering here you know how is it is it kind of like an all-inclusive resort or all-inclusive neighborhood and then they don't ever venture out to the other so i would say it really depends on people's personalities yeah some people are very much about their own neighborhood i want to like get to know people around me that's what's really important and some people like myself consider every neighborhood fair game you know for friendships for doing fun things together and so there's room for for people at all of those levels yeah and um during covid we did more of the hunkering down and now that covet is over i think most of us are really excited to you know spend time in other neighborhoods and see more of our friends get a lot of hugs yeah that's amazing i i wanted to point out the landscaping here this is done it was designed and implemented by a small team led by an artist who lives here so i was going to ask if you had like a beautification committee yeah it takes care of some of the more communal space gardens yeah we do so um she looks a little steam punkish in the back [Laughter] with the sculpture yeah yeah i love it janet is a sculptor and she's in her 80s she's one of our older residents and she just went to town here she just you know she had a vision and she recruited other people and they put this together and every year it gets more beautiful yeah more power to her that's amazing yeah and as you'll see most of these are perennials yeah so we're big on perennials because we don't like to do a lot of watering yeah although probably some of the annuals come in the little yeah container plantings right yeah right yeah but i'm uh i'm a perennial junkie too what's the point of this i understand tender perennials and we have to take them in you know plant them a little later oh it's this is great liz i mean this is uh quite marvelous just to see how everything shaped up because i got here i think i visited eco village i was considering of actually you know living here when i was in university because i think one of my friends had lived here or i like rented a room or something but that was back in like 2002 two i think so to see it expand and grow i don't remember it like this i was like so when i got here i wasn't quite knowing what i was going to expect and it wasn't this it wasn't right but it's pretty miraculous and to hear how you started with as you said in your own words being naive and having to learn along the way and it just goes to show you that if you're organized and you're dedicated and you have a vision and you are able to learn along the way then you're able to actually get something like this together which is like intensely sophisticated yeah and i know you intimated to it as well but it's not always a rose a walk through the roses that's for a lot of hard work a lot of hard work yeah and a lot of personalities that you deal with even if you kind of have shared vision you have all those personalities as well so yeah i can imagine that there's some challenges along the way yeah yeah we actually you had asked about conflict so we do have conflicts here we're human and we strongly emphasize having people work out their conflicts and so we you know if i if we were talking and you lived here and you were complaining about another person i would say oh summer have you talked to that person directly why don't you do that and so it's just like those little interventions like reminding each other these are our values this is how we do it around here and it's not that we're perfect oh my gosh we're so imperfect but we try over and over again as i mentioned before i just think it's so important in our world right now for people to learn these skills you know as much as we're doing environmental things that really make sense like passive house and net zero energy homes it's really a lot of the success of this place i think depends on the social skills and the communication and the visioning together and actually we have a group that i'm part of that is planning a 30-year visioning celebration and we're going to rent a big tent put it over there spend three days celebrating our 30 years together looking at you know how do we describe ourselves how do we want to be what do we want to be in the future how do we want this community to interact with the larger world at this particular moment in history and what are our visions for this community going forward so it'll be great well one question to leave you with is is where did you and do you want to see eco village maybe it started with one thing has that changed over the years and where would you like to actually see it in 30 60 90 years from now well first of all i hope it continues to grow and thrive and deepen and i hope that the farms get more and more economically viable and that we further integrate with the larger community for me the educational programs are so important and we're kind of in flux right now it's a little scary you know we've had all these years of fantastic educational programs with everybody from you know this age to adults but primarily university students and right now we don't have a director we have a really dedicated board for thrive which is our educational programs but it's been on hiatus with covet and it's really hard to now restart it without any staff so i'm praying that that sort of gels and comes together and that we're able to pick up our educational programs and really get them moving again because we have such a message to share with the world and a lot of it is experiential yeah i think that this is just such a wonderful template and it's inspiring to us you know we're not out there to start a large community ourselves but you could definitely learn from the lessons that you've shared and the structures that you've developed so yeah thank you so much for your time oh you're very welcome thanks for the opportunity it's really nice to talk with you and and to meet a friend of dan i know you

Channel: Flock Finger Lakes

Views: 1,127,891

Keywords: Flock, Flock Finger Lakes, Finger Lakes New York, homestead, homesteading, how to homestead, start your homestead, find your homestead, permaculture, permaculture farm, coliving, communal living, ecovillage, intentional community, upstate New York, summer rayne oakes, how to start a farm, farm life, market garden, gardening, outdoor gardening, gardening Zone 5, Ithaca EcoVillage, EcoVillage at Ithaca, commune, communal life, coliving environment, Ithaca, Ithaca New York communes

Id: n-uH36w9xg8

Length: 74min 54sec (4494 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/fuzzyshorts]

The EcoVillage at Ithaca was established in 1991 and has become a mature communal village with three neighborhoods developed on 10% of the land with 90% of the land devoted to farmland and natural areas. Given that we're interested in communally living at Flock, we took quite a bit of notes from the EcoVillage, which is celebrating their 30th anniversary this year.

[u/Doomer_Patrol]

When I was looking for an IC years ago I came across these guys. This is an *extremely* affluent community, mostly retired. Sure easy to fuck off into the woods when you can throw down a couple hundred grand required for entry and not have a job. This place is a joke.

[u/letmelickyourbutt12]

How would this make collapse livable? There are 8 million people in NYC proper. How would we transition into this? I ma happy that these people are living sustainably but this would not stop the starvation of the majority.

[u/[deleted]]

does anyone know where i can find resources on where to find other places like this in north america? i've sleuthed reddit a bit but feeling lost

[u/WhenIntegralsAttack]

This is incredible, thanks for sharing!

[u/ItsJustLittleOldMe]

Great video to watch. Thanks for posting.