Los Angeles Eco-Village (LAEV) began on New Year’s Day 1993 after civil unrest, urban fires and riots subsequent to the Rodney King verdict (1992). These protests redirected the attention of a group of 20
visionaries set on building a US$25m ‘state-of-the-art eco-development that might have taken decades to develop’ on 11 acres of city-owned landfill several miles away. Instead, as co-founder Lois Arkin recounts, the unrest prompted them to retrofit environmental sustainability and ground cooperation and community in the diverse, disrupted and damaged working-class neighbourhood that had been her home for more than a decade.
This leap of faith was economically rational: damage from several earthquakes during 1992 as well as the civil unrest had sent real-estate prices down, making the purchase of degraded apartments in this area more feasible than other options they had considered. LAEV activists – many of them artists, who would apply artistic skills to spread sustain-ability practices – began on the street, getting to know their neighbours better, in order to inform and lay the groundwork for realising the eco-communal housing and neighbourhood activism that has remained central to their very urban ecovillage ever since.
By the mid-2010s, LAEV intentional community had around 40 committed members and a similar number of active participants assisting in a range of ecovillage activities. Managing 50 apartment dwellings, they were immediately accessible to 500 neighbourhood Figure 6.2 Interior of a Lammas dwelling
Source: Simon Dale, photographer
residents, predominantly on low incomes and from around 15 ethnic backgrounds. In short, LAEV acted as an outreach hub, for locals especially, to learn about urban community-oriented sustainability as a way of the future:
The space includes cooperative affordable housing, native landscape, on-site food growth, micro social enterprises, a community land trust, pedestrian-friendly streetscape, bike-friendly amenities, and a host of democratic community-building activities. To visit is to not only feel the history of community transformation, but also be inspired about what a more liveable L.A. can exemplify.21
Formal LAEV structure: networked institutions
As is typical of many ecovillages, the complex activities, scope and range of responsibilities that comprise LAEV are managed through an integrated web of legally distinct institutions, each with specific aims and organisers. In the 1990s, the Cooperative Resources and Services Project (CRSP) – established in 1980 as a not-for-profit community development organisation and the seedbed for LAEV – bought two apartment buildings. In 2011, the Beverly-Vermont Community Land Trust (BVCLT) and the CRSP purchased yet another apartment building. Existing renters were offered the option of remaining in their homes irrespective of whether they decided to become active in LAEV or not.22
Instead of conventional banking, funds from CRSP’s Ecological Community Revolving Loan Fund – supported by US$2m credit from friends and other donors, most of whom had been repaid by 2014 – enabled the property purchases and rehabilitation of dilapidated, damaged apartments and environmental retrofits. By the mid-2010s, most LAEV members lived in one of two adjacent apartment buildings on land owned by the BVCLT – donated to the CLT by the CRSP in 2012 – with the buildings owned and governed by another not-for-profit, limited-equity housing cooperative Urban Soil/Tierra Urbana (USTA).
Members of the CRSP, the BVCLP and the USTA comprised the LAEV Intentional Community. Renters’ payments covered building costs and the ownership models were designed to protect the land and buildings from re-entering the speculative real-estate market.23
Urban dwellers: transport and food
While conveniently located to public transport, LAEV operates over two blocks in East Hollywood close to ‘one of Los Angeles most auto congested traffic corridors, Vermont Avenue’. LAEV members have driven a movement away from automobiles in their neighbourhood and beyond by encouraging reduced car usage, offering a discount of hundreds of dollars per annum to renters without cars, renovating garages into work and business spaces, promoting and supporting bike use (such as through the LA County Bicycle Coalition), a LAEV member establishing a vibrant repairing Bicycle Kitchen, installing arty SLOW DOWN signs on street posts and campaigning to eradicate all through traffic in their neighbourhood. As such, they lay groundwork for Mayor Villaraigosa (2005–2013) to champion a 2011 Los Angeles’
Bicycle Master Plan to establish 1680 miles of interconnected bikeways (40 miles per annum) and advise all agencies to promote bike programs and education.24
Encouraging walking and cycling is significant to reduce car and air travel to reverse climate change. For instance, a 2006 environmental audit of the well-established Scottish Findhorn ecovillage community and business showed that even though both the total travel and the overall ecological footprint of Findhorn residents were half the Scottish average, alarmingly, Findhorn residents’ air travel was around double the average Scottish level per capita. Findhorn residents made significant savings in terms of car, but not air, travel. A study of the well-known Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED) in London showed similar results and advised guilty residents to reduce or eliminate air travel.To avoid regular commuting, many LAEV members have found work close to home.25
Furthermore, such studies indicate considerable environmental savings from self-provisioning in food, a tall order in a global city. LAEV have established a food cooperative in their main apartment lobby where residents and locals can order fresh organic vegetable and fruit boxes delivered from local farms on a weekly basis. Locals can join the cooperative to buy cheap bulk dry foods by paying a nonmonetary fee working in the cooperative around 20 hours per annum. The LAEV blog is replete with news on the dozens of small garden beds and fruit trees that they co-developed throughout their neighbourhood with the aim of greater locally produced food sufficiency. Many LAEV members and
their neighbours belong to the Arroyo Seco Network of Time Banks where they contribute work by the hour credited by another kind of work done by another member for an hour – a system that can facilitate sharing the product of growing, preparing and cooking food locally and collectively.26
The ecovillage has implemented programs to improve the environmen-tal efficiency of apartments through water and energy saving appliances, use of solar energy, drought-resistant landscaping and rain gardens, and by connecting pipes to divert grey water to community gardens (requiring householders to watch what goes into their waste water, such as keeping to biodegradable detergents). Erstwhile waste, along with material mined from local landfill, is reused as construction materials, recycled or composted in bins or holes in LAEV food-producing gardens, of which there were 24, along with 100 fruit trees, in 2011.27
Core values
After an international tour of ecovillages, Litfin suggested using a four- pronged approach to their analysis, combining ecology and economics, and community and consciousness (‘E2C2’).28 Litfin associates spirituality and religiosity, through ‘consciousness’, to environmental respect. But, is there a necessary and straightforward link between either spirituality and sustainability, or consciousness and commitment? For instance, as discussed in previous chapters, studies show that consciousness of environmental imperatives for change does not necessarily inform more sustainable behaviour in practice.
Furthermore, from her E2C2 perspective, Litfin was surprised that the determinedly secular LAEV ‘was also the most religiously diverse community I visited’. By highlighting ‘consciousness’ and weighing its definition down as the driver of practices, Litfin assumed that the secularity of LAEV would lead to the ‘lowest common denominator’.
If, instead, one acknowledges that secular environments are tolerant and protect diversity – giving no particular set of beliefs privilege in communal rituals and decision-making – LAEV’s religious diversity is understandable.29 Sustainability motivation and commitment in practice can be driven by simple scientific understandings and strong socio-environmental values and are, arguably, easier to apply collectively than in an individual household.30 This point is made by LAEV core values, listed in Box 6.1, that members have committed to since 2001.
In terms of cultural diversity, impressed by the community’s self-reliant
‘DIY ethic’, a Chicana who lived there from 2008 to 2011 recalled LAEV as ‘an important site where a racially integrated group experiments with life beyond the usual story for many of us who grew up in marginalized communities’. She described LAEV’s approach as a complete reversal of mainstream aspirations – ‘rising above poverty, we are expected to embrace status-oriented consumerism’ – while LAEV taught voluntary collective simplicity instead.31