Profiles in Sustainable Housing, Fall 2004

Los Angeles Eco-Village: A Model for Human and Planetary Survival

by Maggie Coulter

Ecovillages are intended to be human-scale communities in which people ultimately live in balance with nature and with each other. The Ecovillage Training Center, estimates there are about 20,000 ecovillage communities operating worldwide. One of those is the Los Angeles Eco-Village (LAEV) located on Bimini Place, a one-block street about three miles west of downtown Los Angeles. LAEV is in the working-class and commercial Wilshire Center/Koreatown neighborhood. Cooperative Resources and Service Project (CRSP) is a resource center for cooperatives. Today, about 40 LAEV residents live in two adjacent multifamily buildings owned by CRSP.

"The potential of ecovillages is tremendous," explains Lois Arkin, founding member of LAEV and executive director of CRSP. "Although it takes time for people to learn again to live in an ecologically based value and living system, ecovillages can even help reverse the negative environmental, social, and economic impacts of unsustainable growth and development patterns."

Arkin worked as a facilities planner in the aerospace industry, with troubled youth and their families in East Los Angeles, and in the music industry before discovering cooperatives. "It was my Eureka. I took six months off and traveled around the country meeting as many people in the co-op world as I could. When I returned in 1980, I started CRSP, the Cooperative Resources & Services Project which was initially an education and training center for cooperatives." 

"We started with housing co-ops. I had a lot of concerns about real estate speculation, and was determined to do something to create permanently affordable housing. I was also very concerned with the environment, so it was natural to combine ecology and permanently affordable housing which translated into the emerging term "ecovillage."

Transformation
About 500 people live in 13 multifamily buildings on Bimini and White House Place. The buildings on Bimini were originally related to the Bimini Baths, which was operational from 1901–1951. "They were looking for oil," Arkin explains, "and they found these hot mineral springs, 2,000 feet underground. The Baths were an international premier spa. People came from all over the world to this little street. After the spa closed, the buildings and street began a gradual decline that accelerated during the 1980s and early 1990s. By the time of the 1992 uprisings resulting from the Rodney King beating and trial, the neighborhood was seriously blighted and people were afraid that they or their children would be accosted or harmed."

The first step was to make the neighborhood feel safe again. Arkin and her organizational volunteers began going door-to-door and meeting people. "We worked with neighborhood kids, published a neighborhood newsletter, and held community meetings," said Arkin. "Within a relatively short time, the neighborhood began to feel safe again, and neighbors started interacting. The foundation for being able to make changes is people getting to know one another. It helps to be friends with someone before you ask them to address problems in the neighborhood."

Early Green Building
Both of LAEV’s 1920s-vintage building were purchased with loans through CRSP’s community revolving loan fund, which used money borrowed from organizations and individuals, not banks.

"We bought our first building at 117 Bimini for $500,000 in 1996, while real estate was still very depressed from the riots and the 1994 earthquake. The 40-unit building had 36 studio units, about 400 square feet in size, and four one-bedrooms of approximately 600 square feet. Two of the units were set aside as common space. We bound the second building, 127–133 ½ Bimini Place, in 1999 for $314,000. It had eight one- and two-bedroom units that were 800 to 1,000 square feet."

"In similar nonprofit housing projects, rehab work can run as high as $150,000 per unit. Our costs have stayed between $2,500 and $6,500 per unit, depending on the degree of rehab required. We did all the rehab with both paid and in-house labor," explained Arkin. "We stripped 10–12 layers of paint and wallpaper off most of the walls. We painted with non-VOC paint, which was hard to find then, although now it is the law. We refinished some of the original Douglas fir flooring and used engineered wood made from wood waste on other floors. We also used other sustainable materials including bamboo, cork, and linoleum."

The Community
LAEV has two basic types of residents, pre-existing tenants and those who are members of the intentional community. "In most affordable housing rehabilitation projects, whoever buys the building pays everyone to leave," explained Arkin. "We had a policy from the start that there would be no involuntary relocations of pre-existing residents, so we still have many people who were here when we purchased the buildings. New residents are required to demonstrate their commitment to more ecological and cooperative living patterns. They go through a process to do this and then have to be accepted by the community."

Car Alternatives
"Here at LAEV, we are trying and succeeding in living lighter on the planet," says Arkin. "One of the main ways we do that is by reducing the use of cars. From my perspective, the car issue is the most serious. All the other things we do, bringing bags to the store, buying recycled, nothing holds a candle to the pollution of cars or the greed for fossil fuels, most which don’t belong to us.

"We discourage car ownership. People without cars have cheaper rent and can park their bikes for free. Out of our 40 community members, only 14 own private cars. And only half of the cars are used more than occasionally. There is lots of informal car sharing. I and some others also belong to Flexcar, a car-sharing program."

"How one makes the decision about not having a car is significant," Arkin notes. "It is important that you think about it as ‘getting rid of the car,’ getting rid of a burden, not ‘giving up your car’ which is about sacrifice. We are less than a 15-minute walk away from 20 bus lines and 2 subway stops that run every 5–20 minutes, so anyone that really wants to reinvent their life to live without a car can do that over time."

LAEV also supports non-use of cars by encouraging on-site livelihood. Their nonprofit provides some livelihood for about a dozen residents, anywhere from about 5 to 70 percent of monthly income. A number of others are working out of their units or trying to move in that direction. Some have added lofts to free up potential workspace. "Because the rents here are a third to a half below market, people can afford to work and commute less or work at something they can do at home, even though they won’t make as much money at it," Arkin explained.

LAEV also promotes bicycles use. "A resident started helping people repair their bikes for free in a vacant unit. One of the things we want to do is to incubate small ecological businesses, so we helped out and now this is the Bicycle Kitchen. They have classes to teach people how to repair bikes including a class in which women and girls teach each other. They also work with low-income kids to build bikes they can keep."

The lead handy person does not have a car, he transports materials and supplies on his bike "truck." Some residents will go shopping together. While some take the bus, someone else with a bike truck rides over and brings back the groceries.

Reuse
In doing the initial rehabilitation, LAEV used Interface carpet tiles donated by the Palm Springs Convention Center in 1998. "We often get low-cost used materials from yard sales, thrift stores, or just discards," explains Arkin. "Somebody bought dozens of Sautillo tiles from Mexico at a yard sale and we used them in kitchen remodels. We have used broken tiles to fill up sidewalk cracks and potholes rather than have the city fill them with asphalt. For the first several years, only used appliances were purchased."

After the 1994 earthquake, CRSP had a contract with the City of Los Angeles to collect red brick that had fallen. They collected about 30 tons and have used a lot of it for neighborhood beautification projects, especially for garden paths. The bricks have been reused a number of times as the gardens have changed over the years. Many of the bricks were also given away to other nonprofit organizations for their neighborhood beautification projects.

Recycling
When CRSP bought the first building in 1996, 23 households were filling up two 3-yard dumpsters twice a week. Now, with 40 households, they have one bin that gets picked up once a week. Even so, Arkin finds things that could be recycled or reused in the dumpster. "There are lots of people here who are passionate about recycling and lots who aren’t. We need to do more education. We still have discrepancies between vision and practice and need to work on closing that gap."

Life Cycle Issues
LAEV factors lifecycle issues into its decision-making as well, which affects choices about materials like paint and plastics. For example, CRSP has rehabilitation policies that include using building materials that are least polluting, least toxic, most local, and most recycled-content. However, Arkin notes, "Overbuying, even of nontoxic material, in our case paint, isn’t ecological. That is a practice we need to change."

"Even the use of recycled plastic raises issues. It still makes us dependent on oil and still contributes to pollution. The fact that it is recycled isn’t a reason to keep purchasing more plastics, instead of reusing what we already have."

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Last updated: August 01, 2008