City said NO PERMIT for Ecovillage. They Built it Anyway

50 years ago, this entire neighborhood was designed as an eco-paradise. It's kind of like living in a fruit forest. We said no to conventional housing development. We're just about to come onto the roof now. I call the house Earth Sheltered House. We have about eight inches of soil on the roof. The skylight right here in the middle of your garden. I heard it. But we came under tremendous criticism. The woman who was the head of the planning department says, this flies in the face of everything I've learned in college. And I looked and I said, yeah, I believe that. 270 homes on 70 acres with gardens, orchards, water catchment, passive solar house design and food production right in the middle of the neighborhood. That is revolutionary. It's really magical. Welcome to Village Homes, located in Davis, California. This whole neighborhood was designed around four key elements. And the first element is food production. Let's go over and take a look at the gardens. So there's seven acres of gardens, and it extends all the way from south to north of Village Homes. Everybody has their own choice of what they're going to grow, but they share and trade vegetables. And what we have is local self-reliance. This is the Central Valley of California, one of the most productive agricultural areas on the entire planet. You can grow so many crops here. We've got fava beans and artichokes, peas and tomatoes coming on, squash planted in the ground, flowers of every kind. This is orchards and vineyards. When we started planting, we selected out a variety of things to see which ones would do the best. There's almost every variety of fruit that you can grow. There is so much fruit here. Apricots, pomegranates, peaches, olives, pistachios, citrus, figs, but how do they fit it all in? 270 homes on 70 acres is about a quarter acre per home site, yet the home sites are small. The roads are narrow and the houses are clustered together, so the private space is small. But that means that the commons is huge, and it leaves 10% of the entire neighborhood open to grow food. Down every path, there's food to eat. Here, what would normally be useless concrete in the corner of the street has become an orchard. This is actually way more productive than mechanized agriculture because people are here planting diverse species, they've got cover crops, they have a rapid succession, people are composting weeds and food scraps, and all of that compost is being added to this highly fertile, intensively grown seven acres. This is what any neighborhood could look like. With long-term perennial agriculture, This pomegranate bush is going to live decades, these grapevines could live more than a century. People move in and out, but these olive trees stay right here, growing and producing more food year after year after year. But that's not the only sustainable way of life here at Village Homes. Up next, water. Just around the corner from Village Homes is a conventional neighborhood with wide, sun-baked streets. And all the water from this block is collected and drained out of the neighborhood through this storm drain. In a system like this, very little water goes into the ground, which dehydrates the landscape and makes the impacts of California's drought years worse. But the Village Homes planners had a radical idea to solve this water mismanagement. We'd spent about three years in the planning process and I thought well I need to design a system that has the water going into the ground. But they ran into a major problem. The city bureaucrats were afraid that without storm drains the neighborhood would flood and they refused to approve their plan. And the water design wasn't their only issue. The roads were far more narrow And they plan for food production everywhere. The city planners, the police department, the fire department, they were all adamantly against it. We had another problem. Getting financing for something that was this unusual was difficult. Bank of America says, well, this looks like it would make money, but we just disagree with what you're doing philosophically. Because the objective was to address real problems environmentally and socially. Their ideas were too revolutionary. And it seemed like the system just wouldn't allow it. But they didn't take no for an answer and supported a grassroots campaign to take over the city council. And we were fortunate to have three out of five city council people that were innovative and understood what we were trying to do and they approved it over the objections of all the city staff. With the new permits in hand, they pulled one over on the banks. I took all the innovation out of the presentation, made it look more normal, and finally got along. We broke ground in the fall of 1975. What they built has become the most sustainable neighborhood in America, and at its foundation is the water design. This hill I'm walking up and the basin behind it was sculpted very intentionally to manage rainwater in a revolutionary new way. And here's exactly how it works. They re-sculpted this flat landscape into a design where there are high areas and low areas, so that all the stormwater is collected in low basins that snake their way throughout the entire community, allowing the water to soak into the ground and recharge the surface aquifer. Here's an example to help you really understand the genius simplicity of how this works by analyzing a cross-section of the village home system. The roadways and the houses are on higher ground than all of the water during rain events that falls on the roofs and the roadways is channeled down into these swales and basins that weave their way through the entire community. And the cost isn't high because they're not putting in underground storm drain pipes. They're just shaping the land to hold water. They've created a water battery underneath this entire community. All that water soaks into the upper layers of the soil and feeds the surrounding trees, which creates shade, a park-like neighborhood, and a ridiculous amount of food. This is a good example of where the water comes off the street and then down into this area under the bridge and then on down to a recharge area. How did you go through the design process of figuring all this out? I had the engineer set grade marks, but the city wanted to review all my designs, but I didn't design it on paper. I sculpted it with the big earth movers. That actually really amazes me because in this day and age, you would never get permission to do something like this without having a really exact plan. Well, that was the same then. The city just kind of gave up on me. They didn't try to control anything. They knew I had three votes on the council, so I could just kind of sculpt it. But any design where you're concentrating massive amounts of water comes with a serious risk. Flooding. Because in heavy rain events, the water could overtop the basins and even flood houses. That's why designs like this always include overflow points, where the excess water can safely leave the development. However, the city was still skeptical, so they forced village homes to put up a bond of hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is like a security deposit, so that if and when the system failed and flooded, they would be required to use that money to put in conventional storm drains. And then the flood did come. About three or four years into construction, there were heavy rains in Davis and downtown streets were flooded and water was backing up. The city's storm drain system couldn't handle the deluge. Where water usually goes out overflow. Water was flowing back in from the city system. But Village Homes was able to absorb that water without flooding. We were taking a load off of the city system. This showed that Village Homes actually had a more effective design. And so the city gave them back their bond money, proving that the tree-huggers were right all along. Surprise, surprise. Now, here at Village Homes, we have a neighborhood where nature is encouraged and the natural water cycle has been restored. But they didn't stop there, because design element number three is energy. They used a simple technique to dramatically slash energy bills in the community that most developers completely ignore. It's called passive solar design. All of the streets are laid out elongated east to west with south facing solar orientation to allow natural light to shine into the houses and heat them in wintertime while also blocking the high summer sun to keep the houses cool in the hot season. And here's an example of exactly how that works. In the summertime, this grapevine creates shade so the sun does not get in these windows. In the winter, the leaves fall off and then sunlight can get in, meaning there's natural heating and cooling, which makes the energy consumption of these houses literally 30% of the energy consumption of the surrounding neighborhoods in Davis. That alone is revolutionary. And throughout Village Homes, some of their sustainable house designs take working with nature to a whole nother level. Like this underground house that seems to merge with the landscape itself. I call the house the earth sheltered house. Our house doesn't show up on a lot of maps. It's a green roof, it looks like a vacant lot. Literally there is soil above our heads and the earth is pushed up around us. Southwall is mainly glass for solar heat gain in winter. We could go up on the roof and you can see the perspective from there. We're just about to come onto the roof now. Chimney from our heating system. Skylight right here in the middle of your garden. Do you look up at your flowers when you're down there? Yeah, you can see them, yeah. You have about eight inches of soil. Underneath the soil is a synthetic rubber fabric. It's been here 45 years now. It's amazing. I could barely even tell that I was walking up on a roof. I thought you were taking me up on a hill. And here we are up on the top of your roof. But of all the design techniques used here at Village Homes, the crucial part that makes this a real community is element number four, social cohesion. Each house faces on to these common greenways with fruit trees, beautiful flowers, winding paths where there's a beautiful common space. These common areas that are shared with a pedestrian path, there's no through traffic. Youngsters, oldsters can walk or bike through the entire neighborhood without ever having to cross a street. Each home also has a private area, however the public areas are expansive and beautiful. It's really magical. The kids hear their friends from inside the house open the door and walk outside and it's really sweet. It does feel like everybody is part of the village. I was particularly interested in how design affects people's behavior and how do you develop a sense of community. You have to have places for people to come together and they have to have reasons to come together and what we've done is said the front yard could be fenced and private because everybody needs their own private space but on the other side is community. And a place that you can get together. The whole community owns the common areas, the green belts. It's funny because in the very beginning, people were like, well, I want more privacy. I wouldn't want to live there. I've never heard anybody who lives here say that they don't have enough privacy. In a time when there's a lot of loneliness in our culture, it's so easy here to just walk around and run into so many interesting, wonderful people who care about you and care about your kids and your family, and it feels great. The best part about this whole project is that they completely opposed you and then you completely showed them that this was working and functional. While there was so much protest by the civil engineers of what we were doing back then, today in California there's a requirement that you have to have on-site drainage retention areas to take on water. So now it's become law. After 50 years, I would say it worked, that people are really happy living here. All these projections about what was wrong and wouldn't work turned out not to be true. The most fascinating part about Village Homes is that they achieved a sustainable community without having to go full hippie commune. This is sort of just a normal neighborhood, but with some very good new design choices that properly manages water, allows for local food production, maximizes the solar orientation, and creates more social connection without compromising privacy. I want to see this spread to every new neighborhood because everyone deserves to live in a community that feels safe, healthy, and abundant. This is one of the best things we've ever done to a neighborhood here in America. Why does it not extend past the 70-acre boundaries of village homes? They created a model that's lasted over 50 years, and they've shown what's possible. Every new housing development should be following their lead, because it's just a better way to do it. Village Homes is known as the most desirable place in Davis to live, so I would say from every perspective that it's amazingly successful. Are you ready to design your own thriving permaculture site? Build a meaningful career and learn to restore ecosystems. In my 30 years as a permaculture designer, studying the best examples around the world, I've put everything I've learned into Oregon State University's online permaculture design courses. These online classes are the ultimate way to start mastering permaculture. My team and I will guide you through every step of the permaculture design process with personalized mentorship in a small group setting and over 100 hours of in-depth video training. By the end of the class, you'll create an advanced permaculture design for your chosen project, gaining the professional skills that you'll need to start healing the world. So if you're ready to be part of the solution, then this is your starting point. Click the link below to sign up And I'll see you in class.