https://laecovillage.org/
Editing needed here, still good to read. Oct 21
LA Eco Village
I visited LAEV for several hours in the fall of 2024. Lois showed me around both the eco village but also the nearby neighborhood. Wonderful visit. This writing borrows from the LAEV website and impressions from my visit.
From the LAEV website -
The Los Angeles Eco-Village Intentional Community consists of approximately 40 folks who have moved to the neighborhood to live more ecologically and more cooperatively. Most of us are demonstrating the processes—ecologically, economically, and socially —that manifest an ecovillage. We are raising the quality of community life while lowering our environmental impacts, and expanding public awareness about more sustainable urban living.
LA eco village came into being in 1993. Its location is inner city urban, about 3 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. This area was affected by the Rodney King riots in 1992. Early LAEV pioneers decided to rehabilitate an existing gritty and challenging urban area instead of building a new state of the art eco village in another part of LA. LAEV resides on a quiet street only a block from one of LA's busiest and most congested arteries, Vermont Avenue. There are many bus stops nearby and even a metro stop a ten minute walk away
I visited in 2024, taking public transportation, including the subway, from LAX to LA Eco Village. The neighborhood is very urban with apartments and multi family structures. There is a wide variety of ethnic residents in the area and several public schools. A one time thermal spa, now a drug rehabilitation center is a block away. Another neighbor is the Bresee Foundation's Youth Center, located next to the Bimini Slough Ecology Park – a street removed and turned into a park landscaped with native plants and a block long, day lighted rainy weather creek. Vermont Av on the west side of LAEV has a hard-scaped congested strip mall, packed with shops and stores including a car parts store, sea food supermarket, pharmacy and many more. The larger area is known as Koreatown.
LAEV has a complex set of ownership and financing arrangements. The land under the buildings is part of the Beverly-Vermont Land Trust. The eco village has three buildings with 50 units of residential capacity. The buildings, all decades old, undergo gradual upgrades for energy conservation and livability. The eco village is a resident organized limited equity housing cooperative. The buildings and land are removed from the speculative real estate market and will continue to be affordable housing into the future. They were bought with two million dollars in money borrowed from friends and others, avoiding conventional financing.
Core values for the eco village go like this, from the LAEV website -
1. Celebrate and include joy in all our endeavors
2. Take responsibility for each other and the planet through local environmental and social action
3. Learn from nature and live ecologically
4. Build a dynamic community through diversity and cooperation, giving and forgiving 5. Inspire compassionate, nurturing, & respectful relationships 6. Create balanced opportunities for individual participation & collective stewardship 7. Engage our neighbors and broader community in mutual dialog to learn, act and teach
Other core ideals are to depave as much of the two block neighborhood as possible, to grown as much food as possible, to recycle and restore as much habitat as possible, to be as water wise as possible, to reduce energy needs as much as possible, to provide conflict resolution services to the neighborhood, to offer cultural, health, economic and recreational opportunities to the neighborhood.
LAEV as an organization and its members support and participate in a variety of initiatives that benefit people and planet. Here are several described on their website.
Food Lobby. LAEV has, essentially a micro natural food store in its lobby. Open several hours during the week, it makes available basic healthy food products to nearby neighbors. There is also a Community Supported Agriculture drop off for fresh produce. Friends, members and neighbors can also buy monthly in bulk from a local natural food distributor. Buying in bulk saves money.
Time Bank. Members of the time bank exchange an hour of services for an hour of other services from members of the bank. Money is avoided. The ideal is to address under served needs and make available services by avoiding the cash economy.
Bike Talk Radio. This program plays on Pacifica Station KPFK and other Pacifica Network stations. The weekly talk show takes a look at bike news both local and national and advocates for bikes and the rights of bike riders.
Ciclos. Ciclos is a 501c3 non profit with the mission to increase community access to cargo bikes in particular and bikes in general to underserved people. Ciclos offers internships and training in bike fabrication and repair, particularly to young people of color.
My own visit to LA Eco Village took place in November, 2024. On my way to three months in Italy, I chose a flight that included seven hours in Los Angeles, enough time for a short visit to the Eco Village. I took a bus into Union Station and from there, a subway to the nearsest stop to LAEV, leaving me with a fifteen minute walk on Vermont Av. I had made acquaintance with Lois some years before and was always curious to visit LAEV in person.
LA Eco Village is in a part of Los Angeles dominated by cars and concrete. The occasional palms rising above the hard scape. We walked and talked for several hours in the immediate neighborhood including the quiet street the eco village is located on and the strip mall on Vermont which they shared an alley with.
The property occupied by LAEV is heavily vegetated. The main lobby is spacious with older overstuffed furniture. Apartments and shared spaces are up the stairs of the tidy building dating to the 1920's. There were historical fotos on the walls, some art work, bulletin board and friendly residents. A favorite location was the courtyard with a lot of edible trees, surrounded by building.
We checked out the youth center down the block, talked with people who worked there doing great work for young people. We appreciated the small eco park installed where there was once a street. Lois explained the history of the thermal spa on we passed by, now a drug rehabilitation center. We explored some green spaces on the street across from the eco village, one are an expansive home for a flock of chickens
A big interest I had was to see the repurpsed concrete structure at the end of the street farthest from the youth center. The site of interest was an auto repair business and gas station. The site had to be remediated because of leaks from the gasoline storage tanks. The space is now used for bicycle fabrication and a meeting space. There's a tiny house on the property and a revegetation project we watered, overlaying the remains of trolley tracks.
The intention for the former auto repair building is for it to become a community culture center for events and meetings. Also very exciting is the intention to transform the quiet street, over 100 yards long, between the hub and the eco village main building. Remarkable as it sounds, the city of car dominated Los Angeles offers an opportunity to residents to actually decommission a street if the removal of car use to that street has minimal impact on those living on or near that street. Ending car use on this part of the street from the culture space to the eco village would have minimal impact on the use of cars in the immediate neighborhood.
So the plan would be to turn the street into a pedestrian area, free of cars, landscaped and welcoming to people and nature.
At the time of my visit, progress was being made for the turning the street into a pedestrian area. My time at LAEV was coming to a close.
I cooked up a hot meal in the community kitchen upstairs in preparation for my return to LAX and a lenghty flight to Copenhagen and then Milano, Itlay; my destination over the next several days, Alghero, Sardegna. I would have time to reflect on my visit to LAEV. I love the green spaces, the courtyard, the repurposing of the older apartment buildings into an eco village, the progressive neighbors and people friendly initiatives on the street.
Contact me Donate to the Primer
LA Eco Village
I visited LAEV for several hours in the fall of 2024. Lois showed me around both the eco village but also the nearby neighborhood. Wonderful visit. This writing borrows from the LAEV website and impressions from my visit.
From the LAEV website -
The Los Angeles Eco-Village Intentional Community consists of approximately 40 folks who have moved to the neighborhood to live more ecologically and more cooperatively. Most of us are demonstrating the processes—ecologically, economically, and socially —that manifest an ecovillage. We are raising the quality of community life while lowering our environmental impacts, and expanding public awareness about more sustainable urban living.
LA eco village came into being in 1993. Its location is inner city urban, about 3 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. This area was affected by the Rodney King riots in 1992. Early LAEV pioneers decided to rehabilitate an existing gritty and challenging urban area instead of building a new state of the art eco village in another part of LA. LAEV resides on a quiet street only a block from one of LA's busiest and most congested arteries, Vermont Avenue. There are many bus stops nearby and even a metro stop a ten minute walk away
I visited in 2024, taking public transportation, including the subway, from LAX to LA Eco Village. The neighborhood is very urban with apartments and multi family structures. There is a wide variety of ethnic residents in the area and several public schools. A one time thermal spa, now a drug rehabilitation center is a block away. Another neighbor is the Bresee Foundation's Youth Center, located next to the Bimini Slough Ecology Park – a street removed and turned into a park landscaped with native plants and a block long, day lighted rainy weather creek. Vermont Av on the west side of LAEV has a hard-scaped congested strip mall, packed with shops and stores including a car parts store, sea food supermarket, pharmacy and many more. The larger area is known as Koreatown.
LAEV has a complex set of ownership and financing arrangements. The land under the buildings is part of the Beverly-Vermont Land Trust. The eco village has three buildings with 50 units of residential capacity. The buildings, all decades old, undergo gradual upgrades for energy conservation and livability. The eco village is a resident organized limited equity housing cooperative. The buildings and land are removed from the speculative real estate market and will continue to be affordable housing into the future. They were bought with two million dollars in money borrowed from friends and others, avoiding conventional financing.
Core values for the eco village go like this, from the LAEV website -
1. Celebrate and include joy in all our endeavors
2. Take responsibility for each other and the planet through local environmental and social action
3. Learn from nature and live ecologically
4. Build a dynamic community through diversity and cooperation, giving and forgiving 5. Inspire compassionate, nurturing, & respectful relationships 6. Create balanced opportunities for individual participation & collective stewardship 7. Engage our neighbors and broader community in mutual dialog to learn, act and teach
Other core ideals are to depave as much of the two block neighborhood as possible, to grown as much food as possible, to recycle and restore as much habitat as possible, to be as water wise as possible, to reduce energy needs as much as possible, to provide conflict resolution services to the neighborhood, to offer cultural, health, economic and recreational opportunities to the neighborhood.
LAEV as an organization and its members support and participate in a variety of initiatives that benefit people and planet. Here are several described on their website.
Food Lobby. LAEV has, essentially a micro natural food store in its lobby. Open several hours during the week, it makes available basic healthy food products to nearby neighbors. There is also a Community Supported Agriculture drop off for fresh produce. Friends, members and neighbors can also buy monthly in bulk from a local natural food distributor. Buying in bulk saves money.
Time Bank. Members of the time bank exchange an hour of services for an hour of other services from members of the bank. Money is avoided. The ideal is to address under served needs and make available services by avoiding the cash economy.
Bike Talk Radio. This program plays on Pacifica Station KPFK and other Pacifica Network stations. The weekly talk show takes a look at bike news both local and national and advocates for bikes and the rights of bike riders.
Ciclos. Ciclos is a 501c3 non profit with the mission to increase community access to cargo bikes in particular and bikes in general to underserved people. Ciclos offers internships and training in bike fabrication and repair, particularly to young people of color.
My own visit to LA Eco Village took place in November, 2024. On my way to three months in Italy, I chose a flight that included seven hours in Los Angeles, enough time for a short visit to the Eco Village. I took a bus into Union Station and from there, a subway to the nearsest stop to LAEV, leaving me with a fifteen minute walk on Vermont Av. I had made acquaintance with Lois some years before and was always curious to visit LAEV in person.
LA Eco Village is in a part of Los Angeles dominated by cars and concrete. The occasional palms rising above the hard scape. We walked and talked for several hours in the immediate neighborhood including the quiet street the eco village is located on and the strip mall on Vermont which they shared an alley with.
The property occupied by LAEV is heavily vegetated. The main lobby is spacious with older overstuffed furniture. Apartments and shared spaces are up the stairs of the tidy building dating to the 1920's. There were historical fotos on the walls, some art work, bulletin board and friendly residents. A favorite location was the courtyard with a lot of edible trees, surrounded by building.
We checked out the youth center down the block, talked with people who worked there doing great work for young people. We appreciated the small eco park installed where there was once a street. Lois explained the history of the thermal spa on we passed by, now a drug rehabilitation center. We explored some green spaces on the street across from the eco village, one are an expansive home for a flock of chickens
A big interest I had was to see the repurpsed concrete structure at the end of the street farthest from the youth center. The site of interest was an auto repair business and gas station. The site had to be remediated because of leaks from the gasoline storage tanks. The space is now used for bicycle fabrication and a meeting space. There's a tiny house on the property and a revegetation project we watered, overlaying the remains of trolley tracks.
The intention for the former auto repair building is for it to become a community culture center for events and meetings. Also very exciting is the intention to transform the quiet street, over 100 yards long, between the hub and the eco village main building. Remarkable as it sounds, the city of car dominated Los Angeles offers an opportunity to residents to actually decommission a street if the removal of car use to that street has minimal impact on those living on or near that street. Ending car use on this part of the street from the culture space to the eco village would have minimal impact on the use of cars in the immediate neighborhood.
So the plan would be to turn the street into a pedestrian area, free of cars, landscaped and welcoming to people and nature.
At the time of my visit, progress was being made for the turning the street into a pedestrian area. My time at LAEV was coming to a close.
I cooked up a hot meal in the community kitchen upstairs in preparation for my return to LAX and a lenghty flight to Copenhagen and then Milano, Itlay; my destination over the next several days, Alghero, Sardegna. I would have time to reflect on my visit to LAEV. I love the green spaces, the courtyard, the repurposing of the older apartment buildings into an eco village, the progressive neighbors and people friendly initiatives on the street.
Contact me Donate to the Primer