230 people living communally on 175 acre eco village [video]
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If you look at the map and don't have the public relations material in front of you, the urban form is ordinary exurban sprawl.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ecovillage+At+Ithaca+Inc/@...
Sure there's a bus stop at the end of it's long driveway. Route 20 has six buses per weekday. Three buses a day on the weekends. https://tcatbus.com/bus-schedules
If you're going anywhere in the long cold Ithaca winter, a car is the most practical option because it's still sprawl. Maybe better sprawl. But still sprawl even though there's a garden instead of a golf course.
'The point is to see what value we can find in the paper, not what flaws. Our purpose is to learn and to grow knowledge. Papers are written by humans; every one has flaws. If flaws disqualify, every paper is disqualified. They are experimental, pushing the frontier of knowledge. Your work, your hard work, is to see what you can get out of them.'
The "village" is divided into three neighborhood, all of which appear walkable (from a brief glance at the video). What I personally wouldn't like would be the small scale and having to buy-in and put all your eggs in the eco-village basket, so to speak.
The video doesn't take you through the entire community, but I'm not sure why people are left with the impression Ecovillage is in the middle of nowhere.
A lot of sprawl or plastic goods are branded as "eco" because they promise less exposure to exhausts, but hide the fact that their users emit a lot more.
One has to wonder what the rest of the US would look like if we could kick someone out of their neighborhood and force them to sell or give up their home simply because we didn’t like them. The possibility for authoritarian attitudes seems high.
So first it's important to point out that in self-organized communities a ban is the most drastic measure that can be taken against someone. It's not exactly the option thrown in the air when there's any kind of neighborhood conflict.
Then, it's a feature not a bug. It requires consensus: why on earth would you be allowed to live in a place where nobody wants to live with you?
Also worth considering, what's the alternative? Calling the cops? Besides any question of autonomy in regards to the State, how would that help? What would cops do that the commune can't? Would it be more humane to incarcerate the undesired person? To assassinate them?
You might want to step back and take a deeper thought about this. We aren't very far removed from redlining and all manner of restrictions on where people live.
But even stepping back from mindless restrictions based on race, sexuality and religion, this is even problematic with objectively undesirable elements, like the homeless.
Lots of states and localities would love to make homelessness illegal. Many of them already toe that line. But what is a homeless person to do if each and every city outlaws their presence?
Will we build giant homeless refugee camps in the country's interior?
the situation is: in a co-op living arrangement the community can kick someone out by consensus.
someone says: why should you be allowed to live somewhere if the community wants you out?
you respond talking about redlining and de facto criminalization of homelessness. but these things happened and are happening not in the context of a cooperative community.
so by comparison you have a co-op that can banish someone if the community decides on it collectively, and you have a status quo where other forces can also banish a person.
i don't get what you're getting at.
They absolutely could be. A cooperative community full of racists might very well attempt to kick out people of certain races.
> you have a status quo where other forces can also banish a person.
Ah, see, but we don't have that status quo. Nobody can kick me out of my apartment, as long as I keep paying rent. And that paying rent part, isn't even strictly something that would get me kicked out, in certain places!
There are tons of laws and rules and regulations that very much prevent people from being kicked out of places.
> i don't get what you're getting at.
What he was getting at, is that it should be obvious that just because a majority of people want someone kicked out, that this might not be a good reason to actually kick them out!
EX: if a majority want to kick out certain races, we, as society, should prevent that majority from democratically excluding certain races.
So, in other words the answer to the question of "why should you be allowed to live somewhere if the community wants you out?" is because we live in a society, and in that society we want to prevent racists from kicking people out of where they live, even if they kick them out democratically.
Just to be clear, consensus is intentionally very different from a simple majority system - the way that most of the historical racist systems have perpetuated.
It’s certainly not impossible for these things to exist in a consensus based environment, but it’s a different beast.
Ok call it a consensus then. We as a society, want to make laws, that prevent certain communities from enacting a "consensus" to kick out certain races from where they live.
I'm definitely not convinced that laws can protect people from injustice. Rules can if they're consented by everyone (while laws are imposed by a minority of self-serving politicians).
In some communes i know, an overtly racist person would not dare to join because there's already established people of color in the community and a strong commitment to various forms of decolonization. In others, they may slip in, but will get very rough feedback if they're open about it. Of course racism can be more low-key and normalized and i've seen my share of that, but that's definitely not welcomed either in most communities. I'm not saying racist communities (racism being part of their identity) don't exist, but i've never seen any one and i'm personally not interested to see one... (though to be fair i'd much rather have them live their dream white patriarchal life in a corner rather than try to impose it on everyone else)
It's definitely valid for a commune to recognize as a goal to fight against racism. It can take many forms, but just like any fundamental principle it must be decided early on and approved by consensus in order to become part of the commune's essence if you will. Of course, if you build a so-called apolitical community (such as a property-based housing coop) and don't take a stand, then you're doomed to repeat the same schemes and mistakes we witness everyday around us in society. Of course political communes make mistakes too, but there's always times and venues to address the issues and learn from the mistakes.
PS: A consensus is not a majority. One dissenting person can break a consensus, while 45% can fail to break a majority.
like Galileo Galilei,a large number of great people who were ahead of their time were persecuted, prosecuted, burned at the stake, or worse. Life is more than a popularity contest, people have rights even if everyone hates them.
I do not take issue with the co-op having this condition - maybe they need everyone to gel together for their village to work. However I agree with the OP that if this were to become a common clause, it would cause even greater inequality and discrimination than we have today.
How can 90 people discriminate against a group of 10 people if every adverse action against one person requires the other 99 to agree? This system makes abuse much more difficult than the system we have now.
I was just studying a case where a person was accused of a crime, and there was a massive media campaign slinging dirt at him. He needed several people to testify to his innocence, but everyone was afraid of being associated with him and of consequences that might have for their career. He was sentences to 8 years in jail.
On appeal the media crazy died down, so the folks did testify, and he was acquitted, but he spent two years in jail for no reason.
"All of these are criticisms of heavily centralized power strucrures. It's not like everyone in Italy had to come to a consensus to burn someone at the stake."
You are contradicting yourself - lynching and burning people at the stake are local decisions. They happen when there is no centralised power.
Centralised power structures usually follow rules, however flawed they are. Clauses like this don't even have rules, they can just remove you because they hate you.
A local power is still a centralized power compared to a system where everyone has to agree on a decision. In this case, priests and local police were instrumental in creating and maintaining the environments where these things happened. And I seem to recall that there was a certain international organization putting people on trial and then burning them.
Your argument is basically that we need to set up some people with way more power than other people, so they can protect the least powerful people in the society from abuse. Then we set up rules and hope people in power do what they're "supposed to". Sometimes that works out for some people, but as a general principle it's completely backwards. A better idea would be to distribute power more equally to everyone, so that they don't have to wait around for the favor of the powerful.
All these civil rights examples seem to conveniently gloss over the century when our federal government explicitly supported slavery and the decades when that government did nothing about lynching. That's not because the federal government wasn't powerful enough - it commands the armed forces. It was because the constituency affected by these things didn't have enough power to make the government change it's policies.
People seem to think that democracy is the ticket and that anything decided by the democracy is the best we can do, but liberalism will elevate anti-authoritarianism above the will of the people, as a majority is no less capable of authoritarianism than a dictator.
Homeless people are sensible and capable people, not "objectively undesirable elements". Also, no one is essentially "homeless" like one is assigned a race or gender based on certain physical characteristics. Homelessness is the disease of a society which has no respect for humans whatsoever, and in which the number of empty dwellings far outweigh the number of homeless people.
Many self-organized communes are built by people who were previously homeless or living in squats. Yes, of course that includes queer and colored folks, and people of different religions. In fact, some previously-homeless folks can be very helpful to a community because they're often used to various forms of mutual aid and doing the best we can with what we have (hacking around stuff).
> But what is a homeless person to do if each and every city outlaws their presence?
We're talking about autonomous communes based on various forms of affinity, not centralized power structures. That's a very different topic.
I may be wrong, but i'm tempted to believe even in most cities, if there were any actual form of democracy, most people would choose to help the homeless (at least in the popular neighborhoods, as research has shown empathy decreases with wealth) because the solution is easy: just take the empty apartments and place homeless people in. Problem solved. As easy as 1-2-3 if you don't care for this tiny piece of paper called "property title" which in our cultures is deemed more important than actual human lives. If that sounds way too radical for you, how about giving some space for people to build their own housing? Many homeless people would be happy to build something if there were not angry blue-uniformed psychopaths tearing it all down whenever they liked it.
But in this topic, we're talking about collective housing on the countryside, which is very adapted for formerly-homeless folks. First, because after years on the streets it can be frightening to suddenly have a place of your own where you have to stay alone. Second, because having people around can help with many physical/psychological/material problems. Third, because taking part in a collective project such as building a commune can be very empowering. Fourth, because getting closer to nature is soothing, especially after a long time struggling for basic survival in the concrete jungle.
But please remember we're talking about a small commune without a mayor, and where consensus (100% of people agree!) is required to kick someone out. It's not exactly kafkaian tyranny. If anything, the rules we're used to on a daily basis are much more unjust and violent. Like the one that says if you don't have enough imaginary numbers (money) to give to an arbitrary person (landlord) then heavily-armed puppets (cops) will tear down your door and evict you at gunpoint. That's the kind of ordinary injustice and violence which does not exist in free communes.
If you still think excluding someone from a community is oppressive, you might want to take a step back and look around you at the evil barbarism lying at the roots of capitalist society.
Private property.
With a few municipal bylaws.
All under the jurisdiction of an actual legal framework, with a Constitutional foundation.
...
As the commented noted - and what is apparent in the video, these places are a bit more culty than they are secularly civic.
'Free thinkers', bent on re-thinking civilization, can be surprisingly authoritarian.
Especially absent the many constraints of regular society, and trying to pursue some kind of 'ideal', then a kind of authoritarianism takes over - sometimes 'top down' i.e. by the 'founder' (i.e. Walt Disney), or the inner circle, or more competitively among the rank and file
If there isn't an overt hierarchy - it will form on some other subtle basis.
If you thought that 'nosy neighbours' were an issue in small towns, try one of these places.
When the 'living space' gets conflated with so many other cultural issues, then existential debate ensues perennially. It may not exist as 'overt, direct conflict' but rather in the minds of the adherents.
I think it's why so few of these places actually exist - we really do value our privacy and the freedom to work and do as we please.
I certainly am glad that some of them exist, but I think they are better framed as legal municipalities, with some specific bylaws that are more objectively clear, where they otherwise stay out of people's lives. I think a lot of people would go for that.
Authoritarians usually use the existing legal system to oppress 'free thinkers'. It's the minority, the fringe, that get oppressed.
It's important to point out that popular revolts are often anti-authoritarian, fighting for freedom and equality for all. Such is the story of the Paris Commune, the Makhnovtchina, the Spanish revolution, the Chiapas zapatistas uprising...
Most of these revolts for change have been crushed precisely because new people have been placed in power, and that's why most communes seek to explicitly abolish power structures and level the game for everyone to take part in decision-making. Some people call that democracy, others call that anarchy, depending on their political background.
Authoritarian tendencies can still exist in a free commune, but it's counter-balanced by the absence of centralized power structures (police, prisons, government) to make other people's lives miserable, and usually by a political culture that power corrupts even the best people and therefore we should fix our problems ourselves without hoping for a messiah to come and fix stuff for everyone else.
That Mao said he was fighting for 'freedom for all' is completely besides the point, if in fact he was actually fighting for totalitarian control and mass murder.
"these revolts for change have been crushed precisely because new people have been placed in power,"
No, they failed because they were never quests for freedom in the first place.
How many times does that experiment have to repeat itself for people to dismiss with that delusion?
I'm not comparing communes, to Mao, but I am saying that they are culty and have authoritarian tendencies way beyond what we have in regular societies. In culty situations, many of your personal views are scrutinized and you're pressured to 'be and think' a certain way. They have the power to excise you because you don't fit the mould.
In regular society, you're generally free to be whatever kind of fool you want on your own land.
Then why do we have cops, tribunals, prisons and military? Why do people decide for others and have an armed wing to detain or exterminate those who dissent? Isn't that an obvious example of authoritarianism?
You may be confusing authoritarianism (hierarchical power structures) with totalitarianism (the State has total control over individuals). Although our western "democracies" are not far-off from totalitarianism: as history has shown, "human rights" only exist for the well-off, and the people in power will not hesitate to use manipulation, torture and terrorism as means of exterminating political dissent. On this topic, you can read about CointelPro [0] in the USA or more generally about counter-insurgency doctrines [1].
Those do not define authoritarian, unless you redefine the word. By the new definition, everything but anarchy is 'authoritarian'.
Marxist-leninists and maoists typically don't claim that, at all. They advocate for a "dictatorship of the proletariat", which is what led to the fork of the First International between the anarchists and the marxists. You may be interested to read some anarchist critiques such as Emma Goldman's "There is no communism in Russia" or "Trotsky protests too much".
> No, they failed because they were never quests for freedom in the first place.
That's what the new powers-that-be (eg. Lenin/Mao) have rewritten history to be, claiming the quest for freedom was a petit-bourgeois concern and it was all about building a strong "Workers State". However, most revolutions historically had some libertarian (in a left-wing understanding of the concept) tendencies and were very horizontal in nature. You may be interested for example to read about the Russian revolution, which initially was a direct democracy experiment (based on local assemblies called soviet), before a well-organized minority party (the Bolsheviks) seized power and massacred every dissenting voice (which took a few years).
> I am saying that [communes] are culty and have authoritarian tendencies way beyond what we have in regular societies
That's not my experience with self-organized communities at all. If anything, there's a lot more room for personal autonomy, and a much greater tolerance for individual quirks. Most squats and communes i've lived in or visited over the years were populated mostly by people our society explicitly rejects for failing to adhere to norms (neuro-atypical, trans, people of color, anarchists..). Therefore we tend to have more empathy and openness about everyone's weirdness.
> In regular society, you're generally free to be whatever kind of fool you want on your own land.
I'm tempted to agree, but i have to point out first that this is only true to the extent that you are recognized by the State as owner of "your own land", which requires considerable resources/wealth most people don't have. A commune is based on an anarchist understanding of property where you own your house because you inhabit it (usage-based property), not because a piece of paper says so.
Of course the state can revoke property titles at any time via expropriation schemes (see also: NDDL ZAD). And even if you own the land, specific regulations may apply to prevent you from leading your life however you see fit. For example in France, it's illegal to live on DIY housing with cut-off from the electricity grid; it's also illegal to be visibly naked from someone else's property or from public space; etc.
Moreover, living alone as an individual owner has its quirks. You're free to live however you want, but you still greatly depend on other people for basic resources, services and maintenance. A community usually has the same upsides as individual living, but also has a greater share of skills and resources to face issues and find solutions without relying on the capitalist system (greater autonomy).
Maybe we can say that authoritarians use the system to control things; totalitarians build a system of only themselves (or their party, such as the Soviet and Chinese Communists).
If I want some sort of (eco or otherwise) community, what I'd want is some sort of communal kitchen where people cook in shifts and eat together. Now, if I'm jerk, people could kick me out of the communal kitchen and I'd have to eat at home again but I'd continue to have a home (If I kill someone or something, that's a different matter).
So the commune where they kick you out of everything definitely isn't the only way to do things and none of the communes I know of with these sorts of strictures are actually very tolerant.
Also worth considering, what's the alternative? Calling the cops?
I'm not a fan of calling the cops (especially for random crap) but if you're in an organization within the US and you don't call the cops when a cop-requiring-crime happens, you're in big trouble. I should remind you, this isn't a hypothetical post-state world/organization, this is a group that exists today and has to follow the constraints the state places on it (and I suspect it does).
That said, from the swell of defund the police, there have been refernces to establish other groups aside the police (e.g., for someone having a psychological / mental health episode).
I would wonder immediately about the Tyranny of Structurelessness, where a senior member of the community deciding they don't like someone maybe ends up being enough to take 'drastic' measures.
I have no doubt this exact phrase was uttered hundreds of times in the 1950s by redlining commissions justifying the exclusion of minorities from subdivisions.
That said, reactions here are pretty hyperbolic... jumping to a very extreme conclusion that therefore communal villages are bad.
Every selective admissions process has the potential (probably history) for bigotry. University/school admission, mortgage approval, job hiring. Does that mean selective hiring needs to end?
The same laws apply to everyone, imperfect as they are. illegal discrimination is still illegal. If eco villages start representing a major part of society, and >1% of people live in them, then I am sure that we'll have this discussion. I don't think this is iminent.
There's a very big difference between being rejected from a university, and being expelled from your home because your neighbors dislike you.
I don't see how you make the comparison — the problem we're pointing out is being evicted, not selective admission as you're reframing it to be.
The cause of being expelled, would be that everybody thinks you should be expelled - not that no one 'likes' you. Framing the judgement as resting on private preferences, on likeability, diminishes common humanity which should be generally at large and is crucial to the persistence of any group. A viable community group will include members with tolerance and good judgement who would deny a consensus to expel without good cause. If such qualities are absent (completely so! to enable bad consensus) no amount of individual rights will make up for their absence.
Of course they will. My neighbors can't get me kicked out of my apartment complex, because of my race, no matter how much they want that to happen.
And if my landlord attempts to do that, I might be able to get a big monetary settlement out of it, depending on how many mistakes they make, while going about that.
The same is true in any self-organized community i know of. If anything, it would probably generate an invitation for the complaining neighbors to try and find some better suited place for them to live. That is because the only communities i've visited were very much antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist. And despite all the instances of racism i've seen with my eyes (we are after all, all chidren of one of the most racist countries on earth), i've never seen in a community the kind of racial segregation and hatred i've seen on the streets of big french cities.
I mean, i could imagine some white supremacists setting up a community. But they would not let the rest of us in in the first place, and certainly wouldn't require a consensus to cause harm (whether psychological or physical) to their enemies. In a barbaric society where prison or death sentence are supposed forms of justice, it can appear that excluding someone from a community is simply a matter of personal preferences or bigotry. However, having to part ways with someone because they're harming your community and there doesn't appear to be ways to resolve the problem, is a serious concern that you may have to deal with sooner or later whether you like it or not. But proposing to exclude someone for a trivial matter would instantly raise red flags as an authoritarian manipulation scheme.
Life in a commune is not comparable to life under a nation-state in most regards. Your neighbors in a commune are not just people who happen to live nearby, they're people you live with. And certainly there's no landlord to deal with who have unreasonable power over others :)
Alright cool. So then we agree that communities, democratically or not, should not be allowed by society to just kick people out, based on a "consensus" vote, for all circumstances.
We agree that such communities, should be prevented, using the force of law, from engaging in certain actions, such as kicking people out based on their race, even if it is done democratically.
And we should agree that allowing people to be kicked out, for any reason, is not a feature. Instead it is a bug. Such as if those people democratically kick out certain races.
And this whole argument of "why on earth would you be allowed to live in a place where nobody wants to live with you?" is a bad argument, such as in the circumstance of people wanted to kick out people based on race.
And when you ask "what's the alternative?", the alterative is individual rights, that prevent communities from kicking people out of where they live based on race, even if it is democratic.
And the "more humane" way of handling "undesirable" people is a system of individual rights, that prevents communities from kicking people out of where they live, based on characteristics such as race.
Neither does this place. It can only happen by consensus: that is, if everyone agrees. Not some majority, but everyone.
Obviously the question of what were to happen to your shares if you did get kicked out is unanswered, but aside from that, if you want to be able to continue living somewhere where everyone hates you enough that they are all calling for you to get kicked out, then maybe this community isn't for you, you can have that by living basically anywhere else. If you're even a little involved in the community, then it would be pretty difficult to get everyone else to work against you to kick you out. If every one of my neighbours were to conspire against me right now, where the houses are privately owned, I bet they could get me to leave by being hostile enough.
I do agree that a system of individual rights might be a more appropriate model for handling this, but I also don't know their full set of bylaws.
Ok, and if everyone uses a "consensus" to kick someone out, based on race, that should not be allowed, and the government monopoly on violence, should be used to enact legal arrests or fines on those people/communities.
The law should come in, and prevent this group from kicking people out, based on race, even if they have "consensus".
> then maybe this community isn't for you
Maybe communities that are engaging in actions that break individual rights, that are protected by law, should be shut down by the government, or arrested, or fined, for breaking anti-discrimination laws.
Then do you really want to live there? At this point, it becomes important what the rules say happens to your shares if you're kicked out, they did not explain this in the video.
> The law should come in
> that are protected by law
It does. These people aren't above the law. You are free to challenge them in court if you feel your are being discriminated against.
> should be shut down by the government, or arrested, or fined, for breaking anti-discrimination laws.
And if it happens, maybe they would be. Until they actually break the laws, by kicking someone out or otherwise breaking anti-discrimination laws, they haven't broken any laws. You are equating "their internal rules would allow them to" to them actually doing it. They aren't and haven't (she said they've never kicked anyone out and would do it only in extreme cases). So why are you so hung up about something that's never happened? Their internal rules cannot override state or federal anti-discrimination laws and you have the same recourse there as you do anywhere else: you bring them to court for breaking the law.
If that’s not enough guarantee for your comfort then the solution is to not buy a house there. Nobody is forcing anyone to live there, if they’re not comfortable with the community or it’s rules.
No, it is not a good thing for people to be allowed to using illegal discriminatory practices. Such groups should be fined or shutdown by the government legal system.
> Its a privilege to be in the group not a right
Discriminatory practices are banned in many places, and you do not have the right to discriminate based on race, for things like housing, in many places.
Such practices should have the government sent on you, who should hopefully arrest or fine you, for illegal discrimination based on race, and that is a good thing.
> judged unlawful and prosecuted when appropriate by other authorities
Ok and current anti-discrimination laws, that exist in many places, are a good thing, and if they got prosecuted for that illegal behavior, that would be good.
Ok, so then you agree that are current discrimination laws are a good thing, and should be applied even to communes, such as if they discriminate illegally against certain races, even if it was done via "consensus".
Thats what I am talking about, regarding anti-discrimination laws.
Anyway I do wish you the best with your concerns. I do believe prejudging people as little as humanly possible dis/regarding race, class, everything and in carefully focused anti-discrimination laws. But I feel there is considerable danger to do more harm to human relations and attitudes than good, with laws which prosecute too bluntly or frequently between individuals relationships. I think people should resolve differences through the courts as a last resort, as legal justice is very expensive and prone to error. So that would be why I have not been answering your prompts in the affirmative, though they have been stimulating :)
All the best'
My previous reply > I expect it would often be very hard to tell in practice what the eviction is based on, as a community are unlikely to admit - sometimes even to themselves, that their conflict with the 'evictee is rooted in a particular banned prejudice. A common defense and rebuttal for a group accused of kicking someone out over their race - would be that they were aware of their race when they accepted them into the group (!) Perhaps that's why I'm not so alarmed at the possibility of people being uprooted by racists in these communities that you seem to be - where racism is a problem in them it will hardly result in evictions, it will result in barring entry. When you think cynically about what groups of others are capable of, there is no end to villainous possibilities, but others are capable of being better than we ourselves are, as well as worse.
Meanwhile, this also corresponds to reality. In places where planned communities of various sorts exist, there is occasional tension around racism or other bigotry in admission. Almost never around eviction.
I realise that the possibility of eviction is uneasy for some. If so, don't live there. Meanwhile, 99.9% of actual evictions are in rental context. Sometimes this can happen gated communities. For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people.
As to which is worse... housing, education and employment are all pretty important.
Could that be because the victims of eviction are individuals without the political power of a whole race and its supporters behind them? Obviously evictees are not happy being evicted or they would have left voluntarily.
> For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people.
My guess is it's the lack of personal freedom and and lack of accountability for those who can control your life. Slavery sounds scary too even if it involved the same practical lifestyle as conventional work. Prison sounds scary, yet many people spend all day just sitting at home doing nothing more than they would do in prison anyway. The feeling of freedom is often more important than actually exercising that freedom.
> My guess is it's the lack of personal freedom and and lack of accountability for those who can control your life
Usually, building a free commune is precisely a practical attempt at tackling these issues and not having someone "who can control your life" but collective decision making to empower everyone to the extent possible.
Practical example: some people live a noisy lifestyle, others can't bear noise. You seem to suggest that in a free commune one individual's freedom to make noise would outweigh others' expectations of calm, or the opposite. In practice, a commune would gather feedback from its members and propose to rearrange the disposition of housing so that everyone is happy and comfortable.
Liberal society rests upon the idea that one's individual freedom competes (and stops) with another one's. Anarchist society considers that freedom is not a scarce resource, and one's freedom is complemented by another's. If we take time to study issues as a collective, we can find better solutions for everyone involved.
Collective intelligence is a thing. For example the french government started a "citizens council on ecology" (or whatever would be the translation) where ordinary people spent time with researchers to come up with solutions. And they've come up with a platform for ecology more advanced than even the Green party would dream of. Of course, the government then flushed all those good ideas down the toilet because they're just puppets of the industrial capitalists.
Try to find a realistic interpretation of what I said instead of something so transparently ridiculous. In other words, argue in good faith. There's no point engaging with someone if you try to misunderstand them.
Of course, but communes like that typically don't have a language test to be admitted. There's usually a common set of objectives and rules for the coop that you have to agree with, and that's about it. Sometimes, there's not even a formal interview process or any form of question. You just end up living there because you somehow arrived there, people are friendly and there's place to stay.
That's not to say everyday racism is not a thing in free communes. Who could claim to do away with racism when growing in some of the most racist countries on Earth like USA or France? But autonomous communes like this are usually correlated with other forms of social struggles than simply "enjoying nature", and it's not like these problems can't be faced.
Positive action for admission in squats and communes is not unheard of. It was for example documented in Seth Tobocman's autobiographic "War in the neighborhood" comics about squatting in NYC in the 1980s.
In all honesty, I'm of the opinion that job recruiting should involve an objective "required skills" floor, and then a lottery for all who meet it. It'd been known for some time that hiring is very difficult to do objectively and often has similar outcomes wrt retention as sheer chance. Luck plays a massive role in opportunity and accomplishment, and a systematic acknowledgment of this might do well to readjust people's attitudes towards how professional accomplishment squares with economic dignity.
redlining was a policy of banks. people in a community didn't vote for it. would they, had there been a vote? no one could say, but the point is it wasn't up to them.
so by my reasoning there are fewer vectors for discrimination with a co-op.
There’s other issues like what a Marketplace episode[1] went over recently where the system is effectively built to screw over some segments of the population into losing their land and home.
We still have not done any amending of the horrible tragedies that have gained more mainstream awareness in places like Tulsa Oklahoma, Wilmington North Carolina, and likely other places. We just continue to let the status quo remain today.
Imminent domain coincidentally never seems to affect or bother the very well off.
> US would look like if we could kick someone out of their neighborhood and force them to sell or give up their home simply because we didn’t like them
The US and world at large are so far from not being close to what you describe those. Sure the exact wording you used may not happen [much] any more. That doesn’t change the many similar not much better situations happening. Nor are past examples of authoritarian abuse and the actions you stated rectified. The status quo normally remains.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/02/983897990/how-jacob-louds-lan...
"In the last hundred years, heirs' property laws have contributed to the loss of millions of acres of Black-owed land."
In practice it rarely happens, and you are forced to sell your shares and move out. Basically you still cash out your apartment.
No one can forfeit your place/apt as that would be illegal.
It happens all the time. Homeless people, for example, are regularly kicked out of neighborhoods, etc., for no reason but being unliked (and I've heard the excuses, such as the universal one about 'human feces' - and I've been to clean encampments that were dismantled the next day using those excuses. If you're in a city, I suggest seeing for yourself). eople who don't fit, for example for economic or racial reasons, are harassed, and sometimes with little support from authorities who are a creation of the majority. The UK and US both have had, not long ago, practices and policies of administratively, extra-judicially, harassing immigrants, legitimate and undocumented (possibly still true in the UK, and in the US to some extent).
It's nothing unique to cooperatives. Given the self-selected nature of cooperative members, I would guess it would happen less.
Possibly, but I don't think you can point to an "aha!" clause and come to a conclusion.
These things aren't deterministic. A village like this isn't strictly defined by its rules. The people there, and the culture they develop are they biggest factor. A religious oriented community will not be like a socialist one, or like one formed by former college friends.
Rules can be unimportant, but communities aren't legible like that. A "please leave" clause can be used totally different depending on the people involved.
In any case, consensus-based systems tend to get mocked and reduced quite a lot. The thing to understand about these ways of making decisions is that it's premised on the existence of a community of people and a culture of making decisions this way. It doesn't necessarily work at an AGM or whatnot, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work anywhere.
To be fair, one should be able to "sell" his/her shares at market value.
Also related to this particular "expulsion", the practice was in use since ancient Greek times, and called "ostracism" [0].
Also, “it can take place at most once a year, and only for one person. In this it resembles the Greek pharmakos or scapegoat…”
Something something René Girard.
Because I've been working on a hypothetical idea for a while now that's kind of weird version of a commune. A facility that is autonomous and self-sustaining in which the facility and its infrastructure is owned and run by one person, but the community that it houses is governs itself.
The person who runs the facility has the authority (only in very, very extreme cases) to evict people but mainly, the ideal is that the community would police and govern itself, evicting problematic members of their community.
I just have no idea what the legal feasibility evicting someone is in this hypothetical situation.
Does not regular HOA (the US is choke full of those) fine and or eventually force you out if your blinds are wrong shade of green? I am not sure about the exact details as when I was looking for a house it is my first criteria - "no fucking HOA".
[0] https://homeguides.sfgate.com/can-condo-association-evict-ow...
That can mean "marginalized for some non-criminal reason". Sounds disgusting.
What separates the two are the social norms they operate under.
I'd also like to remind everyone that in many shared living spaces, landlords have the power to kick anti-social people out - and the fewer tenant protections there are, the less oversight they are subject to.
My concern is the kind of problem that happens in abusive workplaces, school bullying, abusive relationships, etc. Without rules, the powerful people slowly edge the victims out by always finding something they're doing "wrong". The victim may even believe it and keep trying to please but eventually be expelled anyway.
I assume this is part of the appeal. The group over individual rights.
The greater good
Few notes from it at 1.75 speed:
Two separate methods, "consensus" and "dynamic governance," which are spread across three neighbourhoods, with all three neighbourhood boards meeting together once a month. Leans heavily on elder retired people who have the time to participate in the governance. Ownership is owning shares in whole co-op that are related to the size of the house.
Coexistence is apparently easier with a larger group, (30-40), and groups that are too small get at each other (10 households) and cause harm to the relationships with everyone, where a conflict doesn't impact the cohesion of a larger group of 35-40. Dilution of relationships sounds important.
This comes up again when they talk about multiple special purpose vehicles for neighbourhoods financially interacting so loss of one doesn't impact the other ones. It's kind of micro-federated, where federation isn't a response to growth, but rather, a necessary stability feature of surviving as small.
They're the size of a small village, and it seems like you need that critical mass to keep it running so it can evolve organically and even a bit chaotically, and it's not close enough to each other that they will aligning all in one direction (good or bad) and causing strife. I could see how the whole thing could be vulnerable to politics, but it looks like their federated governance model mitigates lockstep.
It reminds me a bit of a talk I heard about Native influence on the creation of the US constitution, via Mowhawk Chief Joseph Brant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Law_of_Peace
None of these are wrong but they're not necessarily key to the character of the system. "Consensus," meaning something more complex than "vote until everyone agrees," is a pretty natural way of making in tightly knit groups. We do it without realising we do it. Some people talk. Some agree. Some object. People talk some more. Usually, a consensus forms.
It's voting or other formal authority systems that need to be invented. They don't tend to exist by default. Not every culture has voting. Every culture has talking until a decision is made.
Consider jury systems. These are pretty formal, but they do have some consensus as part of the system. This is premised on jurors spending a lot of time together, discussing, argueing, etc.
Anyway, my point is that the most important parts are probably ilegible. A functioning culture forms, or it does not. The right governance rules or group size, with the wrong group of people will not work. The reverse probably will.
They don't need to invent much, but they need to agree on a layer of abstraction above the personal interests of each person in a verbal consensus. Indeed, every group and culture talks until they reach consensus, but the ones who abstract the mechanisms with principles tend to manage growth more persistently. I viewed this ecovillage as a startup solving the ur-problem of governance, but instead of growing like a startup, the are just trying to sustain an equillibrium.
Those can be important. I think in a modern context these will probably exist, because we're already familiar with charters, constitutions and such. They're probably quite necessary for dealing with disputes or property implications in a legally compatible way.
That said, I think considering these primary is probably a mistake, over extrapolating from the macropolitics we know.
The idea is not to design a decision making process. Let a process emerge, using our natural social abilities as people to to navigate it. Whatever emerges will probably be people dependant.
A designed system that works, has answers and resolutions for every eventuality and problem is a least common denominator system. You might have to default to this is you need governance for a random collection of people without a binding thread. But for any real community with solidarity, they likely make it work in a more organic way. It'll depend on the individuals and results will vary a lot between groups.
^What's an ur-problem?
I think there's many layers to it, but the super sweet ambient music with suspiciously-happy people also made me very uneasy. One aspect of why could be because video fails to capture the actual atmosphere: for example we have no smells. Another one is because such scenery immediately reminds me of cult clichés: in mainstream media and movies when we're presented which something that looks so nice there's usually a plot twist coming up :)
My most generous interpretation (and the one I cling to because I hope to live in cohousing one day) is this: cults and many religions answer big questions for you, meaning you’re not background-level concerned with those things any more. Your stress goes down. They help you sync up your behaviours and world-views in a way that typically many of us struggle with in the “urban West”. I guess/intuit/hope that cohousing does the same. You’re (mostly) out of the housing market; you have (likely) had a hand in planning how you live; you know most of your neighbours and likely have built (or designed and managed) roads, drains houses and gardens with them; you have met or helped set guidelines about the neighbours who weren’t involved with the build; your outgoings are (hopefully) lower; your daily surroundings are (hopefully) nicer and you’re a (part-)owner of them, and have a rota for helping manage them.
The “suspiciously happy” thing is (I hope) a tell that the current defaults are off.
I was hoping she would be without ego, cast off any elitist appearances but as I say I saw cracks.
I still like the idea though.
I see myself as the curmudgeonly old man that doesn't greet anyone, or at least the village idiot.
Most of this is things I am really interested in, living off the land, renewable power, etc. 99% of the concepts are right down my alley.
But the overall feeling of just.. more people than I am used to? Just found it really off putting and couldn't watch without sort of skipping through to see the bits I wanted to see.
I am somewhat planning to start building my own full off-grid setup soon but I'm planning to go it alone. I'm not a hermit but I think I need space to myself more so than others.
You can live in a commune and have personal space. Not all communes have dormitories (it's really an anti-soviet cliché)... most have individual or small collective (consented) housing with strong collective infrastructure.
Anarchist ideals have been instrumental in building free communes over the past two centuries, and they refuse a false dichotomy between individual welfare and community building. We can have the two at the same time, as long as we choose carefully who to live with, and properly define what our collective project is.
Edit: I tried watching it again to see if I can figure out the triggers
- We seemingly start mid-conversation which invokes a fleeting feeling of information deficit.
- The tree on the left and the short setback of the house on the right makes it feel extremely crowded. There's greenery but the overly landscaped setting makes it feel unnatural. It looks like a production set instead of a place to live.
- The entire first sentence and unnatural cadence and facial expression feels like a sales pitch. It's a community, nothing is 'perfect', its all tradeoffs.
- Co-housing evokes roommates (i'm sure it has other meanings but that's what it meant to me) and the tethering connotation in the word 'connection' just sealed the deal. We're 7 seconds in and I'm on full alert by this point lol. I want to run away.
- Queue nursing home music and more crowded shots with obscured views.
I’m with you where this is my impression from the video while I have nothing theoretically against the idea itself.
If I look outside my home at any random time of the day, you typically don't see many people either. Perhaps a few children if its the right time of day and weather, but on most days there really aren't that many people around. The video had more people.
When I watched the video I didn't really perceive the people to be "fake" or "ungenuine". I think what's happening is that the vibes these people are giving off are just so radically different to what we're used to in society and our upbringing. For better or for worse, we've grown up to be mistrustful of others as a means of self-protection e.g. to prevent ourselves from being conned, scammed, or taken advantage of. This constant mistrust causes physiological effects on us over time, you could definitely intrepret it as causing elevated levels of cortisol, but I simply interpret it as causing uncomfortable feelings and physical tension.
So what I think is happening is that the nature of these people as very open and trusting and relaxed is conflicting with and almost triggering the latent mistrust that lies within us. Our mind does its best to interpret the situation and lands on the hypothesis that these people are the causes of the physiological and psychological reactions we're having. You know, because maybe they're scammers, con-artists or just putting on a facade. They can't possibly actually be like that, can they?
But I don't think they are mistrustworthy at all in fact I feel it's actually the opposite. Just my 2 cents :)
Or maybe people reach those conclusions on their own! Does it have to be that they were "conditioned" to them, or can they have agency?
While it is a first impression, it's just a first impression.
Somebody is fixing the buildings and growing the food, and I strongly suspect it's nobody living in these houses.
They pretend to be all peaceful and kind, but if anyone disagrees with them they turn vicious. They think bigger government can solve everything, just gotta keep spending money. Most grew up very privileged and have no idea how to actually build or repair anything.
They specifically said they are not trying to be an independent self-sustaining commune, but rather integrate into the wider community.
The farms are rented out (at the price of the annual taxes, so very low rent) and the community can become part of a group or whatever (didn't go into details on how it worked) to be able to get food from the farms. The community center seemed to be volunteer based, but again, she didn't go into details, I'm sure their website would have more information. Overall, it seemed to be more about living closely with people in with co-op style ownership and governance, but you still work your normal job and live relatively independent lives, not a "commune" where everyone is working together as almost one household in a self-sustaining somewhat isolated manner.
Their website is here, but I did not read through it: https://ecovillageithaca.org/
I really like that these places exist but I wish there were regular municipal variations that didn't involve such a 'full in'.
What gives me pause is the certainty that these stylings will not scale. Once the populatione exceeds Dunbar's Number[1], a management layer must needs precipitate, and the Iron Law of Oligarchy[2] will kick in. Inevitably.
The notion that cool ideas like this can apply to large, non-self-selecting populations is a bugaboo.
It's ok. You don't have to scale. Just have lots and lots of smaller communes and federate. If email and ActivityPub can work like that, why not AFK communities?
> Iron Law of Oligarchy
Now that's really not a scientific concept. Just because something does not appear to exist doesn't mean it's not possible. I personally strongly disagree that any form of organization is tyranny: depending on the modes of organizing, it can be pretty liberatory in giving a common framework for empowering me to act in ways i could never if i were alone and isolated.
Building collective power is not necessarily to the detriment of individual power, though i'm not suggesting that finding a balance is always easy.
Not to get hung up on your quantifier, or the idea of organization as such, the issue is the feedback loops that keep the organizational structure in acceptable trim.
The overwhelming majority of bureaucracies tend toward a Tower of Babel situation over time.
As long as humans are humans, good luck. If even a tiny percentage of these have even slightly above average narcissism / sociopathic tendencies / charisma, we'll be seeing social dynamics play out that end up in winner-take-all situations and tensions, communes merging into larger structures based on ideology, etc.
Why does that matter?
That's like saying my backyard vegetable garden will not scale to feed the entire street, or that the new M1 MacBook Pro won't scale to train the Tesla AI.
Just because something doesn't scale it doesn't mean it isn't a great thing worthy of perusing & learning from.
Having just typed that though, I agree with OP that even lots and lots of these could not replace a dense urban city. You know, unless some plague wiped out 90% of our population.
For the "common good". You understand. These sad tales always stem from the best intentions.
> I am completely, 100% on board with what these people are doing and hope they find much joy.
Looks like a wonderful place. But such contexts (thinking the Amish here) are sustained by the kind of cohesion that will be challenging to generalize.
But watch some idealist try.
I don’t think you even need to hit the Dunbar number for it to fail.
> According to a 2005 study, "Despite almost a century of scholarly debate on this question... there is still no consensus about whether and under what conditions Michels’s claim holds true"
As someone who got to move away from the city and work remotely from my countryside home thanks to the pandemic (silver linings), i actually find my current circumstances to be far more stress free than the city life, even if going to the store turns out to be a larger, weekly event, and washing myself involves heating water (or sauna) for a lot of the day with a furnace that consumes firewood instead of just jumping into the shower (and, you know, the house being cold in the mornings, before the centralized heating does a few cycles of water through the radiators and everything heats up).
Of course, living in the countryside also involves a huge amount of things that need to be done - everything from mowing the lawns constantly throughout the summers, tending to the greenhouse (due to my dad's desires to have one), using a tractor to mow down the grass on the fields and collect it (governmental penalties for not doing that), repairing everything that breaks, from water pumps, to having to repaint wooden window frames so they don't rot, acquiring firewood for the winter, making sure that irrigation ditches are okay and don't collapse and so on...
But in exchange for that, i get no nosy neighbors to invade upon my privacy, fresh air, no soot from all the cars on the frames of my windows (and the inside of my lungs, probably), no sense of urban sprawl or the need to rush anywhere and no worries about the current pandemic either (even though i'm vaccinated). Plus, growing your own tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and herbs, berries and other stuff is nice, at least as far as the end results go. And building anything or making improvements to the home doesn't take permits upon permits upon permits. My sleep is also pretty much excellent nowadays and i also have a safe environment for doing exercise with no judgement or social pressures whatsoever.
In short, there are both benefits and drawbacks, but living closer to the nature just feels more right, a sensation that's utterly devoid from urban life, save from regularly visiting parks and such.
I haven't spoken to my nextdoor neighbor in months besides saying hello.
As for activities, they seem to have some there, if those are the kind of things you're into. If not, then sure, its probably not for you and living in any village or small town wouldn't be for you. Its definitely not for everyone, for sure.
Personally, while I love the peacefulness of the countryside (I grew up there) and love to visit, I prefer a city lifestyle. My ideal setup, at my current point in life, would be to live outside a small city with a ~30min bus ride to the center. Of course, I haven't actually found such a place :)
And after retirement it will only be restaurants.
That's why living in a community has upsides. Of course, getting along with your "neighbors" is a prerequisite, but it fixes problems such as:
- who's going to take care of X while i'm sick?
- i'm familiar with water pumps, but i have no clue about repairing truck engines; who will do it?
- i'm very good at farming but i'm clueless about making bread
In addition, communal living enables economies of scale which urban individualized lifestyles have completely dismantled. For example, the video mentions communal cooking and laundry, which overall consumes much less resources than each household having their own fridge/stove/oven/laundromat.
> but living closer to the nature just feels more right, a sensation that's utterly devoid from urban life
It feels more right because it is more right. There's nothing inherently wrong with some level of population concentration, but modern cities are car-centered nightmares where everything is concrete and pollution and where life without money is utterly impossible, and where the population concentration is such that any form of self-sustaining lifestyle is impossible (if only for energy and food).
I suspect all that wood you burn and possibly some of your other activities are comparably bad if not worse for your lungs but it depends on your setup and which city location we compare to.
I would argue the main issue nowadays is that people born and raised in cities are so disconnected from nature that it seems hostile to them, they lost all the connections rural people grew with and learned to love. All they want is instant gratification, convenience at all price, least amount of friction and physical work, constant internet connection
I remember watching the stars with my grandma when I was 6 or so, we'd get deckchairs, a cup of tea and warm blankets and stare at the sky for hours, she told me about the moon, stars, the milky way, satellites, potential alien life out there &c. It was magical. It was absolutely silent, public lights were switched off after some time so the light pollution was very low. There was nothing better than waking up with the sound of owls or cicadas
I went mushroom picking with my dad every year, learning about the right timing and conditions for optimal mushroom growth, learning which ones are the best, which ones are comestible but not very tasty, which ones will make you sick or kill you, we'd see wild animals, their tracks, their skeletons, &c.
We had a garden in which I spent a lot of time, you could notice how the different seasons had effects in the flora, which insects, birds, small mammals came out of their hiding spots and at what time of the year. Seeing how vegetables were growing, bending down and snacking on the strawberries you planted yourself.
Living in the country side means living in sync with the seasons, you witness their impact on the world surrounding you, trees, plants, insects, wild animals, type of food you have access to, occupations you can enjoy. In the city you're kind of locked into a sort of constancy, sure it gets cold or warm, you have more or less sunlight, but that's about it, everything else stays the same, same activities, same dull concrete jungle, same cars going the same way every day, same dark empty sky, same constant noise
Now I live in a city, I never get a single minute of silence no matter what time of the day or night. I can't see stars, let alone the milky way. Insects are pretty much gone besides the occasional fly or mosquito. Pigeons and crows make up about 99% of wild animals you can spot
I very often go for walks late at night, covid was a blessing for that, the streets were virtually empty. During that time I've seen a howl, foxes hunting for rats almost every day, hares, some kind of weasel, a beautiful heron enjoying the lack of tourist boats. Now that people and tourists are back life has disappeared again and the noise/cars are back to pre covid level
I truly pity people who did not experience this, I wouldn't be surprised if it is a big part of the modern alienation a lot of people seem to go through
It didn't have all the eco vibes, but that probably has more to do with the desert-ish setting. No communitarian stuff. I don't know if they had an HOA, but probably the corporation handled those functions.
Not at all Black Mirror-like and no one was suspiciously happy. I don't know if you could be kicked out, but it wouldn't happen by a vote by your neighbors, for sure.
I don't see how this is real different. Personally, I'd rather have a soulless corporation making the rules than a bunch of Karens off NextDoor.
Not much of a hard sell of year round sunshine and warm weather to an empty nest couple from Iowa. That couple brought church social culture skills into the community clubhouses.
The success of the original developments, brought the brand into Florida as well.
One of Del Webb's insights was building developments large enough to accommodate multiple market segments. Large enough to balance people with three ideas of retirement: playing, saving, and finally having that dream house.
Along golf course fairways, you'll find attached dwellings, small houses, and large houses. The occupants in each segment will be a mix of people who have downsized, streched to upscale, and moved laterally.
It was a money making machine. At it's height, developers would build the golf courses and give them away to another business to run (under the old saw "the best way to make a small fortune is take a large fortune and build a golf course"). The profits were all taken as lot premiums.
Anyway, all 55+ communities with fee simple ownership have HOA's because the age requirements are deed restrictions. Sun City's and other Del Webb communities have very active HOA's. That's why people buy into them.
My favorite design decision is the futurist circular course. They don’t build them like that anymore.
So easy for a layperson to understand when looking at a sales brochure’s neighborhood map.
Bit of trivia: The guy who wrote the amazing book Reinventing Organizations about actual, >100 person, successful companies that are organized non-hierarchically moved to that ecovillage with his family and seems to be really enjoying it. Here's the book in a "pay what it's worth to you after you're done reading" format: https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/pay-what-feels-righ...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1eySW_9TiI5wnvTnIIw2Nw
We will rebuild together, stronger.
However, I wouldn't want to live in a "commune", but rather I'd like to convince ~1,000 people to buy a mountain on the Italian Alps, or an island somewhere, or a large plot of land, and then build some eco-friendly homes, and live there with interesting, nice people - while at the same time maintaining my privacy and my own "space" in my house.
> The first housing cooperative in the United States organized under the Rochdale Cooperative Principles was developed in Brooklyn, New York in 1918 by a group of Finnish artisans - the Finnish Home Building Association.
Coops remain extraordinarily popular in New York City. The vast majority of apartment buildings in Manhattan are coops. Many from elsewhere don't really know what this means. There are broadly two popular models of property ownership:
1. Condominiums. These are titled with the city and state as a distinct lot with the owner's name on it. Nearly always these are part of an HOA that is responsible for maintenance of common areas and establishing and enforcing rules. For reference, single-family homes ("SFHs") are typically in this model but in the US, SFHs aren't called condos. That's reserved for apartments and townhouses; and
2. Coops. The building is owned by a legal entity like a corporation. As far as the city and state are concerned, that whole building is one lot and is taxed as one unit. The coop is responsible for paying that property tax bill. You don't own your apartment the same way you do in a condo. You own shares in the coop that give you the right to a particular apartment. Maintaining the coop and paying expenses like property taxes is apportioned by the number of shares to each owner as a maintenance fee.
It's worth noting that in New York state these two work very differently in terms of property tax assessment, which has been a point of contention between the city and the state for decades.
Basically, coops are assessed in terms of Assessed Rental Value ("ARV") and condos/SFHs are not such that a coop might have an apportioned property tax bill of two times or more of a similarly valued coop. It also means a $100m condo has a tax bill of only 10-15x that of a $1m coop, which is ridiculous.
Anyway, I wonder since this community is a coop how it gets caught up in this tax treatment compared to similarly valued SFHs in the area.
[1]: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=13...
Single family homes are different in the sense that it’s one legally defined property where 100% of it is for the exclusive use of the owner. HOAs can include a group of individual properties plus (or not) common space.
Your description of co-ops reminds me of TICs (tenancy in common) in CA. The property is viewed as one “unit” although it may be subdivided by tenants through a separate agreeemnt. Typically in TICs you buy an entire building and have a separate agreement that lays out what is exclusive and what is common. But the city sees it as one property in its entirety with multiple owners.
It's basically an exercise in rezoning. If you were allowed to build that many housing units originally then they would have been outbid by a developer.
For instance where I live farmland is cheap until it has permission to build a house on it, then it's much more expensive. If you could buy it then get permission to build 50 houses on it, you would make many millions the instant after the rezoning.
Thus, the rich with connections in local politics do this crowding out the communities like these guys. I suspect their secret sauce is local government connections and lobbying / legal expertise to rezone.
A noteworthy point made by most first-handers is that "mission" was a necessary component. Kibbutzim often offered a relatively pleasant lifestyle, but lifestyle alone could not keep them alive. They needed to be fulfilling a greater purpose. For Kibbutzim the mission was zionism, socialism or other ideal. "Ideology" is an important concept to kibbutzniks.
Kibbutz lifestyle and economics were good when the movement started to recede. It was the changing ideals that killed it, especially the decline of socialist beliefs in the 80s & 90s.
I think it's also notable that a lot of communes exist in the world. Most are religious. Many are quirky, even cultish. This probably provides the "greater mission" old kibbutzniks insist is essential to success.
A lot of the modern, secular equivalents are "eco villages." I could imagine a libertarian one or other anarchist idea set.
An article from 1986 said: “About 20,000 volunteers”, “Israel’s 280 kibbutzim”, “About 3 percent of Israel’s 3.5 million Jewish population live on communal farms” implies ~5% labour from volunteers (assuming 3 month average stay and full time work). https://apnews.com/article/96bc6ecc6ae2f9ba6c4707a39babffa6
A modern equivalent in New Zealand is wwoofers.
Seeing far too many cars in that video for any of it to be considered "eco".
Cars are nowhere near as essential as American city and suburb planning unfortunately makes it seem like.
All the houses' roofs are south-facing, which combined with large overhangs, are a passivhaus thing (maximum heat energy in the winter when the sun is low, large overhangs block some of that in the summer when the sun is high).
Some houses have solar on the roof, while the neighborhood to the north has a small centralized solar farm. If you have the land, it's a lot more cost-effective to put a centralized amount of ground-mounted solar and distribute it to a dense cluster of houses nearby. They mentioned they designed all the homes in their latest batch to shun natgas and go all electric.
And then there's a bunch of "eco-mindset" things where it looks like they park their cars in communal lots and the houses are connected by pedestrian paths. Their development model is 10% developed/90% open-space (or something like that which flips the common american subdivision percentages). They said they aren't trying to be completely self-sufficient (they're 15min drive to downtown Ithica), but they do take steps like a have an onsite CSA.
So I don't think they're being "eco" if you think eco means some absolutely self-sufficient car-free hippie in the woods. But that's also an impossible ideal -- even the unabomber who railed against the evils of capitalism still had walmart receipts in his shack, and Thoreau got through the Walden Pond winter with his mom bringing him soup or something like that. But as for "eco" in terms of lifestyle arrangements that give you a good mix of modern and sustainable life, yeah, seems like they're doing a good job.
This past August they were hitting highs 80's with 80%+ average humidity.
https://www.wunderground.com/history/monthly/us/ny/ithaca/KI...
Definitely could use some air conditioning.
Winter is a different story.
I'm more curious about what sort of social responsibilities are required. Do you have to engage in all that `frog`, `song`, `tree` triteness or is it truly an open and accepting community?
Also, the majority of people in the US live in homes that their family owns.
Question:
Who does the agricultural labor here? I watched the first 15 minutes of the video, and was very curious about this.
The ecovillage I lived in was primarily younger people who did their own labor. A lot of it was backbreaking. We did our own construction as well. And YES, people got kicked out if they didn't work hard enough, and that happened several times. When I see an creepy old boomer hippy lady who sounds like a cult-leader, who doesn't look like she's capable of doing any kind of manual labor, I question if they are paying people to come in and handle the agriculture for them. These people all look like they are swimming in money. The ecovillage I lived in was not like that at all. We all ended up looking like a bunch of farmers and construction workers, because that's basically what you HAD to do to make it work.
I'm sure I'm tying up the wrong things in the concept of an ecovillage. The one I lived in was probably a lot more off-the-grid than this one was intended to be.
(((( EDIT: in case it's not clear; I totally love the idea behind it, but I'm trying to paint the picture that it's not as glorious as it seems on paper; I personally think it needs a lot more of a structure (I lean conservatively), and I'm currently building an internal website/platform to try and unify many of the free-spirits that live here; otherwise people just do whatever they want and step all over each other. People move here because it's nice to be here, but they have their own version of ideals. )))))
My wife's family started it a number of years ago. Very green/eco-conscience values, and so made an eco-village of 5-6 acres housing 22 houses (and about 65 residents afaik).
We're a little oasis in the middle of suburbia, surrounded by trees, native plants and habitats, and a growing vegetable garden; it's very lovely to live and work in.
Unfortunately, people have moved in who are more fundamental than the ones who actually went through the trouble of building it, so they have totally unrealistic expectations or ideas, and that's ALL they have. -- It's entirely down to my wife's family (and me by extension) to maintain it. People love to keep saying how human societies are "naturally altuistic" and will "naturally co-operate" but it's entirely not the case.
- The people who are more likely to move here are the fundamentalist types, leading to strong opinions and personalities. A lot of them like to drink and throw random parties / fire-pits.
- A lot of normal people move here because they have families and full jobs. They have NO INTEREST in digging holes or putting up fences / other structures, over weekends. They are just here because it's a lovely place to be. fully supportive though, just not interested in helping out.
- Some are free spirited and so won't follow rules. One recently got a dog (not allowed because it endangers the natural wildlife we try and re-habituate on the property) - Another will buy a massive air-con system (against principles because we were trying to be an "eco-village" so there's certain efficiency requirements and etc). - people will just break the rules and not really care. (The one who got a dog, just last year got a cat, but didn't like the cat anymore, so they just let the cat run wild. Guess what happened to the lovely wagtail birds and other native/rare wildlife we spent so long in making a suitable home for.)
- We don't have any repercussions for breaking rules. "consensus" doesn't mean anything if random people move here.
- Not everyone gets along. Currently there's explosions of arguments because of different gardening styles that leads to tears and destroyed garden beds.
- One of the fundamentalists who moved here is really hung up on the idea that the original brochure for the place suggested that we could potentially grow 30% of our food usage in the community gardens - despite not helping to produce food, at all, and being one of the ones who argues the most about differing gardening styles (and potentially sabotaging).
- Currently my wife is one of the few people who actually works in the garden. We've planted garlic because we get a good 2-300kg of garlic a year and it's relatively low maintenance for the number of hands in the garden we have (3-4 people spend 2 hours, once a month, wife and her family are the only ones that work every other day in the community gardens because it's part of the original vision).
- instead of gratitude for the (legitimately delicious) fresh garlic, it's rather "wtf I can't eat a dinner plate full of garlic". - We also grow bananas, cherries, strawberries, zuchini, eggplant, tomato, host of other food. most of it spoils because no one eats it. (previous fundie won't eat it because it might admit she's wrong in whatever argument she's currently having with my wife).
- a few don't believe in "hierarchy" so (in their mind) we're not allowed to have a maintenance team, garden team, etc. We regularly get massive repair bills to fix up pools and other things because any attempt of organising preventative maintenance is something they're fundamentally against because it implies XYZ maintenance efforts are more important than making sure everyone is the same level.
- One of them keeps asking everyone to go skinny dipping in the pool. "bring your kids!" etc.
I only came into the picture recently and I'm a lot more conservative leaning politically, I think my wife sees it as a bit of a fresh air; and I seem to have a knack for talking to everyone; so at the moment I'm doing a lot of refereeing and crisis management to make sure that people can get along. I'm also aiming to build a bit of an organisation platform so that there's no more "NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO LEAD" arguments;
It will forever be "a great idea" and "totally going to work this time" /s
Or is this basically one big NIMBY?
... what?
54 upvotes. I often see posts with a 1000 upvotes. I don't see a lot of stories about communal living. "Obsessed" might not be the right word here.
It's definitely not for me, but I can see why it would attract the curosity of people on the opposite patch of grass.
I think HN users have a strong sense of curiosity. Some may aspire to live in these communities, others are just curious to hear their story. It's the first time I have seen a topic like this on HN.
I like the idea of eco village but these projects are often ran by religious cults, I would prefer atheistic and science friendly eco village.
and each 1/2 acre should be able to support a small business and garden plot on those resources, and eco erosion controls, streams and wetlands... If of a even slightly conservative mindset.
Also, it looks like there are natural open spaces preserved on some of the acreage.
Anecdotally; the neighborhood of 400 houses, each on 1/2 acre,I reference was < 1 mile distance to an elementary, high school, chain grocery store, and local store fronts - and served 4 similar neighborhoods in 1 mile distance. Other "eco" features supported were 3 retention ponds and multiple streams.
Was it eco? No. If everybody had a garden plot, and biked would it be more eco than this (1/2 to 1/3 the density) neighborhood selling itself as eco, probably
So if you average 4 person households, you need 60 houses to meet that 230 population on 30 acres that's ~82%+10% from the borders.
To clarify, I'm not saying American suburbs are eco, or working communally like this; I'm only saying the numbers in the title (and 90% nature) don't seem to make this eco in a standout way moreso than a green space (or large community garden) next to a neighborhood.
Each "neighborhood" is a tightly packed cluster of houses with pedestrian-only paths and 90% of the total land is not built on. Each neighborhood was said to be 5 acres, so x3 = 15 acres residential while 10% is 17.5 (so maybe the farm structures? Or maybe they're in the 90%, I'm unsure)
The point is, the homes don't each have their own 1/2 acre plot with 1/4 acre border. The homes are all within 15 acres. The rest is farms or left unbuilt.