In 1990, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson published Pacific Edge, a novel featuring a lush ecotopia whose denizens endeavor to tread as lightly as possible upon the earth. They shun cars for bikes, diligently conserve water and wild spaces, grow their own food, and volunteer on committees to preserve their Eden and protect it from rapacious developers. The residents’ mission-driven communalism enables them to forge the kind of deep bonds rarely seen among neighbors in real life.
In 1991, Robinson’s wife took a job in Sacramento, and the couple coincidentally moved in to a Davis subdivision that bore an uncanny similarity to the utopia he’d imagined on the page—down to the bikes, food production, and committee work.
“It blew my mind,” Robinson says as we sit on camping chairs in his garden. “It felt, in a way, like I was coming home.”
His garden is part of a seven-acre allotment that runs down the western edge of Village Homes, land on which residents grow most, if not all, of their seasonal produce. Although it was the dead of winter when I visited, the agricultural belt was a patchwork of kale, broccoli, chard, sugar snap peas—and Robinson’s more than two dozen cabbages, whose milky-green heads perched daintily on a bed of mulch. “I got tired of eating them boiled,” he jokes, “and have learned to eat sauerkraut.”
This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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Like Robinson’s eco-fiction, Village Homes is concerned with human survival on an increasingly imperiled planet. The 70-acre, 245-residence subdivision, developed in the 1970s—an era that saw the first Earth Day—was designed with self-sufficiency in mind. In addition to renting space in the allotment garden, residents grow food in kitchen plots and forage the edible landscape in the common areas. At the time of my visit last winter, many of the trees along the neighborhood’s meandering paths (there are no through streets) were weighed down with bright orbs of citrus, persimmons, and pomegranates. To conserve fuel, homes use solar energy for hot water and heat. Rainwater is collected in shallow ravines, called swales, to replenish local aquifers and irrigate the landscape instead of being flushed down city storm drains.
In addition to offering a real-life ecotopia, the subdivision fosters connection through communal yards, a central pool complex, and, yes, committee work. Many of the first residents still live there—along with their children and grandchildren.
By any measure, the innovative community has been a resounding success. It found a way to reduce a subdivision’s collective carbon footprint 50 years ago using simple, small-scale technology. It turned neighbors into lifelong friends.
Yet for all the success of Village Homes, it remains an outlier. On a planet battling a climate crisis, in a nation suffering a loneliness epidemic, and in a state facing a chronic housing shortage, it’s astounding that this community hasn’t been replicated everywhere.
The End of Oil
The concept behind Village Homes was not exactly new. It was inspired by an English urban planner named Ebenezer Howard. Troubled by the squalid tenements of Victorian London, Howard proposed a revolutionary solution: a neighborhood that would combine big-city opportunities—jobs, social networks, access to the arts—with the bucolic peace and healthy air of the countryside.
“Human society and the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed together,” Howard wrote in his 1898 book, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. He envisioned a circular town crisscrossed by greenbelts for recreating and gardening, with factories on the periphery. Affordable homes would be within walking distance of shopping, schools, and an entertainment district. He imagined a string of such “garden cities” linked by rail, each bound by an agricultural belt that would limit growth to 32,000 residents. Based on the popularity of his ideas, he was able to raise funds to begin building a prototype, Letchworth, roughly 35 miles north of London, in 1905. It was the first of numerous garden cities and suburbs in England. In the United States, Howard’s philosophies sparked several developments, including Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York, and Radburn, New Jersey.
Village Homes proposed an antidote to another seemingly intractable problem: the 1970s energy crisis, which triggered nationwide gas shortages. The neighborhood was envisioned as the world’s first “post-petroleum” community, one that would convert California’s abundant sunshine into free energy and encourage foot and bike transportation.
At the time that the subdivision was proposed, Davis was in the throes of an identity crisis. For decades, the town was just another Yolo County backwater whose small “Farm School” served as a field laboratory for UC Berkeley students interested in animal husbandry and agriculture. This changed in 1959, when the UC Regents turned the Farm School into a general University of California campus. The transformative effect was immediate: between 1962 and 1972, enrollment at the new UC Davis jumped by 275 percent, from 4,000 to 15,000, while Davis’s population grew by 170 percent, from 10,000 to 27,000 people.
Worried that uncontrolled growth would turn their beloved hometown into a sprawling monstrosity à la Phoenix or Las Vegas, a group of young Davisites started meeting at the home of Judy and Michael Corbett—an ecology graduate student and an architect, respectively—to discuss pooling their money to build their own neighborhood, one that would prioritize green values and social harmony. This was in 1970, the heyday of the “we can build it better” hippie ethos, as manifested in the rambling DIY articles of the Whole Earth Catalog and the hundreds of thousands of young people who were ditching the middle class to live communally and build their own mini–social systems.
“We’re pretty well turned off to the computer-state in which we find ourselves parts of a machine,” a member of the Davis group told the campus paper at the time. “It really doesn’t make sense to us. As the situation of most people now stands, we don’t know our neighbors or co-workers, there’s no feeling of community.”
Drawing on her background in ecology, Judy Corbett set about trying to engineer neighborliness. At UC Davis, she studied under Professor Robert Sommer, a pioneer of environmental psychology, and the research she did for her graduate degree revealed that conversations flowed best in groups of eight. In larger groups, one person tried to dominate; in smaller groups, discussions petered out. She’d also observed, as a UC Davis undergraduate living in a dorm, that few residents hung out in the large first-floor common area—instead, they’d crowd into the kitchenette to use the microwave and socialize. “I realized that if there’s a reason to be in a space and it’s comfortable, people will gather,” she says. She suggested that the proposed neighborhood cluster homes in groups of eight around a shared yard, which would be collectively planted and maintained—providing residents with reasons to interact. To satisfy privacy needs, each house would also have an enclosed patio.
Her husband, Michael, sketched out the design guidelines. He recommended that homes incorporate passive-solar systems. (Residential solar panels wouldn’t become widely available for another decade.) Roof-mounted solar water heaters could provide hot water for most of the year. Large, south-facing windows would allow the winter sun to fall onto heat-absorbing thermal masses—tile-covered concrete floors and exposed 18-inch-diameter culverts filled with water—that would then radiate warmth throughout interiors. In the summer months, when Davis regularly cracked 90 degrees, the same windows would be shaded by trellised grapevines and opened each evening to allow the brisk Delta breeze to lower the temperature of the thermal masses and keep the rooms cool.
Other innovations would solve both ecological and social problems. Creek-like swales would help irrigate the edible landscape and recharge groundwater. To de-emphasize cars, homes would be built along narrow, sidewalk-free cul-de-sacs and be accessible via a network of pathways. Freed of their metal carapaces, residents would be able to engage in spontaneous encounters as they biked and walked through the neighborhood. Connections would be made, friendships forged.
“We designed the community we wanted to live in,” Judy says.
Not Your Standard Subdivision
After two years of weekly meetings, the group fell apart. Some people didn’t have money to contribute to the purchase of land; others moved away. The Corbetts decided to forge ahead with the project on their own, as a commercial venture. In 1972, they located a 70-acre tomato farm on the western edge of Davis and persuaded family and friends to put up $10,000 starter shares to raise the $130,000 down payment.
The next step was to get city approval for their maverick subdivision. They had reasons to feel hopeful. Davis had a proud history of green initiatives: it was the first U.S. city to install bike lanes (1967) and adopt energy-conserving building codes (1972), and it would be among the first to roll out curbside recycling (1974).
But when Michael met with the city-planning director to review the master plan, she laughed in his face. “This goes against everything I learned in school,” she said. “Come back to me after you change it, and we’ll talk.” Other city staff piled on. The fire department groused that the 25-foot-wide cul-de-sacs were too narrow for its engines, which were used to coasting down 50-foot-wide streets. City engineers balked at the use of swales, convinced they would become vermin-infested eyesores. The health department blocked plans to install a second drain in showers to collect gray water for the irrigation of household gardens. Other innovative features were rejected simply because they violated so-called “standard rules” of subdivisions; the transgressions included the closely spaced houses, the admixture of agriculture and homes, and the carports, which were designed to optimize space.
For more than two years, the Corbetts haggled with bureaucrats. They set up traffic cones in a parking lot to demonstrate that fire engines could indeed navigate the narrow cul-de-sacs. They agreed to post a bond for funds to install underground pipes should the swales fail (or become overrun by rodents). They reluctantly complied when the director of public works pressured them to “place at least one sidewalk on one street”—by installing exactly one sidewalk on one street. At times, their prospects of success seemed so remote that they resigned themselves to someday writing a book about the whole sad affair.
Finally, the frustrated couple took their case directly to the city council, arguing the plan point by point. To their great fortune, three of the five council members were avowed environmentalists, and in May 1975—over the objections of their own staff—they voted to approve Village Homes.
But the Corbetts’ travails weren’t quite over: more than 20 banks rejected their application for a construction loan, frowning at their unorthodox plans and lack of experience. Michael then rewrote the prospectus to downplay the innovations and quickly signed with a Sacramento lender.
By Thanksgiving of 1975, the skeletal wood frames of the initial homes had been hammered together, and the nation’s first solar subdivision leapt from tabletop architectural model to full-size reality.
‘The Thriftiest Town of All’
Neighbor number one was Virginia Thigpen, Michael’s 24-year-old administrative assistant. “So many concepts were untested, and he was concerned about marketing,” Thigpen says. “So Mike convinced me to be one of the pioneers.”
She scraped together a down payment for the smallest lot, worked with Michael to design a modest home, and participated in its construction to lower her costs. Although there were a dozen or so homes under construction, the area still looked like an abandoned field, with volunteer tomato plants sprouting from the muck. News of the novel community soon spread, and other eco-minded folks moved in, including the founder of the California Wilderness Coalition, environmental lawyers, green architects, and university professors.
Michael oversaw each phase of the development’s growth. He researched and selected plants for common areas based on edibility or drought tolerance; these would include, according to a 2017 survey, 1,500 trees of 55 species, including 90 peach trees, 61 plum trees, and 45 persimmon trees. He designed two-thirds of the 245 residences, allowing buyers to choose between a number of styles ranging from Mediterranean to brown shingle to California ranch, all with built-in passive-solar features. To encourage economic diversity, he included 20 apartment units and 10 small cottages to attract low-income residents—including a group of UC Davis students and several Mexican migrant workers—who built their own homes, using sweat equity as a down payment.
The community’s early years were marked by collective zeal and experimentation. Thigpen helped another resident build a striking “suncatcher house” featuring a row of 10-foot-high water-filled culverts that divided the living area from a hall. Architect Jim Zanetto built an 850-square-foot home that was enclosed in sod, a natural insulator, on three sides. Michael’s ideas for alternative energy seemed boundless. “We want to develop a solar refrigerator and oven and look into wind power,” he told the Oakland Tribune in 1975. “We’re even thinking about human power, a fly wheel you could pedal for energy when the wind isn’t blowing.”
Residents gleefully compared utility bills, which averaged $15 to $18 a month—about 70 percent less than in neighboring developments—and bonded during barbecues in shared yards, at work parties to construct the solar-heated pool, and on committees to maintain swales or review architectural blueprints for solar access. There was a general pride of ownership in building a better neighborhood from the mud up. Couples met and married, had children, formed babysitting co-ops, and walked their kids to preschool in the community center. Older kids safely free-ranged, biking to friends’ homes or to play soccer on the central green, stopping to pick a ripe peach or tangerine if they felt hungry.
“Freedom—that’s what it felt like to grow up here,” says Santiago Gonzalez, whose dad was one of the migrant workers and who recently returned to the community to raise his own kids. “One of my best memories is playing hide-and-seek in the vineyard and reaching up to eat grapes at the same time. We ran around with no fear. Everyone kept an eye out for us.”
Fame arrived in 1977, when Newsweek ran a glowing feature on Village Homes and Davis under the headline “The Thriftiest Town of All.” Next came the Today show, CBS News, and coast-to-coast newspaper coverage. Time magazine declared the husband-wife developers “heroes for the planet.” First Lady Rosalynn Carter biked through the subdivision in 1979, just a few months before her husband installed solar panels on the White House roof. Actor Jane Fonda became a frequent visitor as she promoted the solar initiative of her then-husband, state assemblyman Tom Hayden. French president François Mitterrand arrived in a three-helicopter convoy whose downwash blew the roof off the gazebo near the pool. Other illustrious visitors: eco-minded Prince Charles, folk singer Pete Seeger, and renegade economist E.F. Schumacher.
Soon, hordes of camera-slinging tourists showed up by the busload and trampled across the fenceless yards to get a closer look. “It’s common now for us to have strangers peeking in our window,” a resident told the UC Davis paper. “They don’t bother me.” Other neighbors were less charitable about the “miscellaneous nobodies” who arrived each weekend. “The lookers forget they’re on private property,” groused one homeowner. “They lack common etiquette.”
Be My Neighbor?
Some 40 years later, I appear to be the sole “looker.” After talking to Robinson, I wander around, comparing my East Bay neighborhood with Village Homes. Instead of plodding down numbingly straight sidewalks hemmed in by cars, I’m forced by winding paths to slow down, to notice—the rainwater glinting in the swales, an orchard just beginning to leaf, a flock of parakeets housed in an elevated chicken coop. Instead of the constant drone of the freeway and BART, I hear a chorus of birds. On my street, I rarely cross paths with neighbors unless they’re parking their cars. Here, people are everywhere—trimming hedges, lifting children to pick oranges, pushing napping infants. A short distance down the path from where Robinson’s cabbages marinated happily in the dirt, I come across a dance studio full of graceful ballerinas in black leotards and laugh aloud at the unexpected juxtaposition of rustic and urbane.
Judy has invited me to lunch at the home where she and Michael raised two kids and where she remained after they separated. She’s assembled six of the original residents of Village Homes, all women now in their 70s and 80s, to speak to the evolution of the neighborhood over the past 50 years. Communal life proved unappealing for some, they say, like the man from New York City who announced that he didn’t want to look out his window and see corn or artichokes—which his neighbor happened to be growing—or the woman who grew irritated by the sound of kids playing in the common yard. Both moved out. The women also describe tensions with newer residents, some of whom want to terminate the lease of the preschool that has operated in the community center since the 1970s and turn the space into a workout room or café. Still others, not understanding the purpose of the water-filled culverts, have removed them. “They didn’t come with any type of understanding of what’s sacred here,” says Thigpen, who became a general contractor and built about 20 residences in Village Homes.
When rooftop solar panels dropped in price, many residents installed them along with energy-saving heat pumps and whole-house fans. With Davis’s hot summers growing even hotter and fire-season smoke often making it hazardous to open windows to capture the Delta breeze, air-conditioning has sadly become a necessity for many, including Thigpen. Still, her passive and active solar systems work together to double her home’s efficiency, she says, and her summer utility bills rarely top $20—basically the same rate she was paying in the 1970s.
Judy’s experiment in engineering neighborliness worked. An academic paper published in 1990 found that Village Homes residents had twice as many friends, and three times as many social contacts, as people living in nearby neighborhoods. At lunch, the women speak of their desire to “age in place” alongside their best friends. There is talk of forming a new committee to help older and physically challenged residents with grocery store runs and cooking. Of a new exercise class in the dance studio that promises to reduce chronic pain and arthritis.
“If you foster community, you will always have help,” says Sue Colombano, a retired French and Spanish teacher.
Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities proliferated around the world. Village Homes, in turn, has influenced communities such as Prairie Crossing in Illinois and Civano in Arizona, but it remains more of a curiosity than a prototype. “The problem isn’t the public,” Michael tells me. “We’ve had hundreds of visitors who’ve asked, ‘Why isn’t everybody doing this?’ The problem is developers who continue to build places where you can’t get around without a car.”
I asked the same question repeatedly of academics and others while reporting this story, and I always got the same answer: “Because there’s only one Judy and Mike.”
Garden-to-Table
The Corbetts’ vision took root during a sweet spot in history—in the 1970s and ’80s—when humankind began to understand the perils of our reliance on fossil fuels and clear-eyed leaders emerged with solutions on how to live in better harmony with the planet. At the same time that Village Homes was blossoming into a real-life Eden, a group of U.S. activists and scientists warned the world that humanity’s runaway carbon emissions were altering our climate. Their crusade led to an international conference in 1989 where 67 countries came within several signatures of endorsing a binding agreement to freeze emissions at 1990 levels by 2000, before the delegate from the United States—the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter—undermined the effort. Three years earlier, President Ronald Reagan had dismantled the 32 solar panels that his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had installed on the White House roof.
The price for the ensuing decades of inaction on climate change is today’s lethal heat waves, droughts, and fires. Food and water insecurity will only get worse as the planet grows hotter, scientists warn.
“In 15 years, Village Homes will be ready for the food crisis,” Michael tells me as we pick kumquats from a communal tree. He’s now working on what he calls the Future Project—a small proof of concept he plans to build that will teach people how to navigate the worst effects of climate change. It will include small, sustainable homes, experimental agriculture, and a wellness center to advise people on how to live with climate change and trauma.
“It will be a place to help stabilize people who have gone over the deep edge,” he says. “It could be a training center. Because we’re going to need a lot of therapists specializing in environmental collapse.”•
Julia Scheeres is the New York Times bestselling author of Jesus Land, a memoir; A Thousand Lives, a narrative history of the Jonestown tragedy; and Listen, World!, a biography of intrepid Hearst columnist Elsie Robinson.
