This section offers an overview of the background to our current plans and planning process.
Our first developed plan for the ecovillage project, taking shape from 2014 until 2020, envisioned a village of 25-30 structures housing 40-45 flexible and varied living options (four or five distinct building types, including some duplexes, and many attached studios that could be merged with or independent of a larger house). Also planned was a separate and spacious common house providing community-scale cooking, dining, and meeting facilities, guestrooms and laundry.
All of this was under the auspices of the Planning and Development Circle, with professional help (site design, water systems, architects (multiple) and lawyers and engineers …) as needed.
We submitted full-scale site plans to the county for what became our own special zoning district, approved by the Board of County Commissioners in 2015. All of this was to be designed and built up front under a single loan to a member co-op that would own and administer the whole village under single auspices, allowing maximum flexibility for members to change residences, and allowing the community leeway to set prices, make accommodations, limit and redirect equity, etc.
At the high watermark in 2019, we were negotiating for a HUD-backed, low-interest mortgage for the co-op, had a project manager on board, and developed extensive and appealing schematic architecture for most of the dwellings as well as the common house. Projected costs and pricing weren’t cheap but the project was still looking fairly affordable.
But with the 2020 arrival of COVID in particular, building prices and interest rates skyrocketed, while the requirements of HUD compliance turned out to be immensely bureaucratic and very costly as well. Moreover, and perhaps most basically, the pandemic was the final blow to our already-ambitious project to build and coordinate a critical mass of members with sufficient financial capacity and willingness to take on costs on such a scale ($12-15 million!) , or the person-power, expertise, and sheer time required to plan and manage it.
Retrenchment followed. With great regret but firm conviction, we moved away from the co-op-owned, upfront-built model and (through various steps, all deliberate and, yes, time-consuming) toward the very different model that, since mid-2023, has re-established our momentum and brought us closer than ever to realizing a workable village.
Forward movement continued, even during COVID and retrenchment. Though some members understandably backed out due to uncertain prospects and long delays, other energetic and capable people joined, especially around the expanding farm work. We acquired a new (used) tractor and built a beautiful and spacious barn — mostly built over the COVID hiatus by a team of three members whose average age was 70. We’ve learned – and taught each other – a vast amount about natural building, regenerative growing, and “cooperative culture,” along with endless ins and outs of building and septic codes, farm law, material supply chains, and much more. (Don’t ask … but really, ask …)
In the midst of all this, moreover, a new zoning category — technically, the Flexible Subdivision – Conservation Cluster provision — was adopted by the county (based on a statewide initiative), which enables us to build the same sort of compact village we’d always planned, with most of the land protected from further development, as an overlay on fairly standard zoning. As of this weriting, we are moving ahead with a new plan (see next menu item) based on the Conservation Cluster provisions.
In contrast to the old model, owners (individuals or small groups) will have primary financial responsibility for their own buildings, but by the same token will have much greater flexibility and variety as to design and timing. By limiting community costs to basic infrastructure (road, septic, utilities) in the beginning, the new framework thus makes for drastically lower and far more manageable community costs upfront. Accordingly, P&D has been working hard to consolidate planning on this new model, including most of what you’ll see under the rest of this section.
