An Urban Oasis in Central Los Angeles
How a green, co-operative housing model found its way to Koreatown
Amidst the hustle and bustle, the traffic, and concrete of Vermont Avenue and 1st Street, there’s an urban oasis. Just a block east, on Bimini and White House Place in Koreatown, nearly 75 residents live in a two block neighborhood known as the Los Angeles Eco-Village. Here, the sidewalks are full of native plants, multifamily apartment buildings are co-owned and permanently affordable, residents tend to courtyards full of vegetables and fruits, and there’s even a learning garden and a bike workshop. For the most part, tenants live a car-less lifestyle, opting for a more ecological, interdependent existence.
Lois Arkin helped found this neighborhood 30 years ago with the goal of creating an intentional community that reimagines how we can live in cities. The village’s stated strategy is to “to reduce environmental impacts while raising the quality of neighborhood life.”
I spoke with Lois on her 86th birthday to learn more about her story and what it means to live in an eco village.
* this interview was edited for clarity and length
Samanta: Can you tell me a little bit about who you are and how you helped start the Eco village?
Lois: I was born and raised in suburban Detroit, and where I lived we still had unpaved streets. We had lots of relatives and family friends all within walking distance. Everyone biked. Even though it was suburban, we had everything we needed within walking distance. That was embedded in my memory.
I got married and my husband and I decided to come to Los Angeles. We eventually purchased a house in Chatsworth in the 1960s. And I was not interested in knowing any of my neighbors. We had two large dogs, a three bedroom, two bath house and two cars. We worked in the aerospace industry.
We had a very happy marriage for 12 years. And then it was time to split up.
I needed to get my head straight. I started having a life of my own and sold our house. I went around the world on a cargo freighter to see how other people live and to discover myself as a woman.
When I came back, I decided to learn the music business and found someone to apprentice myself to. She was a very progressive person. This woman who took me in as her mentee was passionate about co-ops. I decided to start this organization in 1980, Cooperative Resources Services Project or CRSP.
I wanted to be a resource center for people that wanted to start a cooperative, whether it was a housing co-op or a worker co-op or a credit union or a childcare co-op.
We were the organization to get information on it. We built a constituency. We started to have public events right away. I lived across the street in a fourplex where I had my office and my home.
We had a 20 person planning committee and began to form the vision of a co-op neighborhood. We had a volunteer architect who did a 50 page feasibility study. We had found a site seven miles from here in northeast LA. Then all of a sudden it was 1992 and we had the uprisings. There were five major fires within two blocks of here. I spent that weekend turning that 50 page feasibility study into two or three pages of bullet points. How might we do this as a retrofit of an existing, built-out neighborhood that was affected by the uprisings?
In early December 1992, it was unanimous. It was the perfect neighborhood to do it in. On January 1st, 1993, the Eco-Village was born.
We didn't own anything. We had no idea when we would own anything. I was never committed to the neighborhood [before], but now I was. We had volunteers come in two and three times a week. We walked up and down the street and met all our neighbors. We met all the kids. We had a kids recycling co-op. We went on field trips. We even went on family camping trips with our neighbors. Those three years were amazing. It was mostly Latino and Korean neighbors. It’s always been a very diverse neighborhood, Latino and Korean and Filipino and Anglo.
Samanta: How did you begin buying buildings in these two blocks?
Lois: One of the things that we wanted to demonstrate is something called an ecological revolving loan fund. We decided that we'll borrow money from our friends, our relatives, whoever will loan us money, and then we'll put the money in a socially responsible mutual fund. We'll have some projects, maybe some small green businesses that people want to start. We'll loan out the money at a low interest rate. And then as people pay the money back, that goes back into the fund and it keeps revolving.
I think we started out with about $20,000 or $30,000 in it. Then we grew it and were able to buy all of our properties. We have never had a bank loan. Some of the buildings were in slum-like conditions. All of our properties were bought without any debt on them because the debt was in my organization's revolving loan fund.
Little by little we were able to get people to move in. Now across all three multifamily buildings, there's about 75 residents.
Our intentional community is 50% POC and we think that's pretty good because the networked movement for intentional communities in the United States is primarily white.
The Los Angeles Eco-Village neighborhood is the full two blocks of Bimini and White House place. There's about 500 people in 13 multifamily buildings within the Los Angeles Eco-Village neighborhood. At least half of them might not know that they live somewhere called the L.A. Eco-Village because on average, people move once every five years. The eco-village organizations own three of those 13 buildings and manage a fourth property.
Samanta: What is an intentional community? And what is an eco-village?
Lois: An intentional community, essentially is any group of people that lives in a geographically discrete area, whether it's a large shared house or an apartment building or a rural multi-acre community where people share some common vision or some common interest. It might be as simple as wanting to raise children together or have an orientation toward art or toward organic farming.
In our case, our vision was to draw people to us that wanted to live more ecologically and more cooperatively and wanted to do that in a geographically discrete two block neighborhood.
An eco-village has five components. Number one, its human scale. It's small enough that everyone can know one another face to face and have the feeling that they can influence the direction of the community. Number two, it's fully featured. In urban terms, that means you would not have to get into a private automobile in order to meet your daily needs. You're within walking distance of pretty much everything that you need, whether it’s shopping, food and education, or religion and spirituality. Thirdly, it closes the waste to resource loops. Nowhere in the world that I know of is there a fully manifested eco-village because no one has fully closed those waste to resource loops. That part of the definition is aspirational. Fourthly, an eco-village supports healthy human development. And lastly, an eco village can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.
There are about 20,000 networked eco-villages worldwide. All over the world in China, Japan, Russia, South America, and all over the states.
Samanta: What is a co-op?
Lois: A co-op is any kind of an organization that comes together to meet its common needs at the highest quality, at the lowest practical cost. If you’re a member of a food co-op, you buy food wholesale at deep discounts on the food. If you're not a member, you don't get the discount, but you get the highest quality food at the lowest practical cost.
Housing co-ops are where the co-op corporation owns the housing. People buy a share in the co-op corporation, which entitles them to a long term proprietary lease in the co-op. So that enables them to live in the co-op. In a limited equity co-op, the value of your co-op share is limited by state law and that's a way that we keep them affordable. People that start limited equity co-ops are interested in permanent affordability.
Our co-op in this building and the building adjacent to it, is a limited equity co-op owned by our co-op members. We have both renter members and owner members and, and we have about a dozen committees. And everyone who's a member of our co-op is expected to participate on one or two committees.
We want to make sure that people want to be here to be part of our public demonstration and not just because we have cheap rent, which we do. Our rents or our monthly housing costs are about half of the market rate in this neighborhood.
My organization CRSP, also known as the Los Angeles Eco-Village Institute, owns this quarter acre property. I have my own board. We are the ongoing developers of the Los Angeles Eco-Village. The limited equity housing co-op known as Urban soil, Tierra Urbana owns this 40 unit building and the eight-unit building next door; and the Beverly Vermont Community Land Trust owns the land underneath these two buildings. And the co-op pays land-rent to the land trust.
CRSP was the initial owner of all these properties. It was always our intent that they should be divided. The land and the buildings should be divided. Why? Because in the 1930 and 1940s, especially after World War II, there were a lot of limited equity co-ops in Los Angeles. What happened is that after the mortgages were paid off, the residents said, “Oh, we don't have any more mortgages. We could sell our buildings and make off like bandits.” That was the end of those co-ops when the mortgage was paid off.
Knowing that in my early research on co-ops, I decided, no, I want permanent affordability. I don't want people to be able to speculate on their co-op shares when the mortgage is paid off. So let's separate the ownership of the buildings from the ownership of the land and make sure that the legal documents for both the organizations secure permanent affordability.
I eventually learned [that] was not ever going to be enough. The only thing ultimately that is going to ensure secure, permanent affordability for low to moderate income people is the culture of the community that you create. It took us from 1996 when we bought this first building to 2012 before my board and I personally felt completely confident that the culture of permanent affordability had been established.
We do this not only for ourselves but for future generations as well. That's why our rents are half price or half of the market in the neighborhood. And that's why our vetting process takes so long. We want to make sure people want to move here for the right reasons and not just to get the cheap rent.
Samanta: What is it about intentional living and eco-villages that made you dedicate your life to them?
Lois: When I learned about co-ops and knowing that our current economic system is an utter failure for a large number of people in our society I realized that we need to look at different kinds of systems and not be frightened of living a high quality of life at a low environmental impact.
We need to radically change our attitudes and our needs and wants. We have to distinguish very carefully between what is normally known as standard of living (what kind of stuff you have, how much it costs, where you got it, what's the brand) and quality of life (What's your relationship to other people? What's your relationship to our life support systems? Air, soil, water.)
It’s quality of life that's got to take center-stage and not just standard of living. By having more collaborative or cooperative kinds of economies, you can have so much more stuff that you don't have to take ownership and full responsibility for.
Samanta: What is your favorite aspect about living in this eco-village?
Lois: The most important thing as you get older is to have social connections. Here there’s a lot of spontaneous connection. People come together and work. Like this morning, there was a street cleanup crew and about six eco-villagers went out and cleaned the streets.
But my most favorite aspect of it is that we are here to reinvent how we live in the city.