VH community memoir

November 2023

Design matters!  Village Homes was very thoughtfully planned, and nearly all the experimental plans worked out well!  From an energy standpoint, just making all the homes face south and minimizing the east and west windows immediately reduced their energy consumption.  Who wants that hot west sun pouring heat into our homes in the summer?  Instead, facing south allows our homes to welcome the winter sun to heat our homes in winter but blocks out the summer sun that is too high overhead to enter.  We open our windows at night allowing the Delta breeze to waft through from the south in the summer and cool our homes overnight.  The more tanks of water, the more we can cool the house for the next day’s heat.  It’s all so simple and based on our microclimate.  Fortunately, the Delta breeze from the Pacific will remain unaffected by climate change, and our nights are still cold enough to cool our water storage culverts of which I have seven big ones!  Passive solar continues to cool my home so well that folks always believe I have air conditioning (I don’t), and I only occasionally need added heat on cloudy winter days.

My home was designed by a local energy efficiency company: Living Systems, that was trying to figure out designs that would use the minimum of energy yet be comfortable to live in.  There is a replica of my home in Homer, Alaska also.  We monitored both homes for energy efficiency and the design performed well in either location.

During my first winter here in 1977, we had a chance to see just how well-designed Village Homes really was.  It poured rain in 1977-78, breaking several years of severe drought! I’ve never seen the water level in the natural drainage swales higher in the 46 years since.  It worked flawlessly!  The rain pummeled the ground and filled the swales, gathering in the deeper ponds at the end of each swale as planned.  And, in between rains, the water quietly absorbed into the ground!  Amazing!  We had no street rain gutters, yet all the water flowed as planned in the natural drainage swales and soaked into our soil.  The system continues to work smoothly all these years later.

Initially, for homeowner meetings we gathered outside in whichever swale had a bit of grass to sit on, weeding as we spoke.  In colder weather, we met inside one of the houses Mike Corbett was building that was far enough along to have electricity and flooring.  We brought our own cushions to sit on.  In those days, we spent time deciding how our gardeners could pick up our compost!  Mike had hired an expert who designed and planted the greenbelt landscaping (north-south arteries), but we were on our own to design our common areas.  Virginia did serious research to find a suitable deciduous street tree – our Chinese tallow trees – to offer us shade in summer and then drop its leaves quickly in fall to allow the sunlight to warm our homes.  

Early on we started a monthly newsletter typed on ditto masters and run off on a hand-cranked ditto machine, then hand-delivered to our homes.  We didn’t even have computers back then!  It sure is easier now!

As more homes were built, street by street, David Bainbridge, Judy Corbett, and John Hofacre compiled a collection of 43 energy-conscious house designs, Village Homes’ Solar House Designs. I still have a copy of that very interesting book.

We hosted a speaker from the Rocky Mountain Institute who came to speak at Freeborn Hall on campus.  We invited a number of progressives working in the energy/home design field from “Living Systems” to our dinner party for him. It was an honor to have such guests looking to create a better future for us all.

I still remember the thrill of meeting Jane Fonda with her husband, CA state legislator Tom Hayden, at a reception at the Corbett’s home, as both of them were interested in seeing Village Homes.  Afterward, we all viewed the Premiere of On Golden Pond in our downtown theater.  And now, all these years later, Jane is a strong and much-venerated climate leader!

We lined the green to watch as Mitterrand had just enough time in his California trip to land his helicopter on our green.  Unfortunately, his copter blew the canvas covering off our gazebo, ripping it to shreds, but otherwise, he delighted us with his quick visit to some of our homes. He was quite curious about our innovative development…and we enjoyed the fanfare.    

Security was much higher when Rosalyn and Amy Carter came to visit.  I believe Jimmy Carter had hoped to come as well, but duty called.   We residents had to choose to stay home for the entire time before and after they visited, or leave entirely as secret service officers blockaded all the roads in and out of Village Homes.  Michael Corbett guided them around and then walked them right past my home with me waving from my deck on the way to a visit inside his own home with his own daughter Lisa who was the same age as Amy! It turned out they were wearing the same outfit, too! If only Carter had been reelected! He was in my opinion one of our best presidents.

My all-time favorite visitor was singer-songwriter Pete Seeger.  Mike Corbett called me one Sunday morning and asked if I would mind letting Pete see my passive solar home!  It turned out Pete had agreed to give a concert in Davis only if he could tour Village Homes.  He was always curious about energy innovations such as solar, and he had heard of Village Homes.  He asked lots of thoughtful questions.  I admired him even more after experiencing his curiosity for ways to live more simply and gently on this planet!  I have always treasured my Sunday morning visit with this quiet yet inquisitive soul who gave us so much in his songs.  What an honor to share my home with him.

Twice we offered home tours (3 different loops of them) for a modest ticket price as a fund-raiser.  We drew visitors from the Bay Area as well as locals who wanted to see inside our homes. We had a guide for each loop as well as the homeowners.  In the Community Center, we had displays and information on the community as a whole.  The guides pointed out the swales for drainage, the interconnected pathways, the narrow streets (to reduce hot pavement), the garden plots to encourage growing our own veggies, the vineyards and orchards distributed throughout, and our versatile community center/pool/and amphitheater to hold us together.  That day we welcomed many local guests, but also many folks from out of town eager to experience our unique community!

Several University professors still bring student groups through to show off one aspect or another:  the natural rainwater collection system, the variety of passive solar designs (but all houses having the basic orientation of facing south and minimizing east & west glazing), the narrow paved streets to keep the overall environment cooler, the embedded fruit orchards, the garden plots for residents, the ease of walking and biking over driving, the emphasis on building community, our own small commercial center with offices mostly rented to folks who live here, and a few apartments.  

Having the community center is important! For many years we had a daycare in our community center during the day, which could be quickly cleared for evening events.  In the evenings there have been various meetings, dance classes, Friday night Ballroom dances for many years, yoga and meditation classes, one-time events ranging from wedding receptions to family reunions to memorial services, slide shows and film screenings, talks, and crafts fairs.  Everyone loves our pot-lucks at the amphitheater which has also served for weddings and memorial services.  Admittedly COVID-19 stopped all activity for a few years.  Now as we recover, the possibilities are many!  

People get together if they have a place to gather, share food, make music, star gaze (we always have some astronomers with telescopes to teach us about heavenly events), to dance, to talk, to play games, to share concerns.  The community center allows us to hold pot-luck dinners and make music together.  It is the heart of our community.

Looking at our future, there is another use for our community center.  We may have need of a resilience center as climate change becomes more severe.  Now we are looking at our community center with its planned upgrades as a possible resilience center should some homeowners need to retreat from homes that lack air conditioning in a heat wave. Or, some folks may lack a way to adequately heat their homes if the electricity is down.  We may need to be sure we can heat and cool our Community Center even if the electricity is down!  How can we give our community center a backup heating and cooling system so we can always have a place to go to stay warm or cool if our homes are no longer comfortable enough?  We have experts in our community who can figure this out.  Disaster preparedness is increasingly important.  How fortunate we are to have the option of providing our own shelter where we can retreat when the power is out instead of relying on the city or county refuges.  

Tours!  For quite a few years we had volunteers who were knowledgeable about passive solar homes (and our variations as builders and home-owners tried different experiments) who could be called on to lead tours.  We had a constant request for tours:  visiting dignitaries, groups from schools (elementary through university students), engineers and planners who wanted to understand, people with a narrow focus on the natural drainage (our swales and lack of street drains so all the rainwater replenishes our groundwater), folks focused on bike paths, etc.  I believe we still need trained tour leaders on occasion as classes and curious individuals continue to come through with questions.  We are an important resource.

I hope these musings of past events that have stayed with me through the years are useful.  I also hope my concern for our future and the possibility of making our community center a resilience center becomes a reality as we consider renovations there.

Thank you for gathering the thoughts of those of us who have lived here from the beginning so we can share our perspectives.  Village Homes has been a wonderful place to live.

Lynne Nittler, resident on Bucklebury Road since November 1977.