VH community memoir

In 1976, I was three years into my position as an Assistant Professor at UC Davis, and after a recent divorce, was a 29-year-old single man looking for a new home. Several years earlier, while still residing in Boulder, Colorado, I read an article about two individuals who were planning a new solar neighborhood in Davis, California, but thought little of it at the time.  Even after moving to Davis in 1973 for my new job, VH only existed on paper, and my then-wife and I bought a house elsewhere.  Having started a fledgling landscape architecture program at UCD, however, Village Homes offered me not only a great place to find a small, affordable home but also a place to practice the energy and water conservation measures I was preaching to my students.  In the summer, of 1976, I bought a small duplex unit (2321) on what was then still Portage Bay Avenue. I was the eleventh resident of Village Homes.

In those days, most of us were single working folks, most with college degrees, and mostly working locally.  Mike and Judy Corbett had easily (and correctly) persuaded us that this was to be the neighborhood of the future that changed the way people thought about energy, open space, walkability, shared gardening, and what we soon found out…work parties.  At one of the earlier such volunteer efforts, a beautiful woman with a beret pushing a wheelbarrow full of beer came by as we worked, and I took notice…of her…and remembered nothing about the beer.  This was Lacey Vasak, the third resident to move into her house at 2413 Elendil Lane.  I did not know at that time I would marry this wonderful woman, raise three children, and live in Village Homes forever.  However, after a series of relationships with others, in 1978, Lacey and I found each other, bought a spec house that Virginia Thigpen had designed, got married in the Redwood Grove of the UCD Arboretum, honeymooned by bicycle in the UK, and came home to our new home in summer, 1980.

Village Homes in the early days was a thriving place that soon became known worldwide. I played my part in this by giving voluntary tours to the throngs of visitors coming through from local, national, and global locations, a task I continued for forty years after I moved in.  Most of us in those days knew our immediate neighbors well, and the rest of the residents at least by which house they owned. Lacey and I commuted to work via bicycle, she to various elementary schools in Davis, and I to the university.  We owned only one small car between us from 1978 to 1997, when our oldest son, Doug, turned sixteen.  We were (and still are) also dog owners: Luna, Sundance, Skye, and Bo are all resting in the hallowed ground west of our house, and our current dog, Milo, exercises with his canine friends on Parque Chico across from our house.  We continue to be extremely grateful for this most accommodating aspect of our neighborhood.

In retrospect, looking at the neighborhood today in 2023, the most remarkable difference from the earlier days is that now we have an incredibly beautiful, climatically and ecologically important, mature urban forest.  With the ample open space and narrow streets of Village Homes, we set an example for the rest of Davis and benefit from the ample shade and wildlife that has shared this community with us humans. The work parties continue; the social life has never been better; the new residents bring not only their joyous children but also their affection and commitment to this place. Village Homes has grown and matured, much as we older residents have, but it retains the youthful optimism it has had since ground was broken in the mid-’70s.  May it always do so.