A Three House Community

A Three House Community

Buy three 2-story houses in Pittsburgh at about $10k each to function as one community. This would function as an ecovillage. An ecovillage is a type of intentional community. A wealth of information on these ideas is available at www.ecovillage.org and www.ic.org. This would be a modern day version of the "communes" of the 1960's. An ecovillage is focused more on ecology and less on religion, for example. There are hundreds of communities with a variety of focuses; just search or scan the directory at www.ic.org. This document is a collection of ideas I have accumulated over the years. Some of them I have tried, some not. Comments are welcome.

Community-wide rules and configurations include:

• No smoking
• Absolutely no drugs
• Internal church functions are pure; no politics
• Cache and filter rain water to drink, cook, and brush teeth. Also, to have on hand in an emergency.
• Run composting toilets to fertilize the garden and reduce water usage.
• Grow as much food as the properties will allow.
• Upstairs would be private space, downstairs would be community space and occasionally public space as scheduled.
• Electronic media, games, and phones would be limited to specific times and space. Allowed at least in the community coffee shop. Books are given prominence otherwise. Members are encouraged to use computers at the public library for internet access, and also to just get people outside!
• Walk and bike locally, especially between houses, and take the bus and light rail to town.
• Pay cash for houses and generally avoid car ownership to maintain a low cost of living for everyone, as in comfortably less than $500 per month per person. To benchmark community success, affordability for senior citizens on SS and people with children would be realized.
• Instead of spending time at work, creative pursuits at home would be facilitated. All kitchens would be stocked with art supplies including at least paper, crayons, colored markers and pencils on the counter. Every kitchen would have a large white board mounted on the wall for messages, impromptu art, and drawing charts and graphs as a part of conversation.
• Community decisions on the scheduling of chores of whole community benefit are up to all of us. But the cleanliness, etc., of private bedroom space is up to the individual.
• Everyone participates in preserving food, hopefully from local farms or picked from the wild.

House #1, the food house.

• This house would have all canning and food preservation equipment.
• The living room would be the community restaurant, with tables and chairs always ready.
• Have 2 refrigerators and 2 ovens for restaurant dinners.
• This is the daily community coffee shop in the morning. Maybe with an espresso machine. Largely self-serve.
• Formal community restaurant dinners every Saturday night or possibly every first Saturday of the month.

House #2, the art house.

• Host a monthly craft project on the morning of the day of the monthly dinner.
• The living room is actually a studio. It has no permanent furniture, save an upright piano. It is always ready for a person or small groups to join in exercise, eastern arts, etc., during the day, ballet and classical music training in the evenings, and practice of any of these any time else! Outside teachers could contract to use the facilities. A ballet class is open to the public.
• It includes 2 pianos, each with healthy wheels.
• The downstairs bedroom has 2 beds mounted up 6’ high on the walls, leaving all the floor space available to store pianos, chairs, and folding tables. People could sleep there, it would just not generally be a private space.
• A sewing machine to rebuild/repurpose clothes.
• Graphic arts including at least sketching and painting never need more than to set up a table…
• Musical recitals just have to be scheduled. Live music for ballet class is only limited to someone willing to perform it.

House #3, the library house.

• The downstairs is 24/7 quiet time. Zero personal electronic devices…
• It would be ideal for the people living upstairs to be on a monastic path.
• This is the “reading room”. All members are encouraged to donate books to it.
• A selection of used classic books are purchased at the outset to at least start filling the shelves.
• Computers are available in their own cubicles to read books downloaded onto the local area network.
• Computers run in text mode Linux with menus for text processing/book formatting(you can write a book), regular word processing, accounting/taxes with SQL, and programming languages to use and learn.
• This house is not the party place. That’s what the food house is for.