Ecovillage

I finally got to tour Ecovillage!!! And let me say it's pretty freakin' awesome up there. I'll say again, that Arlene, a woman who goes to my church, lives up there, and so I contacted her and asked if she could give me a personal tour. It turned out the Thursday, the day I went, was also a community dinner night, so I got to eat some delicious free pesto pasta, root veggies, and salad.
I drove in on the main road and met her by one of the carports near TREE neighborhood  We walked to her house from there and she told me a bit about the history of the village and how it runs. Here is some of the information she gave me.

General:
-Started out as a 30 house neighborhood in 1996 (now, that neighborhood is called FROG, which stands for First Residential Group).
-They now have almost three neighborhoods: FROG, SONG (Second Neighborhood Group), and TREE (Third Residential Ecovillage Experience). TREE is still in the process of being built
-Neighborhood is set up as a cooperative. For example, if you're in New York City and you own share to your apartment building, that's what Ecovillage is like.
-There is a volunteer expectation of 2-4 hours per week. There are multiple teams you can join to meet these expectation, such as the cook team, the dish team, the gardening/landscaping team, the maintenance team, the finance team, and many others.
-All houses are connected to NYSEG still. If there is no solar gain, then they use natural gas for power.
-Two farms present: the West Haven Farm (organic vegetables) and a "you pick" berry farm
-After tree is fully built, there will be approximately 150 adults and 70 kids living in evovillage.
TREE:
-The 25 buildings built so far in TREE are LEED Platinum certified, which is the highest level of LEED certification.
-7 of these houses are Passivhaus certified. There are only about 150 of these in the U.S., and 7 of them are here in Ithaca! The Passivhaus focuses on low energy use, which usually means these houses must have a lot of solar gain from photovoltaics (solar panels). Also, they're all net zero!
-All houses are tightly insulated, but not so tight that mold grows or anything like that.
-There's fresh air ventilation provided by ERVs (Energy Recovery Ventilators).
-No central heating. Instead, there are HRVs (Heating Recovery Ventilators).

I also have a few pictures to show for my endeavors!

This first one is a picture of TREE, the neighborhood that's currently being built. You can see the two different kinds of solar panels that are on these houses. The smaller, darker ones are photovoltaics. The larger ones are solar thermal panels used to heat water.

 The second photo is a picture of part of SONG neighborhood, the second one that was built.

This is a picture of the deck of SONG'S common house. I love the tree ceiling (and without knowing it, they're incorporating TREE neighborhood into theirs!)

Here's a shot featuring all three neighborhoods. The house on the left is part of SONG, the houses in the middle are TREE, and the house on the right is FROG. This shows how close in proximity the neighborhoods really are to each other.

Here's a picture FROG. It's so quaint and fairy tale like, isn't it?!

I would love to live in ecovillage, or a community similar to it. Maybe I'll find myself a little earthship community to reside in in my later years.