EcoVillage at Ithaca
- 5 hours ago
- 12 min read
Just two miles from downtown Ithaca, New York, in the heart of the Finger Lakes region, lies EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI)—one of the largest cohousing communities in the world.
Spread across 175 acres of beautiful countryside, EVI is an experiment in sustainable living, community, and the question of how we might meet our basic human needs while living in greater harmony with one another and with the Earth.
More than 80% of the property will remain open green space, including 50 acres protected by a conservation easement held by the Finger Lakes Land Trust.
The landscape is a mix of mature hardwood forests, recovering aspen groves, meadows, ponds, streams, wetlands, and organic farms. Semi-open fields blend into tree lines, creating important corridors for native wildlife. A central pond provides a gathering place for summer swimming and winter ice skating.
Approximately 210 people live at EVI, including about 170 adults and 40 children. The community is organized into three neighborhoods: FROG, SONG, and TREE.
How It All Began
The seeds of EcoVillage at Ithaca were planted in 1990, when 150 people walked across the United States from Los Angeles to New York City as part of the Global Walk for a Livable World.
Along the way, they stopped in approximately 200 communities, held workshops about sustainability, planted trees, and met with local activists.
The walk was also a social experiment. Participants practiced communication strategies for resolving conflict, shared meals, and distributed work according to people's skills and needs.
As they traveled across the country, they began dreaming about what a truly livable world might require. Cohousing emerged as one possible experiment in sustainable living.
In 1991, two of EcoVillage's co-founders, Joan Bokaer and Liz Walker, hosted a visioning retreat in Ithaca. About 100 people attended. Together, they developed a mission statement, discussed purchasing land, and established goals around green building, organic agriculture, and sustainable living.
A Place With a Deep History
The land around Ithaca has a rich cultural history. The Gayogohó:no' (Cayuga) people are the original stewards of this region and are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a union of six Indigenous nations whose governance traditions influenced the development of American democracy. Central and Western New York also played an important role in the abolitionist and women's rights movements and was home to several early utopian and social experiments.
EVI feels like another chapter in that long history of people coming together to imagine a different way of living.
The Mission
EVI's mission is:
“To promote experiential learning about ways of meeting human needs for shelter, food, energy, livelihood, and social connectedness that are aligned with the long-term health and viability of Earth and all its inhabitants.” That mission is visible throughout the community—not just in the buildings and gardens, but in the way people interact with one another.
Cohousing: Privacy With Community
Like many of the larger communities we've visited, residents have their own households and private spaces, but each neighborhood also has a Common House where people can gather for meals, meetings, parties, classes, laundry, and informal socializing.
Residents can opt into community dinners three times a week. Each dinner is hosted at one of the Common Houses and involves rotating cooking and cleaning teams. Residents sign up and pay a minimal fee, with approximately 60 spots available for each meal.
The dinners seem to be much more than simply a way to share food. They are an important part of community connection—and the meals often feature locally sourced ingredients.
The Common Houses also include spaces such as children's playrooms, guest rooms, meeting rooms, offices, libraries, and laundry facilities.
Residents can reserve guest rooms through an online community database. There are also shared offices that allow residents to work remotely without necessarily having to work from their homes.
Designing for Connection
The physical design of the neighborhoods encourages interaction.
Beautiful paths wind through central gardens between the homes. Kitchen windows face these paths, creating natural opportunities for residents to see one another, stop and chat, and connect throughout the day. But each individual gets to choose how often and in what ways they interact.
Cars are parked around the periphery of the neighborhoods rather than directly in front of the homes. Carports are equipped with electric vehicle charging stations.
This design creates a very different experience from a typical suburban neighborhood, where driveways and garages often dominate the landscape.
Instead, the heart of the neighborhood is designed around people.
Community Life
The culture at EVI includes plenty of neighborly support, seasonal celebrations, spontaneous parties, music jams, and talent shows.
There are also some wonderfully unconventional traditions—including winter polar jumps and highly competitive ping-pong championships.
Children participate in art exhibitions, and each neighborhood has a playground. Every Common House also has a playroom.
Residents spend a lot of time outdoors gardening, playing, running, hiking, biking, and stopping to talk along the paths, even in their harsh winters.
Many are also deeply involved in the wider Ithaca and Tompkins County communities, which have strong sustainability, social justice, and civic engagement movements.
Perhaps most importantly, many residents describe developing lifelong friendships with their neighbors and feeling deeply grateful to live in a community built around rich relationships.
The Three Neighborhoods
EVI has developed in three distinct phases: FROG, SONG, and TREE.
FROG: First Residents Group
Completed in 1997, FROG was the pioneering neighborhood. It contains 30 passive-solar homes arranged in two rows. The houses were designed with south-facing windows, natural shading, abundant natural light, and relatively small footprints.
The duplexes share walls, which helps improve heat retention and reduce energy use.
When FROG was being developed in the early 1990s, rooftop solar was not yet financially practical. Today, a 50-kilowatt ground-mounted solar array provides approximately half of the electricity used by the 30 FROG homes.
The neighborhood is currently exploring further decarbonization, although natural gas is still used.
The FROG Common House
The FROG Common House is designed to support both practical needs and community interaction.
It includes:
A large commercial-style kitchen with three ovens. The decision to place ovens in the Common House rather than in every individual home was intentional—it encourages residents to cook and interact together as well as reduces the cost of each individual needing to own a personal oven.
A children's playroom where kids can play while parents attend meetings.
A guest room that residents can reserve for visiting friends and family.
A large meeting room used for regular community meetings and other gatherings.
Offices that residents can rent for remote work.
Shared laundry facilities with several washers and dryers. Residents are encouraged to line-dry their clothes outdoors.
An infrared sauna.
A ReUse Room where residents can exchange items they no longer need.
SONG: Second Neighborhood Group
SONG was completed in 2006 as the second phase of EVI’s development. It contains 30 energy-efficient duplex homes. Unlike FROG, SONG used a more individualized, self-development approach rather than relying on a single architect and uniform design. Residents here are responsible for maintaining the outside and inside of their homes, whereas in the other two neighborhoods, residents are only responsible for indoor maintenance and neighborhood associations are responsible for the outdoor.
The neighborhood was laid out with a larger central common area that opens toward views of the surrounding hills.
The homes are individually customized and demonstrate a wide variety of sustainable building techniques. All are Energy Star certified.
The large SONG Common House sits centrally within the neighborhood and includes a kitchen and dining area, laundry room, library, and playroom. In addition to EVI gatherings, the building serves as an event venue for organizations from the wider Ithaca community.
Residents also enjoy the surrounding fields and a 10-acre woodland along the neighborhood's northern boundary.
TREE: Third Residential Ecovillage Experience
TREE was completed in 2015 and was designed with two important goals: accessibility and ultra-low energy use. The neighborhood was intentionally designed to support older residents who want to age in place. Though many of the oldest residents leave at the end stages of their lives because they need easier access to medical care.
All 40 TREE homes are LEED Platinum certified, the highest level of LEED certification. These homes are designed to provide clean indoor air, abundant natural light, and safer building materials while reducing energy and water consumption.
Seven of the largest homes are also Passivhaus certified, meeting a rigorous German standard for extremely energy-efficient buildings. These homes use excellent insulation, highly efficient windows, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, minimal thermal bridging, and exceptional airtightness.
At least one TREE home is net-zero, producing more energy through rooftop solar than its residents consume over the course of a year. Other homes may also achieve similar performance.
Energy and Electricity
EVI uses significantly less energy than a typical American community.
Through passive-solar design, super-insulation, energy-efficient construction, and on-site renewable energy generation, the community estimates that it has reduced overall resource consumption by roughly 70%.
Solar production comes from both ground-mounted and rooftop photovoltaic systems. A prominent 50-kilowatt community solar array generates a significant amount of electricity, with total solar production estimated at approximately 60,000 kilowatt-hours annually.
Depending on the neighborhood, on-site solar supplies roughly 42%–60% of electricity demand.
The community also uses custom web-based monitoring systems to track solar production and individual electricity consumption in real time.
The homes themselves contribute significantly to energy savings. Large south-facing windows, advanced insulation systems, and passive-solar design reduce the need for artificial lighting and space heating.
Waste and Composting
Food scraps and organic waste are handled through decentralized, neighborhood-level composting systems. Each cohousing neighborhood maintains its own composting setup where residents deposit kitchen scraps and garden waste.
Residents share responsibility for maintaining the compost piles, periodically turning and managing them until they become rich organic amendments.
The finished compost is returned directly to community gardens, agricultural areas, and permaculture landscapes throughout the property.
This creates a simple closed-loop system:
Food → Kitchen Scraps → Compost → Gardens → Food
The community estimates that on-site organics management significantly reduces the amount of material requiring conventional municipal garbage collection.
Farming and Food
Food is an important part of life at EVI. Each neighborhood has a community garden where residents can grow their own food. SONG has a particularly thriving Common House kitchen garden and the largest community garden.
Many residents also participate in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, in which customers pay farmers at the beginning of the growing season and receive shares of the harvest throughout the season.
West Haven Farm
One of the farms within the community is West Haven Farm, a 10-acre certified organic farm.
The farm was started by Jen and John in 1992, when the FROG homes were still being designed. It was later developed by the daughter of EVI co-founder Joan Bokaer and is now operated by EVI residents Carlos and Lorena.
EcoVillage residents can walk to the farm to pick up their CSA shares. The weekly pickup has become a vibrant community event, often featuring live music, U-pick flowers, and locally made bread and honey.
In 2025, West Haven Farm offered 250 vegetable shares, 83 of which were fully subsidized for low-income families.
Our guide told us that during the summer, almost all of his produce comes from his CSA share.
Kestrel Perch Farm
Kestrel Perch is a 3.5-acre organic U-pick berry farm. The farm grows strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and currants.
Kestrel Perch was founded by EVI resident Katie and is now operated by the local sustainability-focused charter school, New Roots.
Groundswell Farm:
Groundswell is a non-profit organization that rents land from EVl. They provide new farmers up to a 1/4 acre of land, technical training, one-on-one guidance and resources including deer fencing, a vegetable wash station, walk-in cooler, tools and equipment, and more.
Groundswell primarily serves people of color, immigrants, refugees, and women, trans, and non-binary people with a goal of building a more diverse farming community by supporting farmers who often experience significant systemic barriers to starting their business.
Water
EVI sources its water from the local Fall Creek watershed. Fall Creek flows through Tompkins County and eventually into Cayuga Lake near Ithaca.
Although the water is relatively clean, many residents choose to further filter their drinking water at home.
The presence of streams, wetlands, ponds, and the central swimming and skating pond also makes water an important part of the landscape and community experience.
Animals
Community chickens are kept in shared pens, including areas near the FROG neighborhood, providing residents with fresh eggs. Over the years, different neighborhoods have also experimented with small-scale animal husbandry, including ducks, rabbits, turkeys, sheep, pigs, and goats but currently there are none. Many residents have dogs and cats that are kept within their homes.
Work and Shared Responsibility
Residents live in private homes as families, couples, and singles, ranging in age from infants to octogenarians. Their professions are just as diverse: farmers, software engineers, nurses, therapists, writers, poets, builders, musicians, lawyers, financial professionals, teachers, professors, and artists. About 30% of residents are retired.
There are no communally-run businesses but many independent professionals work onsite such as: therapists, massage therapists, acupuncturists, artists, martial arts classes, in addition to the 4 farms onsite.
Gourdlandia is a unique art studio - one of the residents, Graham grows gourds onsite and carves them into lamps, instruments, and more and sells them at EVI as well as online and at art fairs.
Along with their outsourced incomes, living in a cohousing community requires residents to contribute their time and skills.
Village residents volunteer approximately 2–4 hours per week to help keep the community running. That's considerably less than the volunteer commitment required by many of the other intentional communities we have visited. However, the financial cost of living at EVI is also significantly higher than at many of those communities, so the balance between financial contribution and volunteer labor looks different here.
Community work is organized through a Work Team system, allowing residents to contribute in areas that interest them most.
Teams include:
Cooking
Dishes
Outdoors
Maintenance
Common House
Finance
Process and Steering
Community Life
This structure allows people to contribute according to their skills, interests, and availability.
Governance and Conflict Resolution
Like many cohousing communities, EVI uses collaborative decision-making processes including consensus and Sociocracy.
Each neighborhood has its own governance structure, while a Village Association brings together representatives from all three neighborhoods.
The community also has dedicated Conflict Transformation Teams to help residents work through disagreements and interpersonal challenges.
This is an important part of intentional community living. Sharing land, resources, meals, responsibilities, and decision-making inevitably creates opportunities for conflict. EVI recognizes that conflict isn't necessarily a failure—it is something that needs to be addressed constructively.
Children and Families
Approximately 40 children currently live at EVI.
Some are homeschooled, while others attend local public and chartered schools.
Children are clearly an important part of community life. Each neighborhood has a playground, and each common house has a playroom.
Children are encouraged to participate in community activities, develop their skills, and showcase their talents through events such as art exhibitions and talent shows.
The overall environment seems to embrace children as full members of the community rather than treating them as separate from adult life. Children who become adults in the community are given the opportunity to stay if their families have the desire and space to accomodate them.
Art, Music, and Play
Art and music are woven throughout community life.
EVI has many seasonal events that bring the three neighborhoods together, and the community is home to numerous musicians and artists who contribute their talents.
The Common Houses and weekly CSA pickup events create regular opportunities for spontaneous interaction. There is a noticeable sense that play is considered an important part of community life—not an afterthought.
Health and Well-Being
Living at EVI requires a certain level of physical engagement. The community is designed for walking, gardening, biking, playing, hiking, and socializing outdoors. Paths connect the homes and common spaces, and residents are frequently moving between their homes, gardens, Common Houses, and surrounding natural areas.
Although we didn't have the opportunity to meet a large number of residents during our visit, everyone we encountered—from children to older adults—appeared active, engaged, and joyful.
Standout Features:
One particularly interesting feature is the ReUse Room, essentially a free community thrift space. Residents leave useful items they no longer need, and other residents can take what they can use. It's a simple example of a circular economy in action: instead of buying something new or sending a useful object to the landfill, someone else gets a second use out of it.
Residents here have created a framework that allows very different individuals and families to live alongside one another while sharing resources, responsibilities, and a strong sense of community yet in the context of still having many of the individual comforts the modern US citizen enjoys.
They also have a mission of affordability and diversity which they admit they have not reached. Houses in this community are at market value, around $400,000 per unit. This makes it pretty unattainable for many.
TREE has an affordability fund to help with low- to no-interest loans for down payments.
Neighbors Helping Neighbors program supports people with short-term financial challenges.
In this same vein, although they value diversity & attract residents from all over the world, their demographics do not reflect the racial diversity of our nation.
Diversifying their community remains a challenge and goal.
What We Took Away From Our Visit
What makes EcoVillage at Ithaca interesting isn't simply its solar panels, energy-efficient homes, organic farms, or composting systems. It is the way these pieces work together. The architecture is designed to encourage interaction. The gardens produce food. Food scraps become compost. Solar panels produce electricity. Common Houses provide shared space. Cars are moved to the edges of neighborhoods. Children grow up surrounded by multiple generations. Residents share meals, responsibilities, celebrations, skills, and friendships. At its heart, EcoVillage seems to be asking a much bigger question: What would our communities look like if we designed them around relationships, sustainability, and the long-term health of both people and the planet?
After spending time there, one thing became clear: sustainability isn't only about technology. It's also about how we live together.
EVI is an ongoing experiment in that idea—a place where people are testing, learning, adapting, and trying to build a more connected and sustainable way of life.
And perhaps the most meaningful measure of its success isn't the number of solar panels or LEED certifications.
It's the people.
The friendships.
The shared meals.
The children running along the paths.
The neighbors stopping to talk.
The gardens.
The music.
The willingness to help one another.
And the feeling that creating a sustainable future might be something we do together, rather than something each of us has to figure out alone.
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