Enright Ridge Urban Ecovillage

In 2004, Imago, an ecological education organization on Enright Avenue, brought 17 residents together to start an ecovillage in the neighborhood. They came together and committed to developing a neighborhood that valued a sense of community and would become a destination neighborhood embodying green sustainable living practices, as well as a model for revitalizing other urban neighborhoods.
The ecovillage is located on four dead end streets all contiguous to Imago. We have some 200 houses on the four streets and are just minutes from downtown Cincinnati. Roughly a third of the people are involved with the ecovillage, a third are open, and a third are basically indifferent. There is little opposition because the ecovillage has helped to make the neighborhood a wonderful place to live for everyone.
Houses and rentals are reasonably priced. In collaboration with Imago, and an organization called Community Earth Alliance, we have rehabbed some 25 foreclosed houses over the years in the ecovillage, and sold most of them to people interested in home ownership. We used creative financing to purchase the first house. We then came across a foundation that would grant us money for purchasing and rehabbing each home. We would return the money to them when we sold the home with 0 to 3% interest. It was a wonderful deal. Houses in the ecovillage are mostly owned by homeowners. We do not control who buys in the neighborhood, but most people who move here do so because of the ecovillage. We had a a good number of young families with children move here over the years.
With the majority of people now living in cities, we have to find ways of making our cities more Earth friendly. The retrofit urban ecovillage is a great way of doing this. Our goal is to help other urban neighborhoods create their own ecovillage. We have published a book, “Creating an Urban Ecovillage: A Model for Revitalizing Our Cities”. Our goal for the book is to let people see an urban ecovillage and find ideas for how to start one in ones’ own neighborhood. We are willing to consult with groups interested in looking at the possibility of creating an ecovillage in their city neighborhood.