Welcome

This web site, village-town.com is used for VillageTown project sub-domains. If you happened to come to this page looking for information, we would suggest you go to our main page VillageForum.com. But if you are just looking for a brief overview, we are happy to provide it here.

A VillageTown is a town made of villages. What that means is that we need a town of about 10,000 people to support a strong, self-supporting local economy, but we don't want that town to be homogenous - in other words: boring, lacking in authenticity and character, and too large to enable people to know others and to be known. In a village of, say 500 people, there is an inherent tendency of people to manage their own affairs without the need for a bureaucracy. In villages, folks look after the children, the old people, the weak and infirm because people are inherently social. Not everyone of course, but in small communities, folks know each other and tend to take more care. This will become much more important as our national and global systems run out of money and those support systems they promised will fail to deliver. Thus, we build a town made of villages. The town is strong & diverse; the villages are intimate and supportive.

To make these villages safer and stronger, all day-to-day destinations are placed within walking distance; the technical term is a walking home-range. What this means is that not only are cars not necessary inside the VillageTown, they are eliminated. You can keep all the cars you want in the motorpool near the VillageTown entrance, but within the village walls, children are free to run and play in the streets without parents worrying - no cars on the village streets. Old people who lose their driver license don't have to move to a retirement home. The cost of living drops by about 15%. The air smells sweeter. The alfresco coffee tastes better.

The purpose of a VillageTown is to enable people to enjoy what Aristotle called a good life... when several villages come together to become self-supporting, the purpose of their continuance is to enable their people to enjoy a good life, understood as the social pursuits of conviviality, citizenship and artistic, intellectual & spiritual growth. This definition of why we build communities is over 2,300 years old, but it makes more sense than why we build them today.

In order for this to work, however, there cannot be someone at the top telling those future villagers what a good life means. It must come from the people who will live there. That, of course, means that they have to self-identify before the villages are built. In that way, they can set the theme, the look & feel, the layout and the values upon which their village is designed and built. And, if you remember, each village will be different, because the people who will live there come together attracted by a different concept - what we call the theme. This is what makes the town so interesting - each village is different.

When people come together before the project begins, there is another, very important benefit: Money. When a developer does a project, the developer has to guess what the buyers want. Usually this results in an unfulfilling, cookie-cutter design; somewhat boring and done as cheaply as the market will bear.

With a VillageTown, because the people pre-identify, a developer is not used. Instead, the VillageTown is built by an Organizing Company. Like a developer, the 4,000 homes for a 10,000 population on 500 acres (60% of which is greenbelt around the urban core and industrial park) will earn the Organizing Company huge profits; probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Unlike a developer, those net profits are not taken away. Instead, once the project is completed and the Organizing Company has paid its taxes and a 10% reinvestment premium, it is recast as the VillageTown Operating Company. The VillageTown Stewards & Co, who started the project then turn in their stock, which is then reissued - one share per home, with voting rights by citizens living in those homes.

This means that if you buy a home, you also get a community that starts out with several hundred million dollars in the bank... and you and your fellow villagers own that company. It exists to enable the citizens and the villages to provide for their economic, social, cultural, environmental and spiritual wellbeing. It is called a Legacy Fund, and it invests in the small-to-medium enterprises in the VillageTown to create a strong local economy. It uses profits to assure zero unemployment, zero poverty, care for the elderly and infirm, a far better education for children, a low tolerance for crime, sustainable design & utilities, and a socially and culturally enriched life. It also is instructed in the founding documents that the fund managers must plan for seven generations (175 years). This is because the VillageTown becomes a place where people can put down roots; a place where when the founding villagers build their home, they think about it the way people used to think - not just passing through, living in whatever will resell, but a place to love, a place to live for life, and a place they build not only for themselves, but for their grandchildren, great-grandchildren, perhaps as many as seven generations or more. It's a whole different way of thinking, like the people who plant trees so folks a hundred years later will have shade.

When one builds with that sense of roots, attitude changes. One builds with great care, attention to detail, thinking about ornament and even about appliances not as disposable and cheap, but beautiful, durable and functional. The kitchen ceases to be a re-fueling station for the body, and instead is designed for family, friends, laughter and joy. Out in the central village plaza, the villagers decide to add about $5 a month to their mortgage so that collectively they can pay for a cafe. By doing this, they then can lease it to a proprietor for $1 a year, provided the cafe has great food and drink that reflects the rent-free overhead, and provided that in the warm months it has lots of tables and chairs outside where people can sit and visit with each other and not feel obligated to buy.

When we began this page, we said it would be a brief overview, and we confess at 1,200 words, to be pushing the meaning of the word brief. But this is because there are so many details in the VillageTown that are fundamentally different than anything you may expect. The original idea came from Claude Lewenz, an entrepreneurial businessman (trained as a constitutional historian) who noticed that while he was busy making money in the computer industry, society flipped and the concept of home & community became a transient commodity. Talking about this with friends, the idea grew until it came to the attention of some prominent people, including Libby Rouse and Stewart Udall who saw in the VillageTown concept some very important elements that the real estate industry was ignoring. Out of this came the VillageTown Stewards, a volunteer group of people committed to helping make VillageTowns go from a good idea worth doing to a live project. It now is moving from talking to fund-raising, meeting with local government officials and finding the right place to begin. It is becoming real.

If this has piqued your interest, then go to the VillageForum.com. Click on the book tab above to buy the books. Learn more. And if you love the idea, become involved. After all, it's your life; it's your opportunity. Build your village.