$150M Eco-topian ​“Village” Envisioned

Soon you may be able to walk up Prospect Street — and enter utopia.

The utopia has a name: Living Village. It is set to appear just past the red brick of the Yale Divinity School (YDS) quad.

If completed, it will feature a set of buildings with 155 apartments that give more to the environment than they take.

The shades and windows of the apartments will open and close based on the position of the sun. Solar panels on the rooftops will provide all of the energy needed for the Living Village, and then some. All water will come from rainfall and all waste is handled on site.

The Divinity School is planning to demolish a parking lot and three existing apartments to build this utopia thanks in part to the largest gift in the school’s history: $15 million from philanthropists George and Carol Bauer. The school is now raising the rest of the money for a $150 million project that aims to create community while preserving the planet.

The idea is to mimic nature in creating a self-sustaining community, off the grid.

“If you think of a flower, it has to take everything it needs in one place. A flower can’t get up and say, ​‘The sun isn’t very bright where I’m at, so I’m going to go on that hillside,’” said Dean Gregory Sterling.

The vision runs on three cylinders: eco-theological commitments, community-building and easing student financial burdens.

The Theology

One of Yale University’s original purposes was training ministers. YDS became a separate school in 1822. Students are Jewish, Muslim, agnostic and more, but the majority of the roughly 380 students are Christian.

“We don’t apologize for that. That’s just who we are,” Sterling said in an interview in his office.

Div School students now go on to become ministers and chaplains, professors and leaders of nonprofits and companies. Each program – ministry, academia and other – captures a third of the students, according to Sterling.

This commitment to religion is intertwined with a commitment to the future of the environment and a feeling of moral responsibility to take care of it.

“We recognize that there are serious challenges confronting the human race. Climate change is one of them, the disappearance of species is another one of them, the loss of native land is another, and they’re all related,” Sterling said.

To Sterling, Christianity tells him to take care of his God’s creation and consider future generations.

“I don’t want to do things to the environment that my grandchildren can’t live with. I feel strongly about this. I think most people do.”

So when Sterling was thinking about replacing existing student apartments, he knew environmental consciousness would be part of it.

The Community

Roughly 90 students live in what used to be married student housing (once known as the ​“Fertile Crescent” because of the number of children born there).

Tucked behind other buildings on Prospect Street, the three apartment buildings were built in 1957 and are two decades past their life expectancy, Sterling said.

When Sterling was mulling over the dorm situation in 2014, lawyer and Div School advisory council member Christopher Sawyer asked him whether he had ever heard of one of the most rigorous standards for sustainable buildings, the International Living Future Institute’s Living Building Challenge. The challenge requires certified buildings to be built without a long list of harmful materials and then exist off the grid with their own sources of energy and water.

Sterling decided this was what the Divinity School needed. Renovating the Fertile Crescent would cost more than the buildings are worth, so he resolved to tear them down and replace them with a building that meets all of the standards of the Living Building Challenge.

Sterling described visiting Seattle’s Bullitt Center later and seeing the windows and shades move with the sun. The Bullitt Center meets all of the Living Building Challenge requirements, including by generating more energy than the building needs from rooftop solar panels.

“There is the sense that the building is breathing,” he said.

If successful, the Living Village will be the first Living Building Challenge-certified building at an Ivy League and in Connecticut.

YDS plans to train students to operate the building the way computers do at the Bullitt Center – for example, by manually lowering and raising the blinds rather than relying on automatic settings. Sterling hopes to train students to live sustainably in that process and that they will take that training with them in their future careers.

The Price

The Div School’s current academic and administrative buildings were once dormitories too, designed after Thomas Jefferson’s ​“Academical Village” at the heart of the University of Virginia.

When these buildings, known as the Quad, were converted into offices and classrooms in 2003, the Divinity School lost some of its sense of residential community. The Living Village would restore that sense.

“We’re actually trying to prepare people not only in theology but how do they build communities, and we want to model that for people when they’re here,” Sterling said.

While the Living Village takes inspiration from the third president and slaveowner’s model of living and learning at UVa, it hopes to take more inspiration from the future than the past.

“The University of Virginia was not always open to all people. We want this community, this village to make a statement about being open to all,” Sterling said.

A cornerstone of that inclusivity is making the Divinity School an affordable place to attend.

Sterling said that YDS is close to being tuition-free for all students who have demonstrated need. The cost of living for students is the next piece of that goal of affordability, and Sterling aims to accomplish that with below-market rents at the Living Village.

“It costs approximately $22,000 to live in New Haven, and that’s not living very well. That means one room of a large house with six other people and being very careful,” Sterling said. ​“We want to give people a nice place of their own at roughly the same price.”

And – in line with the vision of sustainability – students would not need a car.

“It’s only 155 units. It’s not going to ruin the rental market in New Haven by any stretch,” he added.

Next Steps

Sterling cautioned that the vision of the Living Village is not yet assured. YDS still needs to seek approval from the Yale Corporation and to ask for permits from the city to go off the grid.

None of these steps made sense until the Bauers’ gift.

With an anticipated budget around $150 million, there is still plenty of fundraising left to do. But Sterling said he believes that leadership means being willing to risk failure.

“My great example is Living Village. It’s a huge stretch for the Divinity School, and I’m quite aware of that,” he said.

The risk and history-setting possibilities were part of what drew George Bauer, a retired IBM executive. Neither George or Carol Bauer went to Yale but both have developed strong ties to the Div School.

The dean said that despite being older than himself, Bauer was constantly creating new ventures and looking towards the future.