Finding land...you never know where the lead will come from

Soon after realizing we would not find land meeting our needs in Northern California, I learned about cohousing groups. The basic idea is that a group of people form some type of partnership or corporation for the purpose of purchasing and holding land or existing housing. The group usually has a common desire to become a community with a shared organic garden and periodic shared meals. Cohousing is usually designed a bit denser than typical single family homes resulting in either lower cost or increased quality. Cindy and I liked the concept, so I got on the email list for the Santa Cruz Cohousing group. Cindy and I attended a meeting in 2003 and read up on the forum history for the group.

Cohousing ultimately did not work out for us. However, I kept my subscription to the email list and still do to this day. I learn about great speakers that are visiting the area as well as terrific home and garden tours. The most rewarding result of staying on that mailing list was learning about a parcel of land that was for sale to a group of like minded green building folks.

I'll tell the whole story about the Santa Cruz land in another post. The purpose of this post is to inspire you to try anything when looking for land on which to build your dream green home. You never know where your lead will come from. The idea is to let as many people as possible know about your land search. The bigger your network, the more likely a golden lead will find its way to you. Some things that should be part of your land search:

• Of course, you should have a good Realtor looking for you.
  
• Tell everyone you know that you are looking for land.
• Tell people you don't know that you are looking for land - use it as a conversation ice breaker.
  
• Sign up for a cohousing email list or newsgroup - this is what worked for me.
  
• If you see land you like, find out who owns it and make contact. You never know if they may want to sell to you.
  

I'd love to hear about how you found your land or interesting ways you are searching. Go ahead, leave a comment!

Catching up to the 21st century, part 2...country living complete with wood burning stove

A township outside Willits is Brooktrails, 4 miles west of town up in the redwoods. Brooktrails has a small market, a video store and several hundred homes - about ½ of which are vacation homes. The creek going through the valley is dammed off to form a reservoir that supplies water for the homes. Water is very cheap per SCF, but the flat rate fee for access to the water is large because the reservoir silts over and needs to be dredged every few years.

We found an 850 sq-ft rental home that is owned by the same guy who opened the local natural foods market >20 years earlier. We signed a lease and planned our escape from the “rat race”. We packed all our stuff ourselves into a 17 foot moving van and drove up to Brooktrails in June of 2003. Some of the highlights:

- Living among the trees was great with peacocks, turkey & deer going through the yard every day.

- Living 4 miles out of town having to drive a steep & heavily traveled narrow road was not so great for my tastes.

- We were living without TV (other than movies) for the first time. I didn’t miss it a bit.

- We were paying off our sleep debt. With no alarms, we were sleeping 9-10 hours a night for weeks in a row. "Sleep Thieves" by Stanley Coren is an excellent book about sleep. Mr Coren also wrote another excellent book that we are partial to, both being left handers - "The Left Hander Syndrome".

- We discovered local community sponsored radio at KZYX. We volunteered for one of the KZYX fund drives and met some fun, dedicated and interesting folks.

- I started spending hours a day surfing the web, looking for real estate and researching natural building. Ultimately, stumbling along the cohousing topic would have a huge payoff.

- The home had a wood stove. We purchased a cord of wood in July and stacked it out to season over the summer. Check out woodheat.org for some great wood burning tips. We really enjoyed the radiant heat provided by the wood stove. Being a pyromaniac at heart, I really enjoyed starting a fire most every day over the winter. The place had backup electric wall heaters which we did not want to use unless absolutely necessary. The place had an electric water heater that the landlord replaced with a propane on demand water heater.

- The week before Thanksgiving in 2003, I played drums in the Ukiah Brewery open mic night. I met Estok Menton, CEO of Menton Builders that night. Besides being an awesome natural home builder, Estok also sings and plays a pretty mean guitar. Estok invited me over to play with his band the following night. I practiced nearly every week and eventually played out several times with the band. The members are my good friends, and I still keep in contact with them to this day.

- Searching around the Willits/Ukiah area for raw land made us soon realize that there was none within our budget closer than 15 miles from town. Living in Brooktrails made us realize that our desire is to live in the woods, but near an easily accessible town. Althoug we enjouyed our stay in the Willits/Ukiah area, it would not be the place where we set down roots.

- In August of 2003, my mom died. A road trip to get away and soul search ensued soon after in late September to early October. This was a truncated version of a road trip we had planned to take from CA all the way back to IL/WI to visit family. We saw our families around the time of the funeral in Aug/Sep which meant we would not drive any further East than the Rocky Mountains on this road trip. The plan was the same as for the California coastal trip in my last post - check out the cities as potential places to settle. The trip went from Brooktrails to Boulder, CO and included the following stops:

Sparks, NV - last little/big city before Black rock City and Burning Man
Salt Lake City, UT
Boulder, CO - fantastic outdoor college town, one of my top 3
Denver, CO
Colorado Springs, CO
Durango, CO
Moab, UT - spoke deeply to the mountain biker in me

The trip showed us amazing scenery. Unfortunately, we could not find significant multi-day backpacking trails - we are very spoiled to have the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. However, Boulder was an awesome town with beautiful scenery, hiking trails, biking trails and rock climbing all outside the backdoor. The Ball Aerospace Corporation has a division that develops space satellites in Boulder. They interviewed me and made a job offer.

To be continued....

catching up to the 21st century, part 1: Los Angeles, to northern CA

1999: In August, my wife and I moved to a nice condo in Redondo Beach, CA.

2000: My wife's repetitive strain injury reached a breaking point. She was concerned about the future of a “career” if she could not type. She changed jobs in August to work for a former colleague who understood her need to take it easy on the arms. I was very concerned for her health.

Late 2000/early 2001: The early rumblings of a change in lifestyle. As we were cleaning our 2000 sq-ft condo one day, we realized it had too much space and we had too much “stuff”.

2000: My father died, 2001: 9/11. Two unrelated events that changed my views towards life forever.

April 2002: My wife and I decided to go on a 10-day road trip up the California coast. I was starting to think about other places in CA I may want to eventually live/settle/”retire” to. I read a book on coastal CA cities and fell in love on paper with Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz (foreshadowing). These cities became the bookends of the trip. I mapped out farmer’s markets, parks, libraries, whole foods stores and vegetarian restaurants. The idea was to get a quick feel for the cities and real estate markets during the visit and see if the places were a fit for our lifestyle. The plan was to go up as far North as Santa Cruz and stop in Santa Barbara on the return home. We saw good friends along the way at Hearst Castle. These friends like visiting Big Sur every summer - a good reason to settle in Santa Cruz since Big Sur is only about 1 hr away.

I read “Cannery Row” to get a feel for the wharf in Monterey and watched “Citizen Kane” to get a feel for Hearst castle.

Stops along the way:

Buellton/Solvang (of “Sideways” fame)
Santa Maria
Arroyo Grande
Pismo Beach
San Louis Obispo
Atascadero, Paso Robles (wine country)
Morro Bay
Cambria
San Simeon (Hearst Castle)
Pfeiffer Big Sur state park
Carmel
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Seaside
Watsonville (artichokes)
Aptos
Capitola
Santa Cruz
Felton
Ben Lomond,
Boulder Creek
Scotts Valley

We stayed at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park near Felton in the Santa Cruz mountains. I hiked among redwoods for the first time. I enjoyed the beauty of the area and the higher green space and more limited development compared to Los Angeles. I ate a delicious veggie meal at Dharma’s, yum!

The return drive was on Easter weekend, so all of the places to stay in Santa Barbara were booked. We had to check out Santa Barbara one weekend later. We looked at apartments within the rent budget limit at the time, but no places were appealing. I was left with a longing for Santa Cruz and places to the north.

May, 2002: My wife's company decided to close their Los Angeles office and offered to move us to the Bay area. Coincidence?...I think not.

June, 2002: We began to pack up the house. We had a multi-day yard sale to unload much of our excess stuff. We met many interesting people, and even sold some items which were headed for the trash can. We had tearful goodbyes with longtime friends, then we drove north to our future.

July, 2002: We moved to a nice rental home near downtown Palo Alto, CA. The city has an awesome library system. We started reading “simplicity” books. We read “Your Money or your Life”. I didn't find work immediately, so I volunteered at Hidden Villa for the Community Sponsored Agriculture (CSA). It was a really powerful experience, with amazingly cool people. I started seriously thinking about early “retirement”. My wife was not happy with her work environment. Like most companies during the dot bomb years, layoffs and bad morale were as rampant as the irrational exuberance leading up to the bust. Also, repetitive strain was still nagging her, preventing her from doing one of her favorite hobbies – quilting.

I started working at Space Systems Loral (arch enemy of my former employer, Boeing Satellite Systems) in late October, 2002. I began crunching monthly budget numbers. I shifted investments to Government Agency bonds (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac) to capture a known income stream. I arrived at a reasonable monthly budget funded by the bond investments leaving a chunk of cash available to buy land and build a small home somewhere in Northern California. I started reading about natural homes/building a home/living rural off the grid/green building/gardening. Some of the best:

How to Find Your Ideal Country Home: A Comprehensive Guide - a terrific source of information even if you are not planning to live in the country

The Art of Natural Building - the place to start for reading about natural building

The Strawbale Home - what gets most folks excited about strawbale homes

Golden Gate Gardening - awesome source even if you don't garden next to the Golden Gate Bridge

2002: Searching for a place to settle. We love backpacking in the Sierra Nevada mountains so we would love to live close by on the eastern slope in either Bishop, Lone Pine or Mammoth Lakes. Unfortunately, the climate is extremely dry so there is little water for farming. I could not find organic foods in Bishop or Lone Pine. Mammoth has a natural foods store, but it also has a significant winter - hence the great skiing. I shoveled my share of snow growing up in Wisconsin, so I will pass on a retirement filled with white Christmases.

We took a road trip up Interstate 5 from the San Francisco Bay area to Redding. The central valley is either too barren for my tastes (Stockton), too hot for my tastes (Redding) or too dirty from agriculture blowoff and 5 freeway traffic (Visalia/Three Rivers).

We took road trip up highway 101. Heading north over the Golden Gate bridge from San Francisco takes you through Marin and Sonoma counties. These are very beautiful areas. However, being fairly developed, they lack in raw land within our price range.

North of Santa Rosa, highway 101 opens up to, for the most part, relatively undeveloped land for the remainder of the state. Ukiah and Eureka being the 2 major exceptions. This is in stark contrast to Southern California, which will someday be one long suburb along the coast. It is understandable that people continue to flock to Southern CA given the superb climate. The question is, how sustainable is the development? Mendocino county saw its share of the “back to the land movement" in the 60’s/70's. The hills to the east of Willits became home for many off-the-grid dwellers creating a need for PV and wind power systems. This movement combined with the desire to smoke a doobie combined to form the beginnings of the solar and wind power industry in America. The marijuana growers had money and needed power for their homes.

We visited Hopland, home of the Solar Living Institute and Real Goods retail store for the first time in September, 2002. We were jazzed about the strawbale store being cool without air conditioning on the 100+ degree Fahrenheit day. We toured the grounds and enjoyed the pond and organic garden that the interns tended. We spoke with 2 of the interns about their experiences and started to consider interning as an opportunity to gain experience in building an alternative home.

Just north of Hopland is the soaring metropolis of Ukiah ;-). Ukiah has an awesome grocery store called, imagine that, “Ukiah Natural Foods”. Rents in Ukiah were a bit too high for our "early retirement" budget. The city of Willits sits a little further "up the hill" like a suburb of Ukiah. Willits (of “Seabiscuit” fame) is a great town:

- nice library
- Purple Thistle - a great organic restaurant
- Shanachie Pub - a must stop on the 101 for an organic beer or wine

A pub is a good place to stop a post that is too long already.