A TEI Project

Interview of Lois Arkin

Contents

1. Transcript

1.1. Session 1, ( March 6, 2007)

UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 1, 3-06-2007
COLLINGS
OK. Good morning, Lois. Let me just ID the session here. Jane Collings interviewing Lois Arkin on March 6, 2007, at her office. And we're ready to get started with our interview. We usually sort of start off like really asking people about their early life, as perhaps we've discussed, so why don't you just tell me when and where you were born?
ARKIN
Well, I was born in Detroit, Michigan, at Women's Hospital, delivered by my "Uncle Al", who was my mother's uncle, so I guess -- no, mother's cousin. And -- on February 18, 1937. So I was, for the first few years of my life, I think that we lived in the very central city, and when I was about three, we moved to a suburban area where there were no roads. I mean, there were roads, but most of the roads were dirt roads, and there weren't all that many houses, although I imagine it was early [tracked] housing in that neighborhood. And this was in Detroit, Michigan, I think I mentioned. "Auto City" and future city of soul music, future capital of Motown. And so I don't really have any memories of very much before we moved into the suburban space, but I don't know whether I actually remember this because I actually remember it, or because of all the stories that my mother told me so many times and in front of so many people as we would reminisce about growing up.So the one thing that was repeated many times was the time that she bought me a new pail, I had a sandbox. So I went, and -- oh, shall I say that she had new carpeting. And so I did promptly fill up my pail from my sandbox outside and brought it in, and very delightfully showed her how wonderful it was by spilling it all on her new carpeting. She was not a happy camper. But I remember -- I do remember, much later in life, I think in my -- even in my pre-teen years, there was a good deal of hanging out in the woods; we were suburban, and so -- maybe not so much woods, actually, but fields, many, many fields, and very, very proudly bringing her home garter snakes for Mother's Day, other kinds of little animals that we might catch that she was maybe not so pleased to have.Some of my earliest memories -- of course, when we moved into the suburban area, my father was, I think, already at that time starting to be a builder, and I think he started out building garages for people, and he had, I think, designed and built our home, which was not a real large home, but for that time, probably quite a middle-class home; it had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, one upstairs and one down -- I'm trying to remember, did we actually have a bathroom downstairs, I'm not sure -- and a two-car garage -- no, maybe it was only a one-car garage, maybe I'm kind of fantasizing. This was of course in the '40s, in the early '40s, and what Dad did do -- it's so interesting, now that you think about it -- he built us a playhouse onto the garage, so that was a place where we kids could really go and play and have our own playspace. And he built us a little concrete swimming pool. It was no deeper than three feet deep, but of course, that was a wonderful place; lots of kids came and shared our little -- it wasn't very big, probably it was no more than 10x10, maybe 12x12, I'm not sure. But a small little swimming pool, and we did spend time in it.But of those early memories, maybe by the time I was five -- oh, I do remember my first day at school, at kindergarten. My mother took me, and I was totally hysterical that I was being left alone by my mom, and I remember that's quite a common thing for people as they remember back to their first day of school; I think I've heard that story from a lot of people. And of course, in those first few years of school, we were all bussed; it wasn't until I think I was in maybe 5th grade, 4th or 5th grade, that there was a school built in our neighborhood that we could walk to. I will remember clearly, it was James Vernor School, because Vernor's Ginger Ale started in Detroit. And one of the wonderful things about James Vernor School is that we used to have a field trip to the Vernor's Ginger Ale plant every year, and we had a school song. And I still remember it, and I'm going to sing it for you. It goes, "James Vernor School, I love you. No other school above you." I'm not sure I remember the rest. (laughter) But going down to the James Vernor Ginger Ale Plant was where I first got exposed to cream sodas, and that was really special.Let's see, I remember -- I have thoughts of being very starry-eyed as a kid. I was one of four children, I was the second, so I have a sister [Joan] two years older than me, who I was talking to when you walked in, and I have a brother [Richard] five years younger and a baby sister [Judy] six years younger. Of course, my baby sister is in her 60s now, but I still refer to her as my baby sister. I imagine parents do that frequently too. And I think that my older sister was extraordinarily influential on me; she -- I always felt so hated by her as a child.
COLLINGS
Oh, wow.
ARKIN
Maybe not as a very young child, but certainly by the time we were approaching adolescence. She didn't really want to have anything to do with me, and it was very painful for me. And I adored her. No matter what, I adored her. And I think it was the cause of my early interest in psychology. It was a way that I learned to cope with the world, and not -- I think I learned not to take that sort of thing too personally. But what it did do, and these are things that -- I imagine there are similar stories in many households -- so my parents really never -- very, very rarely ever used physical violence on it. My dad did from time to time spank us, but he always said -- it was always methodical, and it was almost never reactionary, and he always said, "This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you." And -- but I think that my father was beaten terribly as a child by my grandfather, who was a Russian immigrant, and I think that was a source of a lot of rebellion on his part. I'm not sure about his brothers and sister, I never had that conversation with them. And I never really had it very much with my father, but I think my mother had told me that. And I think a few conversations with my dad before he died indicated that that was a reason why he would often go off by himself, and he had a pet bear, he says -- I don't believe it. (laughter)But at any rate, where was I before that? So my sister would kind of beat up on me, and I would beat up -- or we would get together and beat up on our younger brother and sister, and I am sure that there was much more trauma in their lives than their was in ours. And I think that frequently happens too when there are so many children in a household, is that the -- you know, it kind of goes down the line, and if someone's bigger than you, you don't try to beat up on them; you beat up on someone that's smaller than you. And I have always, as a more mature adult, always had so many regrets and sorrows, and do talk to my younger brother and sister about it from time to time, and hope that they've gotten over it. I'm kind of a proponent of reality therapy. Oh, OK. It's OK to talk about it for a little while, but then kind of let's get on with life; here we are now, are we going to mope? And my older sister, whom I still absolutely adore, and she, I believe, really does adore me today, and we're very, very close. And I have learned so much from her, and I know she's learned a lot from me too, as adults.But I remember, some things that I remember that really stand out for me as a child was looking up to the older kids, to the day that I would also carry a three-ring looseleaf binder, and -- when I think of what kids do today, in terms of those rolling backpacks -- that goodness they're rolling now, and they're not always carrying them on their backs. But that was it, and I can remember as an older adolescent, looking up to the girls -- it's just astounding when I stop to think about it. This has nothing -- I don't think it has anything to do with who I am today, but I can remember looking, in high school, and had this kind of really weird posture, kind of bent over and to the side. Well, maybe it was influential, in that it was part of the instilling in me a love of learning. But going back to elementary school, we had handwriting classes. I'm not sure they have that sort of thing today.
COLLINGS
They do, yeah.
ARKIN
And I remember we would have to practice writing things sometimes 25, 50, 100 times, to get the handwriting just right. And some of the quotes that I remember most was, "Without the love of books, the richest man is poor." And of course, that was way before computers, and -- well, of course, we do have books on computers today, but -- And so let's see, what else? I have visions of myself climbing trees a lot as a child, of hanging out under the street lamps with lots of kids, of riding my bike freely wherever I wanted, of walking freely wherever I wanted. I had terrible, terrible fears, because my parents did allow us to go to all the Saturday matinees, and we did go to the movies very, very frequently as young children, but we saw these horror movies too, and I think that the horror movies -- I don't think they had ratings in those days, and I don't think parents knew --
COLLINGS
It was a very dark period, (inaudible) as well.
ARKIN
Yeah. But pictures that terrified me horribly as a child were The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Beast With Five Fingers, and my older sister knew that, and she -- whenever she wanted to kind of get at me, she would say, "OK, the beast with five fingers is coming after you." I remember one night, my parents were getting all dressed up to go out, because they had some kind of big event to go to. And my sister decided to frighten me, and I became so hysterical, it was very, very hard for them to leave.But the other thing I remember being terrified of as a child were spiders, any kind, but of course the kind that were fairly prominent were daddy long-legs. And I do believe there's kind of something genetic in us, and that different people are terribly frightened of different animals. I was never afraid of snakes or any other kind of insect or any other kind of animal, just spiders. And of course, we know people that are -- oh, and I loved mice, and rats were interesting too. Other people have this with mice and rats; other people have it with snakes; other people have it just with different kind of insects, bees and so forth. But with me, the only thing was spiders, and so I'm not sure how that all started, but the idea that, oh, someone -- maybe it was some kid I saw -- would catch a spider and take its legs off and bury them, and -- which sounds kind of cruel, but I'm not sure whether it hurt them or not -- so of course, I had terrible nightmares about these spiders growing up and coming back at all of us and so forth. So I suppose there were a few other things that I was afraid of, but mostly I don't ever remember being too afraid -- oh, I do remember -- I think it was very, very rare, but every one in awhile, one heard about a child being kidnapped and cut up and its body parts being found in different places. I mean, I suppose that's not so very unusual today, but it was terribly unusual in those days, and that terrified me. And so, let's see, where are we? We're still --
COLLINGS
Where is your mother's family?
ARKIN
My mother's family is from Boston, and my father was born in Detroit, my mother [Helene] was born in Boston. Actually, my mother's parents were from Germany, and my father's [Jack] parents were from Russia. So my parents were first-generation, and I'm only second-generation US-born. They are -- three of my grandparents lived well into my middle age, and we only lost one, my paternal grandmother, when she was in her 50s. But all of the rest of them lived into their 80s. Yes, so that bodes well for a fairly long life.
COLLINGS
Yes, wonderful.
ARKIN
And my maternal grandmother [Millie], she was so funny. Very, very German; she was quite stereotypical, in terms of -- I would say -- she was an amazing woman. She -- it was hard for me to really appreciate her 'til I was in my own middle age, and now I look back on all the incredible qualities that she had that I see in myself and some of my siblings as well. And also what my mother had to overcome, because she was very, very German, and very meticulous, and very do-it-now, everything, do it now. And she was always involved in philanthropic organizations, and she was very committed; she worked as a volunteer well into her 80s with her local schools in Orange County, and she was very proud of all her awards. My family is Jewish, I don't think I mentioned that, and so both of my grandfathers were quite Orthodox, but not my maternal grandmother at all. She was -- her name was Millie, and so she often got referred to as "Thoroughly Modern Millie," and she had her own business and she smoked cigarettes, and she drove, at a very young age she actually taught me how to drive, at a very young age, 14.
COLLINGS
I'm sorry, this was your mother's --?
ARKIN
This is my mother's --
COLLINGS
Your mother's mother.
ARKIN
My mother's mother, who was Thoroughly Modern Millie. She was -- I remember when there were also very hard times for me as an adult, particularly after I had started this organization, and money was frequently very, very short. So even though my grandmother's children were supporting her, I was one of those people that would never ask my parents for anything once I was independent -- I feel very differently about that today, but we can talk about that later -- and the implications for other people that have come out of affluent families. But -- well, that became -- my family was certainly not affluent growing up in those early years. But -- I forgot what I was going to say. My grandmother -- oh, she used to give me donations regularly, she would give me donations, even though the money she was getting was from her children to live on, to supplement her Social Security in her elderly years. And -- but she was quite remarkable, very, very focused. Always knew exactly what she wanted, when she wanted; not an ounce of procrastination in her. And she had a beauty parlor, so some of my early memories, actually, were going to Grandma's beauty salon, and having those big machines that give you permanents and hairdryers and all kinds of things like that.
COLLINGS
So she had her own business.
ARKIN
She had her own business, so that was in -- surely she had it in -- maybe she started it after the Depression, because I think my grandfather had also been a builder, he was a builder, and I think they lost -- they had some money, and I think they had lost everything during the Depression, and I think that Grandma then started her beauty salon. And so she was always working, and so my mother was home taking care of her siblings; my mother was the oldest child, and so that was quite an education for my mom.And my mother was very sickly as a child; they told her she had some kind of heart disorder, and that she shouldn’t really exert herself in any way. So she was very over-indulged, and she was taken care of a lot, and yet she was taking care of her younger brother and sister. And my grandmother, all of the energy, in terms of education and direction, was put into my uncle, who became a fairly well-known physician, he was a gynecologist, and ultimately ended up at UC Irvine here in Orange County. But getting him through medical school was the main thing, and so my mother and my aunt never had any college education, but they were there to support my Uncle Ed, who did get all the way through med school. And of course, that was the dream of every Jewish mother, is that her son would become a doctor.And so my mother also kept kosher, kept a kosher house, and my dad was never particularly kosher, but we all learned that. Some of my -- we all learned -- it was very difficult for me, I never -- as an adult -- was particularly interested in that, but it took a very, very long time for me, after I became adult, to even taste bacon, or mix dairy with meat; that was so much part of my upbringing not to do that. Not on any moral or ethical grounds, it was just kind of how you were -- food habits you are raised with. And -- but I will share this, that I remember my father, at an early age, taking my older sister and I for a walk in the woods, we'd do that, and coming across the carcass of a cow. Oh, actually the skeleton, at that point, and my father saying, "You see, kids? That's where your meat comes from." And that was the start of a vegetarian era in our lives. And my sister was quite, quite serious about it. I think mine lasted maybe not so very long, because I was terribly addicted to hamburgers and hot dogs. So as long as it didn’t look like flesh. (laughter) But of course, later in life I did become quite vegetarian. And my sister did go back to meat-eating, but then she became a very, very radical vegan, after reading John Robbins' book , Diet for a New America about 20 years ago or so.So that was -- so those walks in the woods, both by ourselves, making forts in the woods, collecting things, bringing small animals home, nurturing small animals that we caught, bringing a bird back to health or the stray cats, having funerals for our animals that died. Collecting wild berries, I'd imagine, every once in a while coming across maybe an apple tree someplace, or -- it was a very, very suburban life that way, with access to the wild fields that were very close by, and exploring in those fields and having a lot of freedom, knowing our next-door neighbors, having relatives that lived down the block and so were a second family; if we got mad at Mom, we could run away to Aunt Jane's house, and having my cousins there, we were all quite close. And my grandmother also lived a walk away, or a brief bike ride. And so there was this kind of small-town feel.And I imagine that there are still somewhere in this country people that have that type of upbringing in a suburb, but the people that I know today that live in suburbs do not; the children are really confined mostly to their backyards, they are not allowed to play out on the streets, young children. And there is so much more fear today than there was when I was growing up, and of course, the more deserted the streets are, the more dangerous the streets are. At any rate, in terms of my parents, you wanted to maybe ask a little bit more about them.
COLLINGS
Yeah. OK, so let's see. Your dad was a builder.
ARKIN
My dad became like a garage builder, and he eventually became a home builder. He did not go -- he was very, very patriotic, and he was in the Army Air Corps in the late '20s, early '30s. And he was -- he loved being a pilot; he was just wild about planes. And that passion for planes did get passed on to me and my brother, both of who got -- I only my trainer's license; I could fly alone, but I couldn't take other people up. But my brother actually did get his pilot's license. And he eventually, after he learned how to build with the garages and so forth, started building these wonderful -- I say wonderful because in those days they were wonderful, and today I guess I think they would be more wonderful, although there was a period in my life probably that I wouldn’t have thought that.But, you know, the average size of a single-family detached home for a family of four in the 1950s was about 1,000 square feet, and today it's about 3,000 square feet. But my dad was among those builders that built those 1,000-square-feet homes for families of four, particularly for veterans that were returning -- the war was over, this was starting in the mid-'40s now, that he started doing it. I think we moved in -- yeah, I guess he had built our first home probably in about 1941, even though he mostly had started building garages then, but he did build the home that we moved into. And then it was really by probably '45, '46 that he started building little [tracts] of these single-family homes for the returning veterans. And then I remember -- and he was building in the neighborhood where we lived; we could ride our bikes to the projects, and it was very suburban. And he was buying up this land, who knows how, because we didn’t ever seem to have any money.And -- oh, I want to come back to the houses that Dad built, but I do want to also mention, I can remember in those days -- we had a second floor in our house, and when the bill collectors came and knocked on the door, my mom and I and whoever was home, we would hide upstairs and watch them 'til they went away, because as a builder, there was always a cash flow; you might be land-rich or you might have equipment or you might have all kinds of things, but you never had any cash. And so it was -- at least in those days, and on the scale that my dad was entrepreneurial. But he was also very, very creative, and I'll get into that in a little while.But so, going back to some of the houses that he was building in the neighborhood, there were lots and lots and lots of trees in this one neighborhood, this one tract of land where he had bought up land, and my sister -- and bulldozers were out there, and my sister and I got really upset, because we thought he was going to bulldoze the trees, and I do believe that he was planning to do that, and we got out there, and I don't remember whether we just actually threatened to do this, or we yelled so much at dinner, or if we actually laid down in front of the bulldozers -- I think as you get older, you tend to put a little spin on things, particularly when you have a really good reason for telling stories about who you are and what shaped you (laughter) and the kinds of things that happen later in life that you could kind of, "Oh, yeah." So I don't know; I'll have to ask my sister: "What did we really do, do you remember?" But at any rate, we feel that we influenced my dad.And always, in everything that he did, because he was quite a pioneer, he saved the trees, and he built around the trees. And those developments that he did that are just filled with trees are just -- the houses in between the trees; he only took out what he needed to build the houses. So that was quite remarkable. So my father was frequently referred to as a visionary, in terms of his idea of where to buy land, where was going to be the next big development.And so he did buy up a tremendous amount of land, and that later became one of the first largest shopping malls in the country, called Northland, in northwest Detroit. And he had owned most of the land that Northland was built upon, and -- my sister tells this story, and I don't remember if I remember all the details or not, but he didn’t really have the money to do this, and this was like way out in -- you can't even call it suburbs; it was rural country. But he was so creative; she says, "Oh, he went, and I think the closing on the deal was scheduled for three days down the line, and --" I'm going to get this story from her, so I'm going to come back and get the really authentic one -- and he saw that there was all this topsoil on the land, and he put out an ad to come and purchase topsoil, and people came and purchased enough topsoil for him to actually be able to close the deal on the cash that he made from the topsoil. Stuff like that. And he was always quite clever.And eventually, much further along -- well, no, that was -- so that was still fairly close to where we lived. We had moved into -- by 1948, we had moved into a second house that Dad had built, a very, very large, rambling ranch house, because that was really -- California ranch-style house, that was really cool in architecture then. And it was a four-bedroom house, with one, two, three, four bathrooms altogether, and a great big rumpus room, and a library, and a huge basement, and it was quite remarkable. And so that was really where we spent our teen years, because I think I was 12 when we moved to that house from the one three blocks away. And by now, of course, all of the neighborhood side streets were being paved already. And I don't -- (phone ringing)
COLLINGS
Should I pause for a minute?
ARKIN
Shall we -- could we do that? And then -- OK.
COLLINGS
OK, we're back on now.
ARKIN
So, yeah, and we're in this remarkable -- I don't know, it must be 3,000-square-foot home, and it was -- the basement became a really wonderful place for all our teenage friends, my sister is two years older than me, and of course I was aspiring to have her friends, but I had my own friends too. But we used to have many, many activities in the basement, dancing and playing music. But also about that time, which is quite interesting, we were having a tremendous scare about the Soviet Union and nuclear holocaust, and it was quite -- or, no, that was already the '50s, we were definitely out of the '40s by then; it was the McCarthy era. No, it was the early -- oh, no, I'm sorry, wait -- where are we? I'm sorry, '40s, early '50s maybe.Well, anyway, it was -- we were really faced with nuclear threats, and we were having, in the schools, I believe they were having air raid drills; we were having -- oh, goodness, during World War II; I didn’t even cover that. We were still in the old house up the block, and we had a victory garden, and we had blackouts, air raid drills, and the sirens would go off and we would all turn all of the lights out in our house, and we would have these air raid drills, and that was still during World War II. And so we were -- so as the Soviet Union came into power, it was like no big thing, essentially; we had already experienced air raid drills in school. Today of course they're fire drills, but we had air raid drills for the threat of attack, during World War II, just regular bombs. And -- but my dad decided to go into the bomb shelter business. You know, that was actually later, because that was -- much later, it must have been the late '50s, because I'd already lived in California and was married. (laughter) So just trying to -- we'll get into that, maybe later. But we did have a bomb shelter in our new rambling ranch house, and it was outside in the front yard, and --
COLLINGS
Was it for tornadoes also, or --?
ARKIN
No, we didn’t have tornadoes there that I recall, never recall that. But it was a bomb shelter; I know that it was there while I still lived there, and so it was during my teen years.
COLLINGS
And did it have food and water and everything?
ARKIN
Yeah, yeah. Maybe not so much after awhile, but I think in the beginning, it did. And then, I guess maybe that was a -- I don't know if that was like an early kind of experimental thing he was doing. But at any rate, there was a bomb shelter. But the other thing that I remember, both in the house that we lived in three blocks away and in the new house, was that weekends were frequently -- chores frequently involved cutting the lawn and pulling weeds, pulling weeds, and raking leaves and burning leaves. And these were regular, regular chores, this business of weeding and mowing and watering. And later on in my life, that had quite a large influence on me, particularly when I lived in a suburban home in Chatsworth. But I didn’t -- I guess I didn’t think much of it, other than these were horrible chores I had to do.We also had two very big dog. We always had dogs, we always had dogs, even I think when I was three years old before we moved to the first suburban house. So one of our early dog's names was Tippy, and then we had Lassie, and Duke and Chi-chi, and they were two big German Shepherds when we moved into the new house. And one of our German Shepherds was an all-white German Shepherd, and he was kind of wolf-like, and everyone was afraid of him, but I adored him. And he did tend to bite people sometimes, but I thought that was their problem, and I was very, very protective of him. And he, every time he bit someone, he had to go in for rabies observations. (laughter) So at any rate, that was --
COLLINGS
So did your dad talk about all of the various business deals that he was conducting?
ARKIN
Yes. All the time. My dad's office was in our home for those years that I was at home, and there was always business being conducted, and my dad always got up very early in the morning, 5:00, and he was on the phone, and he was getting all his contractors set up for the day, and if -- and he was also a person that could nap anywhere, any time, and he generally went to bed early, and he got up very early.
COLLINGS
So he was very entrepreneurial, and he was sort of modeling that in front of you all the time?
ARKIN
I think it was true, and I think that even though I never wanted to have anything to do with his business, that I thought it was horrible, horrible thing to be doing and I didn’t know why at that time, other than maybe it was because it was when he really started building houses, and it was time to clean them up and set them up as models to sell them, then of course we were part of the family labor team, and so it was in there sweeping up the dirt and dusting -- getting them ready. It's interesting, because my older sister Joan ended up working in his office and loved it, and even when he had an office outside the home, really running it, and she was very much part of the business for many years as a young adult. But I never had any desire whatsoever to be involved in that business.But I remember loving to play in the unfinished houses, and it wasn’t just the unfinished houses that my dad was constructing, but there was always construction going on in the neighborhood, and there were always big basements that were being dug and big hills that were -- to climb on, and structures to climb on, because nothing was ever enclosed them, and there was none of this preoccupation with liability that we have today, and so kids were always playing in the partially built houses, and that was very, very exciting, and part of growing up in that area and having the freedom to do that. And I see that -- you know, sometimes it surprises me today, when I'll see construction sites here in the city, and you never see any kids exploring them, and it's almost like they -- I mean, sometimes it's hard to get into them, but it's also -- I think very frequently, it's like, where is their spirit of adventure? It's always so interesting to me.And so at any rate, Dad was very, very entrepreneurial, and he was always talking about everything that had to do with his business, and he really wasn’t very socially -- he didn’t have a social presence outside of his business. And we essentially, before he really started his building business, which I think my sister and I were already maybe seven and nine about that time, or maybe five and seven, I'm not sure. But we were so privileged, I felt, to have had quality time with my dad in those very early years, because once he started that business, we -- it was very, very rare to have quality time with him; he was so preoccupied, from dawn to dusk. And there were so many pressures, and what I do remember, there were so many -- my father had a lot of health issues, even as a young child, I remember he had nosebleed hemorrhages that had to do perhaps with the stress, but also perhaps with just the way his genetic makeup. Now, I -- right now, I've been free of them for a few months, but I also have nosebleeds that are sometimes very -- very rarely actual hemorrhages; I've never actually seen a doctor about it. But I imagine just those very close to the surface veins, and sensitivity in this neighborhood to some of the toxins, and smog.But anyway, so that was certainly what I remember of my dad, and then we lost him, we just really lost him for pretty much all of our teenage years, my older sister and I. And my younger brother and sister I don't think really got the benefits that we did, in terms of the bonding opportunities we had with our dad, even though they in later years were just certainly very -- we were all quite close, actually. So but I've often said an as adult, I believe that there are many of us that grow up in entrepreneurial families, and incidentally, it wasn’t just -- my dad was the builder, but my mother was the bookkeeper, always. And so they always worked together in the business.So many of us that grow up with that entrepreneurial spirit, we have kind of a can-do, nothing's impossible, if you can dream it you can do it. In my case, and I think that this is very, very common among people that come from privilege, which I consider myself, is that parents instilled in us that you can do anything you want to, if you want to do it badly enough. And we heard that over and over and over again as children; it was like a mantra. Of course, then the family dysfunction comes into play too, like, "Oh, you have no stick-to-itiveness." (laughter) Or, and I frequently say this of the Jewish mother, the stereotypical Jewish mother, nothing is ever good enough, and so no matter how -- I think that I got instilled with this value that I could achieve perfection, and even though intellectually I knew you could never be perfect, but I can remember as a young person, even as a young teenager, always thinking, "Oh, but even though one can never achieve it, one always must strive for it." And I think that is some of the baggage that families like mine get put on them.But what I have come to feel today is that even though there's a certain amount of that entrepreneurialness that is almost in your genetic -- I don't want to say in your genetic makeup, but certainly in your environmental influences from your family, I do believe that it is something that can be taught, and I do believe there's a lot of business schools today that do teach entrepreneurship. I haven't really looked at the studies to see how successful it is, or maybe there's some case studies, so people that have none of that in their background but have become quite successful entrepreneurs. I guess we read about them in the papers all the time. So whatever it is, I do believe it can be taught.
COLLINGS
What were your parents talking to you and your siblings about, in terms of your future?
ARKIN
Well, that's very, very interesting. My parents were not, as I recall, and maybe my sister would think differently, and I think my mother would deny this today, but I never feel that education was stressed in my family. On the other hand, I have to share with you that -- and I'll come back to your question, remind me of it if I don't, but I want to tell this experience. When my sister and I were about 11 and 13, mother and dad ordered the Encyclopedia Britannica, and my sister and I were very excited when the encyclopedias arrived. But my sister felt, you know how they all had these onionskin covers on them, and she felt that the covers should stay on, and I felt the covers should come off. And we were so passionate about this cover issue, and the books coming out of the boxes, that we actually got into I think our last really, really serious physical fight, and both of us landed in a clench with each other, we landed with both of our knees on a huge ashtray on the coffee table in the den where the books were being unpacked. And then we were rushed to Emergency, we had these big gashes in our knees, and we were bleeding all over, and I remember when we got there --
COLLINGS
Your parents are thinking, "Why did we even order these dumb books in the first place?" (laughter)
ARKIN
(laughter) I will share with you that essentially, we got there, and they sewed -- I'm not sure, they sewed me up first, I guess, and I guess I had about nine stitches, and I can show you the scar. And then they sewed my sister up, and I decided to look and I fainted. And I've just never been one to really be able to -- I mean, I don't have a problem so much with my own blood, but I've never really been very good with all that kind of stuff. And I should add to that, when my sister was very young, after we learned about the dead cow, and that that's going to happen to us too when we're dead, and after The Picture of Dorian Gray, my sister decided that she didn’t have any blood or bones like that. That was not going to happen to her. So it was very interesting. But I never was in denial about what we were made of, but I think she was for a long time. But back to the question you had asked --
COLLINGS
Your parents' plans for you, when you were --
ARKIN
Oh, yes. So there was never very much stress on education, and that's what made me think, "Well, they did buy the Encyclopedia Britannica for us." (laughter) But there wasn’t, and there was, I think, an assumption, and I do believe that it was part of my early thinking too, is that I would just grow up and get married and have children, and I was very, very romantic, and I think by the time I was 11 years old, I was reading everything I could get my hands on those old -- in those days, we didn’t have porn. (laughter) But we had true stories, and all these romantic magazines, and I imagine they have them today. And so that was where I was learning about love and romance, and I was very, very preoccupied with boys at that age, and so was -- but we also went to a high school that was very, very high-achieving. Mumford High School, which actually gained fame, because Eddie Murphy went there, and was in his early movies.
COLLINGS
Was it named after Lewis Mumford?
ARKIN
Samuel Mumford -- Lewis -- no, there were two Mumfords, and they were brothers. And ours was Sam [Samuel] Mumford, and I think Lewis Mumford was the famous architect. And so -- and I don't remember what he did, shame on me. I don't remember what our Mumford was famous for, but something, obviously. But I remember being tested when I was like in the 10th or 11th grade, and I think that what the counselor told me was that -- "Have you considered being a housewife?" And so, but I can remember when I was about 14, I wanted to do everything. I wanted to be a psychologist, I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to be an attorney -- no, not an attorney, but a judge, I wanted to be a judge. I wanted to be an actress for sure, and a director, which I did do some. Acting and directing. And I wanted to -- what else? A writer, I definitely wanted to be a writer, because I was doing stuff like that too. So I wanted to do all those things, and I figured when I grew up, I'd do a few years of each. But my parents never -- I don't recall them ever encouraging me to do anything.
COLLINGS
But your brother was encouraged, right?
ARKIN
No. I don't know that any of us were particularly encouraged to do anything out of the ordinary, other than to do whatever -- I mean, I think that my father fantasized us going into business with him, and my brother did for many years, and of course my sister worked with him for many years. But I don't think that I -- all I remember is that we can do anything we want to, if we want to do it badly enough. I remember as a kid, I did have a burning desire to be an actress, and to be a musical comedy actress, because I loved to sing and dance. And we were always -- my sister and cousins, we were always putting on shows for our parents at family events and holidays and so forth, and doing dress-up and stuff like that. So I was really, really into that. But I don't remember getting any particular encouragement. Now, even though I can't really think of my parents as environmentalists, they certainly did behave in environmental ways that I think got planted in me. I mean, there was the victory garden; there were the walks in the woods. There was hunting -- I didn’t really hunt; I pretended to later, but I didn’t really ever want to kill anything. But certainly target practice; guns are really big in Michigan, as Michael Moore has reminded us, and guns were always part of our lives, there were always guns in our house, handguns and rifles. And I remember taking one without permission one time to go on a hunting date; that was not a wise thing. And -- but we never killed anything. (laughter) But today, I'm very radically oriented toward gun control, so I do want to rectify that.
COLLINGS
Was it intended that you and your brother and sisters would go to college?
ARKIN
I don't think so. I don't think I was ever particularly encouraged, and there was certainly nothing set aside. But I did ultimately -- I mean, to me, I think it was more the influence of the high school I went to; I was not in any way a particularly outstanding student, I was a very average student. But I do remember, one semester I decided to get all A's, I just wanted to be able to prove to myself that I could do that. And I did it, and then I wasn’t interested in my grades anymore. (laughter) I mean, I was probably a C+, B- student; I didn’t have any special academic stuff, I just really -- I always saw everyone else as much smarter than me. And also, at that age, I was really intent on being a clown, and I loved to make people laugh, and I was very, very silly all of the time; I would come up with these like crazy questions to ask people, and then they would -- and I didn’t sometimes even know the answer.Oh, I can remember even as a very, very young child, going with my uncle in his car, and it was a convertible car, and we adored my uncle, and he was always playing with us kids. And he was this like really sugar-daddy uncle; he would swing us around, and he was just always so much fun. But he swore, and he was -- I can remember going in his convertible, and at every stop sign yelling, just being five years old maybe, "Hi, goddamn son of a bitch! Hi, goddamn son of a bitch!" because that's what I heard him say, and I didn’t know what it meant. But people turned and looked at us, and it got attention. So I was always looking to be, in a sense, the center of attention in those early years. That's embarrassing to say now, because I get way more attention than I think I deserve, and I'm always kind of like, "Oh, put it on someone else!" But then I'm doing this, aren’t I? (laughter) But anyway, no, I don't think my parents did any particular -- no intellectual academic encouragement. So I actually was in my first year of college --
COLLINGS
So you did go to college.
ARKIN
I did go to college, and it was --
COLLINGS
Did your older sister go to college?
ARKIN
Yes, she did. She actually -- she went to college, and she was a teacher for many, many years. And she actually today is on the board of trustees for Florida International University, and is a major, major trustee, in terms of fundraising there. And she's also very, very involved in the non-profit world on a very different level than I am, much more like the kind you see in the society pages. But yes, so she actually I think got her Master's in education, and she taught French for awhile, and she was very involved in teaching. She lived -- both of my sisters and my brother all lived in houses that were built by my father, in their early years, in their family years. My brother didn’t have children, but both my sisters did, and so they really had children in those houses, and they were all neighbors in this development, where my father essentially did this development, now going much further out in a rural area near the lakes, because of course there are -- close in to Detroit, there are just numerous, numerous lakes, and he bought up a lot of land around one lake that was -- the land was all wetlands, but it was before we had any laws about wetlands, and so my dad, in all of his innocence and desire to accommodate, in his most patriotic sense, the returning veterans, filled in all of the wetlands to build this development of quite lovely little houses, and all these canals. He did actually keep -- got all the water to go into the canals, and it was connected to the lake and so forth. And so that was probably one of the very first developments in the country to do that outside of the Venice canals here in Los Angeles. And this was in the early '50s I guess.
COLLINGS
And this was in the Detroit area?
ARKIN
Yes. And so both my sisters and my brother all owned houses there that -- and I was the only one, because I was already in California by then. I remember in later years, my mom always saying, "Honey, would you like to have a lot back here?" (laughter) I never did get it, and thank goodness, because boy, was it difficult to --
COLLINGS
So do they all still live in that area?
ARKIN
Well, my older sister lives in Miami, and for the past 20 years -- she had a second marriage; she had her first marriage and raised her children in that marriage in that house on the lake, and I would say this about her, and I use this in the tours that I do today, I say the statistic about in the 1950s, 1,000 square foot for a single-family detached house, and I say lots of people then who as they became more affluent added onto their houses or bought bigger houses, and I really do believe that that was, in some respects, responsible for the breakdown of the family in many households. And it's like all of the sudden, you have this really small 1,000-square-foot house and everyone can kind of hear what's going on with everyone else, and then all of the sudden, you're in your own bedroom with your own bathroom with your own TV with your own computer, and with your different mealtimes because everyone's doing different things at different times, and so this family is just kind of like an apartment building, everyone's got their own thing going. And I think that my sister's house, when it doubled in size, as they added on as they became more affluent, and people got pretty isolated in that house too. So at any rate, it is all for the better, because of course she loves her life today, and her two children I don't think were particularly damaged, they were already adults when that separation and divorce took place. And so -- let's see, what was your question?
COLLINGS
If the family still all lived back in the Michigan area.
ARKIN
Yeah. And so she eventually moved to Florida maybe 15 years ago, and remarried there. And my brother, he actually moved to LA for a few years and then back to Michigan, and he worked with my dad for many years. And then he lived in the estate that they had about 40 miles from where we were raised, because eventually my dad bought a lot of land much further out, much more rural, and there was a big estate on the land that he bought, and he and my mom and my brother lived in that huge house for many, many years, which I'll be able to show you a picture of. And so then he -- my brother also became a builder, and he built -- ultimately he built a house about 20 miles further out from there, and today he lives in that house and is trying desperately to sell it, and wants to move to Florida or some other place besides Michigan; it's very, very depressed, and it's very, very difficult to sell his house in this very, very rural suburb, which of course, no matter what I might have told him before he did that, my very different set of values; it's not like one is going to ever remind someone that "I told you so." But at any rate, I thought it was a poor choice.And my younger sister, after many years living in Michigan, she and her husband moved to the Phoenix area, where they raised their three children that still remain in the Phoenix area, and she and her husband had moved to the Palm Springs area, where they live on a golf course and play golf every day. Or she does, anyway. And -- but a very interesting life, because it's very immersed in the social life of that kind of senior community that she's living in, where they have dinners together two and three times a week, and they're always doing things together, and there's always a household of 20 of them some place, and it's very interesting to me, that she, too, has in a sense recaptured that sense of community in her kind of townhouse on the golf course, and my older sister lives in a very -- well, that is very upscale too, a very upscale condo in Coconut Grove in Miami, where she is still very dear friends with many of her neighbors, and it's astounding to me: only my brother ended up totally isolated, and we're all very concerned about that isolation, because I knew, at a much younger than I am, 30 years ago -- where am I now? -- yeah, by the time I was 40, I knew that I wasn’t going to have a family of my own. And I already at that time was very, very committed to the idea of intentional community -- or I wasn’t committed to it; I knew about it, and it was something that I really wanted for myself.And so this organization of course has provided that, and I know that whether or not I live out all of my years in this community that I helped found or some other community, there are communities all over the world that I can go and live in and that people would welcome me too, and my poor brother doesn't have that. And so I keep trying to move him in that direction while he's still young enough and healthy enough. Well, young enough? 65? (laughter) That's so funny. Well, from 70, that seems kind of young to me. But so maybe someday he will find something where he's not so isolated. I know he doesn't want to be, and I think he doesn't know how not to be. But that -- so he and I did not have children.But I think that's really great, in a sense, because my older sister had two children and my younger sister three, so of the four of us, there were only one additional person produced. However, the production of those five grand-nieces and nephews that I have, much as I love them and adore them, between the three of them, they've had I think 11 more, so my mother now has 11 great-grandchildren, and of those five grandchildren that she has, and the 11 great-grandchildren, they are the people that have -- they are all in living patterns that have the most major impact on our resources. You know, people that live in affluent America, even middle-class America, have probably 30 times more impact on our life support systems that someone in a small village in India might have, or Africa. And so this is a source of difficulty for me, and oh, I think, did I not bond closely enough with my grandnieces and nephews, and is it too late for me to do that? How might I do it, and perhaps have some influence? And if not them, of course, lots of other children and young people here. (laughter) But somehow with your own flesh and blood, you think, oh, maybe you could have more impact.
COLLINGS
Yeah.

END OF AUDIO FILE

1.2. Session 2 (March 13, 2007)

UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 2, 3-13-2007
COLLINGS
Good morning, Lois. Jane Collings interviewing Lois Arkin at her office at Bimini Place, White House Palace --
ARKIN
Bimini. Formerly White House Place was my home, but now Bimini Place. (laughter)
COLLINGS
Yes. And the date is March 13, 2007.
ARKIN
A nice, sunny, smoggy, warm Tuesday, two weeks before the spring equinox. So we're still in winter, and it was 90.
COLLINGS
Yeah, it was (inaudible), it was really hot.
ARKIN
Interesting.
COLLINGS
Yeah. So we left off last time that you were all grown up, so to speak.
ARKIN
In two hours. (laughter)
COLLINGS
Yes. And you talked a little bit about how your family didn't particularly encourage you to go to college, but in fact you did go to college, so why don't we pick up with that?
ARKIN
Yeah. In my high school, it was a very over-achieving high school, and a fairly affluent high school. So it was definitely the thing to do; I would have been kind of out of step if I didn't go to college, and I really did want to. And so my sister had gone to the University of Michigan, and I had spent some weekends up there, because I had a boyfriend there when I was in high school. But I think what happened is that I went to Wayne State University, and I lived at home that first year, and I met my future husband [William Arkin] at Wayne; he was a very close friend of a cousin of mine Richard Zatkin who was also going to school at that time. It wasn't -- he was a close friend, I should say, of a distant cousin of mine; I think that's what I meant.And so I had run into this cousin, who was a second cousin once removed or something like that, and he had -- and we started kind of hanging out at college, and so he introduced me to my future husband. I don't think I had any intent of getting married so young, but I was not -- I think at that time, it was the '50s, it was the mid-'50s, if that, and I think it was very fashionable, lots of my friends were getting engaged and getting married, and I didn't see anything particularly wrong with it. So I did get engaged, and then we got married I think a year later, in March, 1956; I had just turned 19.When I think of that today, in the milieu of the young people that I hang out with that are my community mates today, so many of the young people that come on our tours, but of course, that was a time when number one, one was definitely going to be a virgin when they married, and number two, where you didn't live together before you got married, although I have to say, in that first year of college, I think I read Bertrand Russell, and he was the one that introduced me to the intelligence of people living together before they got married. So I thought that was a great idea. So my husband and I proceeded to have an open marriage, in 1956. (laughter) Because I was of the opinion -- I forgot what my opinion was, but I certainly had a justification for deciding that our marriage would be open.
COLLINGS
Meaning that you would have other --
ARKIN
That we were giving each other permission, at the front end of our marriage, to be involved in other relationships. And obviously with the full knowledge of the other, not the traditional way of cheating on one another. But of course, I was very much in love with my husband, and I had no desire to be with anyone else. So we had pretty much a ten-year fairly blissful marriage, we were kind of one of those marriages where everyone that met us just perceived us as being delightfully in love. And we were, and -- now, we were -- that first year --
COLLINGS
(inaudible)
ARKIN
OK. Am I talked too loud, incidentally?
COLLINGS
No, no, no. Perfect.
ARKIN
OK. That first year, we both lived in the suburbs; he actually, when we were dating, he lived with his parents only a few blocks from where I lived, where he had been essentially raised, but we had never met. And he was four years older than me, and he had just returned from Korea. So he was kind of war-torn, but he was going to college; he was exceptionally bright, and he was majoring in physics and math. And he had gone to a high school that was an art -- it was kind of like what we would call our magnets today, it was a magnet for art. And is still I think well known in those circles in Detroit. And so he was an artist, also, and so we had that first year in college together, and almost -- no, I guess it was maybe toward the end of my first year that we actually met and started dating. Maybe it was -- I'm not sure exactly when it was. But then -- so we were married in 1956, in March. And we moved into the city from the suburbs, that's what I was starting to say; we had both lived in the suburbs quite close to each other, and we started doing some other exotic things, like decided that it would be really great to have a monkey.
COLLINGS
Oh, how fun. (laughter)
ARKIN
And so we had a succession of monkeys, none of which survived very long, and it was of course before we understood the full impact of species extinction and the illegalities of importing exotic animals and so forth. We were just ignorant.
COLLINGS
It was a different era.
ARKIN
It was a different era and we were ignorant, and we were just thinking how sweet and cute such a thing would be.
COLLINGS
Just to take you back a little bit, you were talking about how you entered into your marriage with your husband, the idea that it would be an open marriage. Did you talk about that with your friends at all, or was this something that was just entirely you?
ARKIN
At that time?
COLLINGS
Yeah.
ARKIN
I suppose there were some -- yes, I'm sure, at that time, there was some dialogue around that; it was like, "Gee, we're so young, and we haven't experienced," -- or at least, I hadn't ever experienced anyone else, and who am I to think that, "Oh, I'm the only one forever and ever that one person should love in that way?"
COLLINGS
Wasn't [Alfred C.] Kinsey saying something like that?
ARKIN
He might have been, but I think the person that really was tremendously influential on me, and I don't know whether this was before or shortly after my marriage, I don't remember what the years that he wrote were -- I think it was later, actually, I think it was much later, was Robert Rimmer, and also Heinlein, Robert Heinlein, in some of his science fiction books, and particular Stranger in a Stranger Land. And I can't even remember the titles of Rimmer's books, but they were quite popular with the alternative lifestyle people, and more later, that was more, I think, in the mid-'60s and so forth. But in the mid-'50s, I'm not sure who I was influenced by, other than Bertrand Russell. I think that Kinsey's reports came out about then, but I don't remember ever really reading them, other than casually hearing in the newspapers that there were sexual studies going on and stuff like that.But I think that I had this idea that love was not narrow, that love was expansive, even then. And it may have been from other books that I had read, but nothing particularly -- oh, I think the O'Neils; I do believe the O'Neils had published their book on open marriage [Open Marriage] in mid-'50s, and I think that was a powerful influence on me. But of course, I had absolutely no experience or knowledge of how to be in such a relationship, and I think my husband, perhaps, as much as intellectually he agreed with this, he had no experience in being in that kind of relationship either, and of course, I was raised with '50s values and earlier of really being a virgin when you got married and all that sort of thing. And he had come back from the service, and of course had much, much experience with women, and was very, very handsome, so of course, there were always women that were interested in him, and I think he probably had many relationships that I didn't know about. Eventually I did, though. (laughter) And when I did, many, many years later, it was never the idea that he had been with other women; it was the idea that he had lied about it. And even if he had lied about it because he cared so deeply about me and didn't want to hurt my feelings, that he didn't have enough faith and trust in me to be able to handle that.
COLLINGS
So it wasn't the act; it was the cover-up.
ARKIN
It was the cover-up; always it was the cover-up, which was not the reason for our ultimate divorce, but it's worth noting, because we're still back in my starting college, right? So that comes later. So in college, I really had the -- that first year at Wayne State University, I was a theatre major, and I think after that first year of theatre, which was lots and lots of fun, but I was exposed to so many other things, it was like, "Oh, goodness gracious; I really want to major in psychology. Oh, no, I really want to major in philosophy." And so all these other things that I was tasting for the first time in any kind of depth was very, very exciting to me; I loved learning and I loved being exposed to new intellectual challenges. Unfortunately, that first year I also took a course in astronomy, because I was sure that I wanted to be an astronomer as well, but I didn't do so well academically in it, and I thought, well, maybe not astronomy. So I think the same thing happened for me in high school in physics. (laughter)At any rate, so there was that sense -- I was very silly; I remember one of the things that really stood out for me in that first year of college was being in the play Gigi, and I was playing, if you remember the movie or the play, I was playing the grandmother. I was 17 at the time, and I was playing the grandmother, and I was always being very silly during rehearsals and so forth, and my director, who was also my teacher, one of my professors, used to -- I remember one day particularly, he was really calling me on my silly behavior and not paying attention to me -- or my not paying attention to what was going on, and I said, "But Gary, I'm only 17." And that was kind of my excuse for anything that I would ever do that was kind of not reflective of the maturity of what a more mature person should be doing.So, as I think I said earlier, in the last interview, as a child I loved to be such a ham and show off, and I really loved to make people laugh, and I didn't really care whether they were laughing with me or at me, and I think that had to do with the protective coat that I had developed from my sister's animosity towards me; it was like, that gave me a certain strength in a lot of ways, and I thank her today for that. (laughter) I think it also gave me a sense -- and I don't know whether I said this last time, but as I played some of that back over the week, I thought -- oh, it also gave me a sense of social justice, and a feeling for the underdog, because I was the underdog in my family, in relation to my sister. Because she was extraordinarily beautiful, at least I thought so, and very, very popular. And so I've always felt the underdog, even though I was not unattractive as a youngster, and not unpopular, but of course, I didn't ever feel that I held a candle to my sister. But so this business of being very empathetic towards the underdog and to social injustice, because of course it was unjust that I was treated the way that I was by her, and that she wouldn't let me borrow her clothes when I wanted to. (laughter) And that she was always coming down on me for how messy and I am, and of course I was, and still am, and she was meticulous and still is. But she accepts me, and we tolerate -- (laughter).So back to college now. So at any rate, I was exposed to all these other very challenging intellectual and academic things, and then of course, there was the wedding. Here is a very big thing that happened during the wedding.
COLLINGS
Your wedding.
ARKIN
My wedding, yes. We were engaged probably for about a year, and had that fun time in college, dating and so forth, being engaged, and leading up to all the showers and the parties and the very essentially traditional large wedding, and I'm not sure how my parents dealt with this, but because my sister had just gotten married two years before, and I don't think my parents were that well off at the time, but somehow they managed. So it was the day before the wedding, I guess, and all of us women were at the beauty parlor to have our hair done.
COLLINGS
Your grandmother's beauty parlor.
ARKIN
Well, no, actually, my grandmother was long out of that business. But of course, my aunt and my grandmother and my sisters and me, we were all having our beauty parlor appointment to prepare for our being so beautiful for the wedding, and I had always for years envisioned how I wanted to look at my wedding, and I had long, long blonde hair, it was probably at least halfway down my back, and these are the things that young people are preoccupied with, at least in those days, in the crowd that I traveled with. And so I had this vision of being this kind of princess, and having a long pageboy, that was my vision of myself, wearing a pageboy hairdo. So the most that would happen to my hair at the beauty parlor would be a slight trimming to shape it into the proper pageboy that I wanted. But of course, the way I wanted to look was not in alignment with the way my mother wanted me to look and the way my grandmother and my aunt wanted me to look, and so they all conspired with the hairdresser, and they began to cut my hair very short, and they started --
COLLINGS
That sounds rather drastic.
ARKIN
It was drastic, and they started in the back, so I couldn't see what was happening, and I just remember being so angry and so upset, and not really -- I was a very unhappy camper. And it was very hard for years --
COLLINGS
What an odd day to get your long hair cut short.
ARKIN
Yeah. But then, this is, in a sense, the kind of controlling environment that I came out of. And I expect it had nothing to do with not loving me unconditionally and completely, but their vision of how they wanted me to look, they felt was more important than my vision of how I wanted me to look. And so it was hard; it was years and years and years -- even today, my mother would absolutely deny that she did that. (laughter) But she did, they did. It was something that was -- stood out as one of my more traumatic youthful experiences. And I think about the trauma in young people's lives today, and it just does seem so silly, doesn't it? And -- at any rate, so then there was the wedding, and there was the honeymoon in New York, and there was coming home and living in our new in-town apartment, the first time as an adult that I actually lived in the central city, which I loved the city, and even as a youngster, I remember loving to go downtown -- by the time I was 11 years old, just to backtrack a little bit, I was able to go downtown on my own with my friends on the bus, and I loved being able to do that. And so then it was very clear, Bill and I always wanted to move to California, and so we began to plan our departure for California.
COLLINGS
Had he been out here before?
ARKIN
He had visited in California; he had relatives here. And so of course, I dreamed of coming to California always, since I was five years old. And one of my ultimate ambitions in life at a very young age was not only to be a musical comedy star, as silly as I was, but to go to UCLA. And that was something I felt strongly about. So at any rate, we were -- let's see, Bill was in his senior year; I think I was only entering my sophomore year. And he was having a hard time with German, because it was a requirement in those days that you had at least a year or two of foreign language. And so it was very difficult. He was fine with physics and math and everything else, but German just really stumped him. But he didn't really want to study that anymore, and he was about to graduate; all he had to do was finish this German stuff. And we just got it in our heads that we were going to come to Los Angeles. And that we were going to both drop out of school. And of course, in that first year of marriage that we were in Detroit, I had actually dropped out of school.
COLLINGS
Yeah, wasn't that sort of the norm?
ARKIN
Yes. And I would see my husband through college. And so I got a job in a -- well, let's see. I think when we were engaged, I was working in a chemical and dye stuff company, and I would take the orders on the phone and type in on this electric typewriter. And that was really exciting, to use an electric typewriter. And I would take all of these horrible chemical orders -- I mean, as I look back on it now, today, it just was a very, very ugly kind of business to be in. And then, after we were married, I got a job as a secretary in a commercial motion picture studio. And I remember my boss, who was in charge of the studio where they used to shoot all the commercials, was always coming on to me, and that was very uncomfortable. And I was very firm about it, but that certainly did give me a taste of sexual harassment; I really -- it was just astounding to me, the degree that that was I guess kind of accepted. But it was fun, because every once in awhile they needed to use my hand or something in a commercial, and I learned a little bit about the movie business, and I realized, oh, this is definitely not what I'm interested in.And so then we came to California, and of course this was the home of the aerospace industry, and it was very exciting at that time, in the mid-'50s, or the late '50s; I think we came in '58. And we kind of settled in southeast Los Angeles, near where Bill's relatives were. We didn't actually settle; we were there for maybe a few months. And so Bill was looking for a job everywhere in the aerospace industry, and of course, getting refused again and again and again because he didn't have a degree. And so finally he wrote a letter, because he was a very creative writer, to Rockedyne, a corporation that was working on various rocket engines and space engines for space, and he outlined an idea for how to shield the rockets from radiation. And it was very creative; I don't remember the science of it, but apparently it impressed someone at that company, and so he was offered a job, even without his degree.And so we moved to the San Fernando Valley, and he became a research and development engineer at Rockedyne, and I became a clerk at Rockedyne, and we started living in different places in the Valley, I think in those first three years or so, '58 to '61, we probably lived in a half a dozen different places, because one of the things that was exciting for us is to move into a brand-new apartment that had never been lived in before, and to look for as many amenities as we could. So the swimming pools and the park-like grounds and so forth, all of this was very impressive for us. We just -- we didn't have many things, and that was just kind of fun. And then on weekends -- let's see, it was still the bohemian era, I believe; it was like pre-hippie time, and we would go into Hollywood and walk on Sunset Boulevard and visit the coffee houses and all the sidewalk artists and so forth, and so we'd kind of be these weekend bohemians, eventually weekend hippies as the '60s came upon us. But it's interesting to think about that. You asked me a question earlier; I'm not sure if I answered it.
COLLINGS
Well, I think -- were you thinking at all in that time of your early marriage about having children?
ARKIN
Yes, the question came up, and we decided that we would like to have children, but not right now. Oh, well, so anyway, so then comes the very interesting story; I'm so glad you asked. So I think it was early 1959 when I became -- we moved here in '58, early '59 when I became pregnant. But of course, I didn't know that I was pregnant, just there was something wrong. And so we went to this gynocologist, and we had talked about having children, but later. And then we had also talked about one of us getting fixed, and then could we get unfixed, and that sort of thing.
COLLINGS
Because birth control was a problem?
ARKIN
We didn't use any birth control. (laughter) And so of course I did -- oh, maybe tried to be careful during the most fertile time of the month, but my periods were so irregular, that was kind of difficult. So I did get pregnant, and so we went to this gynecologist in Beverly Hills. So when he came back with the report, I said to him, "Oh, no, not now. Gee, we were even thinking of getting an operation." And of course, I was thinking about Bill or me getting an operation to get our tubes tied, but of course, the doctor interpreted that to mean that we were thinking of getting an abortion, and so he hooked us up with an abortionist, and I didn't tell him any differently. And I thought, "Oh, wow, that is so cool," -- this a very, very respected Beverly Hills gynecologist, and so we did have an abortion, and it was a very, very happy occasion for us. And I remember being in the middle of the abortion and calling our friends all over the country, and saying, "Guess what I'm doing right now." (laughter)
COLLINGS
Well, that's interesting. (laughter)
ARKIN
So it just -- it's stunning to think about that, in terms of what goes on today. Just absolutely amazing, in that sense. And I've never, ever had any regrets. Every once in awhile, I'll run into some very serious pro-life people and let them know, because frequently, you hear from them that every woman that has an abortion has regrets. And I never did, so I wanted to let people know that. So at any rate, I feel that it's a great gift to our planet, for an American to not have a child, because even perhaps among the most low-income Americans, we are still, for every child born in this country, using 15 to 40 times more resources than a kid born in a small village in India or Asia or South America. Obviously, the child is innocent of that, but I'm of the opinion that we do the planet a favor by having less American children. On the other hand, I can talk quite a bit about some of the issues with that sort of thing too, as obviously, there's a serious population depletion in many Northern European countries, and what the implications of that are. But I guess we'll save that for later, right?At any rate, we did have an abortion, and that was 1959, I believe. I would not say that I don't from time to time think, "Goodness, I could have a kid about 45 years old now and be a grandmother, and perhaps even a great-grandmother at this age." But somehow, it never has been within my self-image, essentially, for to be a source of pride, how many lives you've brought into the world. I don't take that away from my 91-year-old mother, who has 11 great-grandchildren. But I do feel badly about -- and they're all just lovely, lovely children, but they are all hugely impactful children, in terms of resource depletion. You do have to be a little schizophrenic in this business.So there were -- well, Bill and I stayed at Rockedyne for many, many years, from '59 -- or actually it was in spring of '58 to -- I was there 'til the spring of '65, so seven years, and went from being a clerk, to a -- I think by the time I left, I was a planning staff person that helped plan the development of new facilities, so they referred to me as a facilities planner. And my final job there, I had the same rank as a man that had had that position before me, but of course, I was paid much less. And whereas he was a salaried employee, I was an hourly employee and had to punch a timeclock. It was an extraordinary experience, working at Rockedyne in those days, because you would walk into an office, into the office area, and see not cubicles pretty much as you see today even in large offices, but like a sea of desks, like two or three acres of desks. And no windows; this was a secure building. And it was a very amazing experience, and to learn the politics of how that type of corporation worked.And it was interesting particularly because my husband, as a research and development engineer, and giving presentations and so forth. He had quite a different experience in the technical end of what the product was about than I did in terms of a support function, in terms of the corporation. But we certainly both learned a lot. He learned so much that eventually, he decided that he would be able to do a better job working for the government in the quality control function than in working for the corporation, because he saw so much of the inefficiency, the lying, the cheating, the ugliness, and he knew it from the inside, so he switched over and became a civilian working for the Air Force in quality control there at the facility, and did that for several more years. But at any rate, in 1965, I was laid off, which was a blessing; I had just graduated from college -- we didn't really talk about that part, did we? So let me go back a little bit.As I said, we lived in about six different places in the San Fernando Valley -- I'm not sure, maybe it was five -- before we settle -- and along the way, we acquired two large dogs, a Great Dane for Bill and an Afghan Hound for me. So we eventually, our last rental house was quite a large house on a half-acre, where the dogs had plenty of room to roam. But then the people who owned that house wanted to sell it, and we did not want to buy it, and so we needed to find a place that would accept us with our two large dogs to rent, and that was not viable. So of course, Bill had the GI Bill, and we ultimately ended up buying a house in Chatsworth, I think for $23,000, three bedrooms, two baths, two-car garage, backyard, front yard, and only about five miles from work. Maybe not even that far, I'm not sure. And so that's where we kind of settled into our suburban life with our two canine children, and for the next nine years.Eventually, once I -- it was 1965 I was laid off, and I had just graduated from college and so had Bill, and he went on to graduate school to do -- we had both changed majors in those early days, in 1961 when we bought the house in Chatsworth, we shortly thereafter enrolled in Cal State Northridge, which was around the corner from there, and went to school at night. I think both of us carried a full academic load, and worked full time. And so that was kind of interesting, it wasn't like a really big deal to do that, and I guess today it's much more difficult to do that; I haven't really given it much thought as to why it's so much more difficult to do that, to work full-time and go to school full-time and run a house full-time, and some people do all that and have children, too. I had one colleague at the time, a little bit later at a different job that we had, she had five children, and she was working full-time and going to school full-time. I didn't know how she did it. (laughterBut at any rate, we did do that. We switched our majors; we took an anthropology class together, and we were so impressed with our professor that we both switched into being anthropology majors. I think Bill really did want to get a degree, but it was never important to me; I just loved learning. And after a few years, a counselor called me into their office, and they said, "You know, Lois, you have enough credits to graduate, but all you would need to do is take this one course, and you would have enough to graduate." So I thought, well, nothing lost if I do that, even if I was not particularly interested in that course, which was health. (laughter) So I took the course and I got the degree in 1965 with a major in anthropology and minors in philosophy and psychology. And Bill graduated with a major in anthropology and minors in math and physics. And then he went on to do a Master's in sociology, and he worked very closely with Lou Yablonsky at the time, who I think was associated with UCLA, I'm not sure.But he was one of the people that was closely associated with Synanon, and the drug and recovery home that was quite popular in the '60s, and the Synanon games that people learned how to play. Group therapy was really big, and all different kinds of group therapy; Marathon therapy, the Synanon games, many, many different approaches to that sort of thing. So Bill was -- oh, psychodrama, that was a big thing too that Yablonsky was involved in, and Bill learned quite a bit about. So all these things were very interesting to us, but I continued to work full-time while Bill went to school full-time once again, and I -- shortly after I was laid off in 1965, I decided to take the exam to become a probation officer with the County of Los Angeles working with children, and that was quite interesting to me. I think before that at one time, I had decided, oh, maybe I should become a police officer, because I was very service-oriented, and I suffered under the illusion of a really just police department and so forth. And I'm sure there are lots of good people in the police department too.But I didn't pass that test, I guess because I was extraordinarily honest, when the panel asked me all these questions, and I had opinions and philosophies that were not in alignment with the LAPD -- thank goodness. But then I took the exam for becoming a probation officer working with youth in LA County, and people warned me: "Oh, it's a very, very tough test, and people hardly ever pass it the first time." But I did, and I didn't think it was particularly tough, and ended up working in a detention facility for teenage girls called the Dorothy Kirby Center in Southeast Los Angeles, about 35 miles from our home in Chatsworth. And it was a residential facility, so I was able to work off-hours, but it was nothing to drive those 70 miles every day, and I didn't think anything of it. And there was really no traffic at that time to speak of.But I loved working with the kids, and it was such an extraordinary education, working -- number one in a public jurisdiction, and working with teenage kids. And I learned in that position, because, although I grew very close to several of the kids, and I had a great sense of unconditional love for them, even the most troubled. And some were in this detention facility for offenses that were so minor, they were like truancy; they were being locked up for being truants, or running away from home. And it was -- or experimenting with drugs or something like that, but for the most part, very minor quote-"offenses"-unquote. Today we would say kind of going through growing up. But we had five-day group, and worked with the psychologist, each of the cottages had a psychologist, and I was staff to a group of ten kids for eight hours, for my eight-hour shift. And we did all kinds of interesting things and played games, and went outside and had recreation, and played music, and I certainly developed a love of the music that was going on at that time, and the kids taught me how to do all these wonderful things and so forth. But it was -- I believe it was 1965, and that was also the year of the Watts Riots. And so this was an interesting time to be with these kids, and some of them came from areas in South-Central where the riots were going on. So there I was, and then I --
COLLINGS
Were you thinking of this as a career, or was this just something that was sort of interesting to you, the way that the anthropology classes were interesting?
ARKIN
I think it was something that was interesting to me, and it paid very well. I don't think I knew essentially what I wanted to be when I grew up; I think that in the aerospace industry, you work really hard, and you do the best job you can, and I just remember an experience I had during an engagement that I want to go back and tell you, but let me --
COLLINGS
OK. Sure.
ARKIN
And you work really, really hard, and if you work really hard, you will always be promoted, and that was I think what I was raised with, to a large extent, even though my parents didn't work in businesses where promotions were standard, I think it was still the value that I grew up with.
COLLINGS
Yeah, it was around.
ARKIN
It was the ethic that was around, and we hadn't learned yet that working hard was not enough. Oh, I think we were -- there was this expression for getting ahead in the world; it's not what you know, it's who you know. And so there was that ethic that was there too. And later on in life, I realized -- and that was always put out as a really bad and negative thing, that you would get ahead because of who you knew. And later on in life, I realized that hey, there's nothing wrong with that. It's not exclusive to that, getting ahead is not only who you know but what you know; it's what you know combined with who you know in a way that is authentic, and is not putting other people down, that there is nothing ethically troublesome to me about that. But that took me a long, long time to learn that lesson, I think. But -- let's see, where was I?
COLLINGS
You said there was something that happened in the course of your engagement?
ARKIN
During the course of my engagement, that had quite a very strong impact on me -- I was not a person that was particularly self-confident at that age, and I think that as I relate to my mother today, I see that she is among the most self-effacing people that I know. And never putting herself out in front of anyone else. And so I think I somehow had that quality quite a bit as a youngster, except for the fact that I loved to be a clown and make people laugh. So I think during my engagement, perhaps I had put myself down quite a bit in relationship to my husband, or my fiancé, whom I adored and thought was brilliant and handsome and wonderful, and was I really deserving of this extraordinary person. And that was questions in my mind. And I remember one day we were in the library at my folks' house, and I said something very demeaning about myself, and he hit me.
COLLINGS
Who?
ARKIN
My fiancé hit me, and he slapped me in the face. And he did that in a way that -- "I never, ever want to hear you talk about yourself that way again." So it wasn't to be cruel; it was like, wake up and recognize who you are. And maybe he was also telling me that -- "I don't want to be married to someone who's going to be putting themselves down all the time." And so it was a very, very impactful action that he had put on me, and then I remember years and years and years later, being involved with a man who once hit me, and I said, "If you ever, ever lay an aggressive hand on me again, that will be the end of our relationship." And he never did, and he was very sweet. But at any rate, going back to where we were, which was --
COLLINGS
When you were working with the kids --
ARKIN
The kids, yeah. So at any rate -- and you had asked me, had I thought of that as a career, and I thought if I work hard, I'll get ahead in this career. And so I had met a man during this period who was just a friend who also worked for the probation department at the time, and we became friends, and later lovers, after my husband and I separated, a considerable time after that. And I think that what happened was that this was now 1969, and my husband and I had separated. And so there were -- no, first off, there were several years that I worked in the detention facility and did well, and then was promoted, was being promoted to a special program that was working with very small caseloads of kids in the neighborhood where they lived in East Los Angeles, mostly Latina gang kids. And we would work with them in the community, dealing with the problems that they had, instead of sending them away to detention for offenses that they could have been detained for, and tried to work in the context of the neighborhood problems that they were having. And so this was a new program; this was unheard of it.So I had a partner, and the two of us had caseloads of ten kids, at a time where I think the -- today the caseloads are probably 200 kids per probation officer. I think at that time it might have been 75 kids or so. But we just had such a wonderful time. And we didn't have an office, so we just had to make it up, and we often worked out of the backs of our cars, and we took the kids on field trips to the snow, they had never been to see snow, or to the beach, and so forth. And I can remember -- oh, one time we had arranged for the kids to have free beauty treatments, have their hair done and all that sort of thing. But we decided we really, really better make sure they don't have any lice in their hair, and we didn't have a place to do that. So we took them up to the fifth floor -- oh, I guess we had a tiny little office at that time on the fifth floor of the County Hall of Administration where all the executive offices were, and we went in the ladies' room and washed their hair -- this was on a weekend, so workers weren't there. And we left those washbowls just full of -- lice were just coming out all over the place. And it was just so funny when we stop to think about it.But we did things like that, and we worked with the -- we had to find places within the neighborhood where we could essentially do our group therapy sessions and so forth, but we frequently were in the homes of the kids themselves. And it was a wonderful, wonderful experience. I'm not sure, I keep hearing little rumors that that program is still going on; I can't imagine anyone working with a caseload of ten today. But it was great. And I did hear from some of those kids years, years later, every once in awhile. And regardless of how much you think you're not making any progress, that was one of the arenas in which I learned the lesson of the delayed reaction. You work really hard, you form relationships, you -- because I was already, as a young adult now, I think in my 30s already, I was starting to learn the delayed reaction lesson from my own parents, and finding the things that they used to tell me over and over again about things that perhaps, oh, you have no stick-to-itiveness, or you have to stick with things, or you have to listen, you really have to listen, shut up and listen. My father never stopped telling me how important it was to just listen, and all these things; I was started to have learned those lessons now, and so I was able to project that sort of feeling onto the kids, that maybe I didn't see any real change in them right away during the six months or a year or two that I might have been working with them, but I had faith that they would have a delayed reaction, and that someday the work that I did with them might have had some impact. And I did from time to time; I didn't hear from all that many, but there were kids that somehow tracked me down, which was not difficult, I suppose. But it was very gratifying.Then what happened is that my husband graduated; he got a Master's degree in sociology, and I was doing a terrific job impressing the authorities appropriately, and they wanted to promote me to doing a program similar to the one that I had been doing for two years in East LA; they wanted me to do a similar program in South-Central with African-American kids. And I thought about that a lot, and obviously for a promotion and more money and all kinds of things like that. And I thought about it, and I realized that what it had taken me two years to do in East LA with Latina kids, that it would -- had it been someone with my passion that was fluent in the culture and the language, they could have done perhaps in six months what took me two years. And particularly working with the families, many of whom -- all the kids were fluent in English, but many of the parents were not; most of the parents were not. And I think that I realized the same thing, even though it wasn't necessarily a different language, but certainly cultural differences and the black/white thing; we were already deep into the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s, and we were deep into the Bootstrap Movement and Black Power, and it was like, this job really should go to an African-American person and not me. And so much as I was challenged, and I thought it was really, really exciting to do that, I didn't think it was -- from what I had learned, that it would have been the best choice for the department to put me in that position, and so I advised them not to. And about this time, my husband had received an opportunity to do a fellowship for his PhD in sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, and I thought that was really wonderful. But by that time also, our marriage was having some very serious problems; he was, from my perspective, kind of going through a mid-life crisis, and I adored him so much, but I realized I couldn't help him. And I wanted him to want me to go with him to St. Louis, but he didn't really want me to do that.
COLLINGS
How did you know that?
ARKIN
Because he wasn't so enthusiastic -- we had already separated; he was living a few miles away, we had separated, and I was living in the house and he was living in an apartment, because we were kind of needing to have some space from each other. And so he went on to St. Louis, and I guess this wasn't quite where this job change had occurred; I think it was actually before this separation had occurred, before I went into the new job, working with the kids in their neighborhood. So yeah, so I got a little bit ahead of myself there, getting the different pieces of my life, the jigsaw puzzle to match up. He did go to St. Louis, and I did work with those kids, and I believe that I, in 1969, we decided to sell the house, because I really wanted to move into the city, and it seemed like he was going to be gone for a few years, and I didn't know why I needed that big house. One of our dogs had died, and so I gave the other one away to a neighbor who really wanted the dog, and I sold the house, I think for $25,000 -- today I'm sure it's worth a million. (laughter) But I want -- I'm not sure whether I said this earlier in last week's interview or not, but I wanted to just insert one thing, since it has implications for who I am today, there were times -- I think I did say it, when we worked on the lawn every weekend, on the house, and I think that I remember thinking, "Oh, we should just pave it all over," so we didn't have to work on the lawn, because I had all these memories from my childhood where a big part of my chores was to pull weeds every weekend during summer, rake the leaves, mow the lawn, and I just didn't want my life to be about that sort of thing. -- I did mention that, didn't I?
COLLINGS
Mm-hmm.
ARKIN
OK. So at any rate, we sold the house; Bill moved to St. Louis, I moved to the city, I rented an apartment about two miles from where I am now, still very central city. And then maybe it was a year later, maybe a whole year later, that I decided -- oh, I was very, very happy for Bill, because a woman that he had gone to graduate school with here at Cal State Northridge was also going to do graduate work, her doctoral, at Washington University in St. Louis. I thought that was so wonderful; I was so pleased that he would have a companion. I had asked him once, had he been sleeping with this person, and he said no, and course I trusted that that was the case, but about a year later, I woke up one day, or I was -- I woke up one night, it was in the middle of the night, because sometimes when I called there -- oh, he had told me that she was living in the same apartment building as he was in St. Louis, and I thought, "Oh, that's really great; that's so wonderful, there's someone there that he's a good friend and he won't be alone," and I was so happy for him. And then I guess one night I woke up in the middle of the night, and I thought, "Oh, they really are sleeping together."And I called in the middle of the night and she answered the phone, and so I made some really interesting -- I asked some really interesting very direct questions, and she said, "Oh, yes." I said, "When did you and Bill start sleeping together?" And so then I was angry for a few years because he had lied to me, and then I was very sad, too, because I realized that this was a time when -- this had been a time for him that in spite of all of our talk about open marriages and this sort of thing, and expanded relationships, that he was really the one that couldn't handle it. And even -- one time I was almost going to have an affair, and told him all about it, and his reaction was, he was so unhappy about it that I decided not to do that. And so it was really his difficulty in all of this. So but -- and so I was happy that they lived happily ever after; he got a divorce from me in Missouri, and I was very sad for about six months, and went to group therapy for six months, and I had started keeping a journal when I was feeling very sad at our separation, and I think I -- in the group therapy, I don't think I ever talked about myself, but I was always kind of like doing group therapy for everyone else, and it was about six months when I just didn't feel that I needed it. And then I said to myself, when I can read my journal and laugh, I'll know I'm over it. And it was very shortly thereafter that I could start laughing, and then I was really over it.And I was happy for him, and then it was maybe another year before I actually started dating again and seeing other people and having other relationships, and what I did, because when we divorced, Bill wouldn't take anything. Unlike most divorces you hear about, where there's lawyers and anger and everything, he left -- we had savings, we had stocks and bonds; we were a double income, no kids kind of household; we owned a house -- he wouldn't take anything. And I tried to get him to do something that was fair, but he wouldn't. Must have been his guilt or something, I don't know. But at any rate, I didn't know anything about investing or anything or what to do with money, really, or how money grows or anything like that. So I just put all -- once we sold the house, and I certainly didn't want to be bothered with those stocks and bonds that I didn't understand anything about, and so I just sold them all and put all that money in a savings account, and then decided to take a trip around the world on a cargo freighter to get my head straight. (laughter)
COLLINGS
Where did you get that idea?
ARKIN
That was where I -- people were using that expression at that time, "Get your head straight." And so --
COLLINGS
How did you know where to find this cargo freighter?
ARKIN
Well, that's great. My parents were visiting, and we were down in Long Beach at the wharf, and we were just kind of walking around looking at the seals down there and so forth, and we kind of just casually encountered a few women that were these older women, and they were all excited because they were either just going or coming back from their trip around the world on a cargo freighter. And, "Oh, wow, that sounds really interesting," and I asked them for the information, and followed up on it. And I guess this was in the early spring of 1969, and I just made a reservation for the ship leaving in September. And then by -- I had taken a leave of absence from my work with the probation department, and decided I just needed a year off, and, gee, I could afford -- I was very frugal, and I could afford to do that, and I lived in this apartment, and decided to just become a bum and get my head straight, because I was already in my early 30s, about 32 at the time, and I thought, you know, I can afford to do this, and I'm just going to do it.So I did that -- I'm not sure that I actually retired very much before I left on the cargo freighter; I think maybe I retired in July and the boat was leaving in September, something like that. But in the meantime, what I did do, I sold my car. Now, we always had cars, and we always had two cars when we were married, at least during the period we lived in the house. Why in the world we needed two cars when we both worked at the same place, I've no idea. But we did. And Bill's father was in the car dealership business, and so we always had brand-new cars, and we were from Detroit, what can you expect? And so at any rate, I sold my car, and I got a little, little Honda motorcycle, probably the smallest one that you can get. Not small like they have them today, but -- it was called a Honda 90, and I was very proud of that bike, and I rode it around everywhere. I can remember being very suntanned, having this very long blonde hair, because my hair had grown back, and always -- and wearing very short skirts, because I had really great legs in those days -- people tell me I still do, but -- (laughter). And riding my motorcycle into downtown Hollywood next to one of those places where all the Harley Davidson guys hung out, so there would be like a dozen motorcycles lined up making that big "rrr-r-r." And I'd ride up in my little Honda -- "Hey, guys! What's happening?" (laughter) It was a very silly time in my life.And then I also remember, something that I remember quite a bit; there was something called the Hollywood Ranch Market on Vine Street in Hollywood just south of Sunset, and a lot of people hung out there. I can remember -- including just the beginnings, sometimes you'd see a homeless person, or what we referred to in those days as a bag lady, I guess we still do. And I can remember thinking, "Hey, that would be fun to be a bag lady," and I didn't have a problem with that; I liked the idea of being nomadic and homeless, I liked it a lot. Of course, our values were very different then, and our problems were very different then, than they are today. There was kind of the romance of the hobos of the '30s and so forth, and all of the kids that were traveling all over Europe with their backpacks and hitchhiking and so forth. So that was kind of my vision, even though I was a little bit old to be in that kind of younger hippie group, I called myself in my early '30s, "Well, I'm a middle-aged hippie." And so at any rate, then I went -- I did get on the cargo freighter with my motorcycle, and proceeded to travel around the world. And we went to 25 ports, I believe; it was a six-month trip. And we would get off -- the ship would be like our hotel. I lived in a three-room suite that had like a bedroom, a sitting room, and a bathroom, and we had wonderful food, and it was -- there were seven passengers, and I was the only one under 60. So I was given -- I got quite a bit of attention, as you can imagine.
COLLINGS
From the crew.
ARKIN
Yeah. (laughter) And also was the cause of lots of gossip, so that was interesting for the older folks. I did end up having an extraordinary love affair with the captain of the ship.
COLLINGS
Oh, my goodness! (laughter)
ARKIN
Who became very, very protective of me as I -- I remember being in Africa, I think in Guinea, I'm not sure -- no, maybe it was Lagos -- and I remember him being very worried about me, and sending the whole crew out looking for me. (laughter) But I was always the one that would get out; it was very exciting for me, because I had really never been out of the country, other than Tijuana once and to Canada when I lived in Detroit. So when the ship hit Barcelona, which was the first port in Europe that we went to, it was like, "Oh, I'm in Europe!" I couldn't -- it was so exciting. So I decided to get off the ship and travel to Venice and meet the ship in Venice, and so I did that, and took the train from Barcelona to Venice, I'm sure that was what it was. It was a very amazing week that I had. So at any rate --
COLLINGS
What kind of cargo was the ship carrying?
ARKIN
It was all kinds. I don't know, quite frankly, as I think back about it; I have no idea what kind of cargo it was, other than it -- whatever it was, it socked my motorcycle in, and I couldn't get it off the ship until we actually got into Greece -- no, in Yugoslavia, it was in Yugoslavia that I finally was able to get my motorcycle off the ship. And so I went -- I was so excited because we were in Split, Yugoslavia, which was just an extraordinarily beautiful area. And I rode my motorcycle around these winding hills, which were kind of like fairytale views and fairytale mountains and fairytale villages, and I got to the top of the mountain and there was this little village. And -- oh, I rode up, and there was this little outdoor cafe, and there were all these people in traditional dress at this big -- it was some kind of celebration that they were having, and I was so excited to see all these beautiful people in their native costumes, and so I kind of got closer and closer and closer, and the language was English. And I was, "What are you people all doing here in all these strange --?"
COLLINGS
Making a movie. (laughter)
ARKIN
Yes, exactly. (laughter) I came 5,000 miles to get away from that, and here it was. So it was kind of funny. The ship was a Yugoslavian cargo freighter, and so of course I fell in love with Yugoslavians. And when I got back to the States, I was always seeking out Yugoslavians for the next year or two. I remember there being tensions on the ship between the different ethnic groups, the Serbo-Croatians -- I didn't follow it; I didn't really know what it was about, but of course in retrospect there was -- that stuff was already going on.
COLLINGS
So you went from the West Coast through the Panama Canal?
ARKIN
Exactly. And then all through Europe, through Spain and Italy and Greece, Yugoslavia and Greece and Turkey, and then back out through the Mediterranean, and then down to India and Africa, and then back up to Asia and Japan or Hong Kong and Japan, I'm not sure, and then back across the Pacific and then landed in Seattle. And it was six months, and in the middle of the trip, one of the cooks got sick and had to leave the ship, and so I would go down and hang out in the kitchen, and the food was so wonderful, and I tried to be helpful, and so I learned a lot about cooking on that ship. I really wanted to help, and so they put me to work, and I learned how to chop vegetables, and how to mix sauces and all kinds of cool stuff that really hung with me for years after that. And I consider myself a fairly good cook today, but I know that certainly had some influence on me.And so then I came back, and I decided I really -- one of the things I always wanted to do was learn how to play tennis -- really become a good tennis player; I think I had dabbled in it, but I think it had influenced me years and years ago when my husband and I had gone to a park out in Northridge and just watched people hitting a tennis ball back and forth, and they were so graceful and it was so beautiful, and I decided I wanted to really become good at that. So I started going up to Griffith Park where they call Vermont Canyon with a tennis racket, and just hanging out and seeing who would hit with me. And so I did that, and then eventually I met a young man who, like me, was just being a tennis bum. And he was very, very good, and we fell in love. He was -- it was a little bit silly, because he was 11 years younger than me; I think he was 21 or 22 to my 33, I think.Wait a minute -- did I miss something? Let's hold off on that one, because when I came back from the trip around the world, a very dear friend of mine, whom I had become quite close to during our probation years, had moved to Spain, had moved to a small village in the south of Spain, and had invited me to come and spend a few weeks. And I thought, oh, that's really great, and so I went to spend a few weeks visiting my friend in Spain, because I had just loved Spain when I had been there on the ship. And I ended up staying a year, and that was quite an amazing, amazing experience. Wait a minute. Am I getting this time frame correct? Now I'm wondering if I am getting it correct -- yes, I think I am getting it correct. And then I -- yes, OK. And so I ended up spending a year there. It was a small village called Fuengirola --
COLLINGS
Oh, I've been there. On the Mediterranean?
ARKIN
Uh-huh. You have?
COLLINGS
Oh, yes.
ARKIN
Oh, wow. Well, this was in '70.
COLLINGS
Yes, it was really nice.
ARKIN
It was still -- you could almost have called it a fishing village. There were a few tourists there, but most of the tourists were in Marbella or Malaga, or Torremolinus. And so this was a little village that had not been so terribly devastated by tourism at that time. And so we lived there in this little house near the ocean, a block from the ocean, I think, for a year, and she had two other roommates, and then I was a fourth, a British couple. And what she was doing was she had started a little nursery school for the children of foreigners that were living there, and so I decided, oh, I'll just stay and help her in the nursery school, the little kind of pre-school -- they were probably five to seven-year-olds. And we were just a walk from an old castle, you may remember it, it seems to me it was on the south end of town.
COLLINGS
There was sort of a historic village off the side of the mountain, I forget what it's called. (inaudible)
ARKIN
Yes, it was just the sweetest little town. So we would take the children to the castle, and we would work with them in our house, and other field trips in the city and so forth. And there were three of us working, the woman that was part of the British couple and me and my friend, the three of us ran this little school. And what I experienced during that time was what I call -- I can only call now orgasmic labor, who I later met someone who wrote a piece on the concept of orgasmic later. And -- well, no, maybe not; I won't call it that. That came later. I'll call it -- it was a time where people that were in a really good relationship with one another learned how to read one another in relationship to their work, so there was -- without any planning, there was always a way that we picked up on one another, wherever the other person was in relationship to the children. And we loved each other and we loved the children and we loved the work, and so it was natural and spontaneous and very organic to just be so in tune with one another in relationship to the work.And so that was my first experience and my most influential experience in working collectively, and that's what it ultimately was; I didn't really know that much about it, but in working collectively. I'm sorry, but I have to backtrack to college days, because in doing -- and then I'll come back to this experience, because these were world-shaping -- these were life-shaping experiences for me. In our study of anthropology, we came across the concept of community, and -- if I talked about this, will you remind me, and then I won't repeat it -- and my husband and I discovered this spiritual community in the Santa Susana mountains that we started visiting regularly, and wrote some papers on and met the people, and they were very, very loving people, even though they were a very -- they were a cult. And I forgot the name of the cult, although I'm sure I have a paper buried in one of my trunks about them, or two.But they were -- to us as outsiders, they just felt so loving and always full of hugs and always full of caring, and they engaged in rituals like washing one another's feet and that sort of thing, and I just thought it was the most beautiful thing. And because I loved -- part of my private life was fantasy life, and there was a couple there who really believed there was -- they knew, they didn't just believe, but some people have beliefs that they put forward as knowledge, and others that want to be gullible and want to believe, to believe them. And so they did believe that there was a hole in the center of the North Pole where you could go in, and there would be this utopian society that lived in the center of the earth -- perhaps you've heard these stories before. So I really wanted to believe that also. So they were quite influential on me; my husband always questioned it.But then we also had one anthropology class, and this professor had a following; her name was Dorothy Lee, and she had originally taught at Harvard, and then had come to Cal State, and she had a following that followed her from Harvard. And her -- the whole orientation of the anthropology department at that time was called existential anthropology, and Bill and I were in one of her independent study classes with about a dozen other kids. And at one point, we were asked to leave the class -- and Bill was always the scientist more than I was; I was the believer -- because we questioned whether in fact the comet that was coming by in those days was a god traveling through the universe, and other people in the class really did believe -- some of them, maybe not all, maybe if they didn't, they didn't say anything the way we did. And so we weren't kind of in tune with the rest of the class, and we were asked to leave the class. It was an interesting time for anthropology at Cal State Northridge.So at any rate, I was this kind of believer type; I wanted to believe in the utopian society in the middle of the planet. So where were we -- back in Fuengirola, I guess, and having this wonderful experience of working laterally, collectively, in non-hierarchical ways, and of course the experience that I had in the aerospace industry, which was extraordinarily hierarchical, and the experience I had in working for the Los Angeles County, although we had tremendous independence, there was a big hierarchy there above us, and we did have to regularly report and so forth. So this was a new way of working for me, and one in which I fell passionately in love with, and I knew that for the rest of my life, I never wanted to work for bosses again, and that what -- I didn't want only for myself, but I wanted it for other people too. Some people learn that lesson and decide they want to be the boss, but I never wanted to be the boss; I wanted to always find people that I could work that way with. So that was definitely a pivotal experience, the nursery school in Fuengirola.
COLLINGS
And it's interesting, the way you've always gravitated towards these kind of group experiences, because I was just sort of struck by how you were talking about working at the various jobs here in Los Angeles and going on the trip, it didn't ever sound like -- you didn't mention particular friends that you were talking with, other than your husband; you didn't suggest that you were in any way lonely. And even when you went to get married, you made a special point of saying, "I don't want this to be just the two of us," you know? (laughter)
ARKIN
Yeah. That's right.
COLLINGS
So it's striking that for you, relationships seem to be -- seem to need to be larger than that, more oriented toward groups.
ARKIN
That's right. And you make an important point there: as a youngster, and even as a young married person, or engaged, I never, ever felt that I needed anyone, and I didn't even -- I remember, of course there was the teenage years, I think from the time I was maybe 14 or 15 'til I was in my 30s, I had no need for my family, and no great love for anyone in my family. There were certainly family reunions, but the teenage years were very rebellious for me, and the young married years were -- you know, I really -- I always saw my husband and I changing the world together, and another thing that I didn't mention, during the marriage years, was the fact that we wrote; Bill was, I thought, of course, a wonderful, wonderful writer, even -- and I loved the idea of writing; I had always written poetry, I think, from a young age. Not that -- I wasn't a prolific poetry writer, and I was a decent writer for my papers in college, and I got good grades, but Bill was a very creative writer, and we partnered, and we saw our life together as writers that would enable us to write and to travel and to do all the things that we wanted to. And so we were -- we wrote short stories, and that was an era when there was still a fairly substantial market for short stories, so we just regularly sent out short stories in to be published, and we regularly got our rejection slips back, and every once in awhile a personal letter that would encourage us to keep writing.
COLLINGS
Were you communicating with other writers? Did you --
ARKIN
No. (laughter) Not really. And so that was a little -- I guess a little aside, and I wanted to mention the thing about feeling like I didn't need people, and the writing, and all these little pieces of the puzzle come back. So let's see, we are -- how are we doing?
COLLINGS
Good, good.
ARKIN
Oh, great. I'll --

1.3. Session 3a ( March 27, 2007)

UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 3, 3-27-2007 Arkin.Lois.3A.03.27.2007.mp3
COLLINGS
OK. Good morning, Lois. Today is March 27, 2007. Jane Collings interviewing Lois Arkin in her office in Hollywood.
ARKIN
East Hollywood.
COLLINGS
East Hollywood.
ARKIN
Koreatown.
COLLINGS
Koreatown.
ARKIN
Wilshire Center. (laughter)
COLLINGS
Wilshire Center. (laughter) OK. You want to give the street address? OK. Last time, we left off in Fuengirola, Spain. You had gone there to work with a friend in her cooperative nursery school.
ARKIN
Actually, I'd just gone there for a visit.
COLLINGS
Oh, I see.
ARKIN
Ended up staying -- going there for two weeks and ended up staying a year.
COLLINGS
Oh, yes. OK. And this was your first lived experience with intentional community. And you were saying last time that you had found it to be really fulfilling.
ARKIN
It was amazing. The amazing part was the way in which we worked together, because we were such close friends, and we had so much love --
COLLINGS
Can we turn off that coffeepot? (laughter) Sorry.
ARKIN
(laughter) Yes, let's turn that off. Oh, I'm so sorry.
COLLINGS
That's OK.
ARKIN
It is really loud, isn't it.
COLLINGS
Yeah. There, that's a bit better.
ARKIN
(inaudible). It's going to do that for a few more minutes, so I'll speak over it. (inaudible)
COLLINGS
OK. OK, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
ARKIN
The thing that was so remarkable, I think I did mention this last time, that it was the working together in a collective fashion; no one was a boss. And we were all so tuned in to one another so that the energy of one person, so if there was a hole, the energy of another person would just move in there like a seamless puzzle, and that we were able to support one another in that way in such a variety of ways, and it was such a joyful way to work that I envisioned, oh, never again will I work in hierarchies; I want to work in flat ways where we are -- we have this kind of wonderful way of being together in our work, and to manifest -- [Khalil] Gibran talked about work in his poem on work, that it is love made visible. And that stuck with me and stuck with me, and I thought, yes, this is how it's supposed to be.
COLLINGS
Interesting. What was the decision-making process at the --
ARKIN
I don't remember that we had any; we were just so, "Hey, should we go to the castle today?" Or, "Let's plan on going to the castle tomorrow." "Yeah, let's do that." "Gee, I know this game we could do with the kids." "Let's do that."
COLLINGS
And how did you interact with the parents of the kids? Or were they part of this group?
ARKIN
I don't remember, essentially, but I think most of the parents of those children were people that were kind of un-parented, un-parentlike, and were just happy to get the kids out of their hair, because they were kind of like expatriate people, or maybe celebrities, or whatever, they were people that were not particularly interested in children, and were happy to have them out of their hair. That's how I recall in my head; this was a very long time ago, so it could have been something else. But I think someone else kind of dealt with the parents, and I never had any dealings with them. And we just kind of dealt with each other and the kids were great, and they were very international, so -- I don't think my Spanish was so good at the time, but my colleague's Spanish, my friend's Spanish, my housemate's Spanish was quite a bit better than mine.So it was just a fun, wonderful time. It was that experience of the flat way of managing ourselves, and being able to do that in a way that was very non-contentious and complimentary and respectful. And honest, it had integrity; no one was just being nice to one another, we were able to be who we really were. And have our other life, too; there was balance in our lives. It was going to the markets every day, cooking together, hanging out in the cafes, and working together. So it was a very balanced and integrated life, although of course we weren't growing food there. It was before that era.
COLLINGS
Now, were these all women that worked --
ARKIN
No, there were -- yes, there were three women. Two of us from the States and one from Great Britain, the United Kingdom, London -- never know what to call it. And then her boyfriend, who wasn't particularly involved but was there. The woman that I was with from the States, we had worked together with the at-risk children in East LA, and so she had become my friend that way, and why I had gone to visit there at her invitation for two weeks and ended up staying a year. So it was fabulous. But also from there, I have the experience, after having traveled around the world on the cargo freighter, I had the experience, being in Spain for a year, of traveling pretty much around that part of Spain, the south of Spain, and also traveling in Morocco, and having that experience of -- I mean, Spain was a pretty different culture from what I was used to in LA, but Morocco was, of course, much more radically different. And I had no fear; I hitchhiked, and I remember -- I don't know if we actually talked about my being in Morocco.
COLLINGS
No, not at all.
ARKIN
But it was -- did I talk about my boyfriend at that time?
COLLINGS
No, no.
ARKIN
I had a Moroccan boyfriend, and he lived in Rabat, and we had met because he was traveling in the south of Spain and had been in that village. And so it was very interesting, because it was a time when [President Richard M.] Nixon was in the White House, and the group of us that were just having this wonderful time living in the south of Spain, and in that time, the Vietnam War and all the other horrible things that were going on at the time, that we perceived as horrible things that were going with Nixon, which of course, as we look back at now, was a tea party compared to today. But Nixon was planning a visit to the King of Rabat, the King of Morocco was either planning a visit to the US, or he was planning a visit to Morocco. And so my boyfriend at the time was -- his father was the jeweler to the King, and so all of us young people at that time -- of course, I was the oldest among the young folks; I think I was in my early 30s at the time, but most of the other folks we were hanging out with were in their 20s. And so we figured out this fabulous gift for the King to give Mr. Nixon, and it would be that the father, Jacque's father, would design this exquisite golden screw, and the King would give it to him, and we would -- the youth all over the world would know what it meant.
COLLINGS
(laughter) Yes, exactly. Let me adjust your mic a little bit; I think it might be scraping on your blouse. There we go.
ARKIN
OK. There we go. Yeah, so that the King of Morocco would give this golden screw to Nixon, and everyone would know what it meant.
COLLINGS
Right. Did this happen?
ARKIN
No, it did not. (laughter)
COLLINGS
I didn't think so. (laughter)
ARKIN
But we all got a kick, and we've had many, many years of storytelling about it, about the possibility of it. So at any rate, so I had spent time in Morocco, in Marrakesh, in Rabat, and it was a very -- it was just kind of a world-changing experience for me, because although I had been in other countries and radically different cultures when I was traveling around the world, I really -- this was another radically different culture to me here. And I was very -- I retained my naiveté, I had a wonderful and interesting pickpocket experience in one of the marketplaces, so I then had to deal with that, from a foreign country with foreign languages, and I remember being almost kidnapped and raped.
COLLINGS
Oh, great. (laughter)
ARKIN
And that was a very interesting experience; I always wanted to, wherever I traveled, wanted to have the experience of going into people's homes and seeing how they -- and feeling and experiencing how they lived. And I was very open and vulnerable, and so there was sometimes, in other parts of my travels as well, there was always risks involved. Fortunately, I survived them all.
COLLINGS
When you were traveling in other countries, Mediterranean countries and some of the others, did you notice anything in terms of lifestyle that sort of piqued your interest, in terms of sustainability or ways that people were dealing with their daily routine that you noticed?
ARKIN
Yes, I think everywhere I went, I noticed that. But of course, I didn't have the kind of consciousness about it all that I do today, but I think that it played -- certainly all of it played a role in my future life. I remember being in Turkey, and of course just delighting in the children. And so even though we didn't speak any language, they recognized -- this was a small town in Turkey at that time called Mercin on the Mediterranean, and I think since, I've heard it's grown into quite a large city. But I remember getting -- I remember getting off the ship and being in the streets and playing with the children, and then somehow, they -- word traveled about this quickly -- I don't know, whatever, in their language -- and then all of the sudden, I had about 25 or 30 children following me around the street. These children were not begging, as frequently happened in other countries that I visited, but they were just kind of joyfully --
COLLINGS
Just having fun, yeah.
ARKIN
Just having fun, and being -- we were kind of pantomiming back and forth to one another and being playful, which I loved to do. And then all of the sudden, the police appear to protect me and to take me away, because I'm in danger from the children. And so this was quite interesting to me. What was that about? I didn't feel like I was in any danger whatsoever. And so -- but the mode of transportation in that town was then a horse-driven buggy, and so that was quite amazing; there were very, very few cars. This was true in some of the villages that I had been in Spain and Yugoslavia at that time, in actual cities, there were high-rise apartment buildings, but the grounds around them were full of gardens and chickens and occasionally goats and cows. And so here we were, oftentimes in actual cities that had all these kind of rural realities all around them that obviously were providing a significant amount of the food supply.In many cities, I remember in -- particularly it stood out for me in Lebanon, the -- but it was true almost everywhere in cities; there were the food vendors on the street, and I hadn't yet really begun to experience that in Los Angeles; it would be in the late '60s, early '70s; I think it wasn't as common as it is today. But everywhere, in many of these developing societies, there were food vendors along the street. So these were kind of small, independent businesses which were very sustainable in that sense. The -- of course, so often the mode of transportation everywhere was feet first and bicycles and bicycle trucks and tricycles -- adult tricycles, that is, and there were taxis, even more recently I think there was -- where was I? -- oh, I believe in Peru a few years ago, there were these fabulous motorcycle taxis that were essentially tricycle motorcycles but with carriages or --
COLLINGS
Oh, that's a neat idea.
ARKIN
-- buggies built on them so you can take two or three people. So that was kind of -- of course, they were still petroleum-driven, so I would like to see those (inaudible). Let's see what else I can think of. Oh, of course there was some places, particularly in Africa, where one of the main modes of transportation in the rivers and streams were canoes, or different kinds of boats that they had carved out from falling trees. It's very interesting, observing someone creating one of those little boats. In one small, then-small city in Africa -- I think it was in Conakry, Guinea -- I remember going from picking up a young man from -- I had my motorcycle; I was able to get my tiny Honda motorcycle off the ship, and I picked up this young man in the marketplace over (inaudible), young man, maybe he was nine years old, and offered to drive him home on my motorcycle. Of course, I don't think I saw any cars in that town at that time (inaudible). And I remember him, as soon as we got home, he climbed up a coconut tree and brought me down a coconut.
COLLINGS
Well, that was very nice.
ARKIN
Gave him cigarettes --
COLLINGS
Well, I don't know about that. (laughter)
ARKIN
Well, I was of course smoking at that time, and we'll talk about that. So you know, in the anthropological lore of old, there was all this trading with the anthropologist with the indigenous people for cigarettes and beads and all kinds of things, and so I kind of observed myself being the anthropologist and being escorted into his village, and talking to the elders and so forth. But the idea that, oh, that was another form of transportation is him climbing up this 50-foot coconut palm just with his bare feet; how did that happen? (laughter) And to obtain food. So all these experiences, I think, were very deeply imprinted in me, and also had the hooks of all my anthropological studies of transportation, food, water, shelter. And so these things I was seeing that manifested those.
COLLINGS
Now, were you looking for these things as you went around>
ARKIN
No.
COLLINGS
No, this was just -- OK.
ARKIN
No, but -- well, I wouldn't say that I was looking for them, but I was anxious to experience all that I could experience.
COLLINGS
You were sort of more finding yourself and so forth than surveying these kinds of lifestyles.
ARKIN
Yes, but I had a curiosity about the people.
COLLINGS
Yes, a natural curiosity.
ARKIN
And I remember consciously distinguishing myself between being a traveler and being a tourist. And I was determined that I would not be a tourist; we still had -- I still had in my head, and of course we do today, the "ugly American," which was probably realized, I think, in the '60s, and I didn't want to be one of those people. So I decided to tag myself -- when people said, "Oh, are you touring?" -- I would never identify myself as a tourist.
COLLINGS
I think you were a traveler. (laughter)
ARKIN
(inaudible) because you travel. (laughter) So yes, let's see. We are back in --
COLLINGS
Fuengirola.
ARKIN
-- in Spain, so that time had come to an end, it was time for me to go home; I was able to live in Fuengirola, I was able to live there very, very inexpensively; I think my rent for my portion of the house was something less than $50 a month, of course food was very cheap. And at that time that I was there, having gone thinking that I was only staying away for two weeks and I ended up staying a year, I was still paying my rent in the apartment back home, which was about $200 a month at that time, in the early '70s, '70, '71. And I was living on savings; I had sold my house, as I mentioned, and my husband wouldn't take anything, and all kinds of stocks -- oh, this is quite interesting. We had stocks -- did I mention that?
COLLINGS
Briefly.
ARKIN
OK. Well, did I mention that it was an oil stock?
COLLINGS
No.
ARKIN
OK. We had purchased about $10,000 probably of the Trans-Canada Pipeline; I had a friend back in Michigan who was very savvy about investments, and so under his influence, I bought this, I don't know, some kind of weird option that it would convert to stock; it was an investment that would convert to stock when the pipeline was built. And of course, I didn't, after we were separated and divorced, and he wouldn't take anything, I didn't know anything about that stuff, and I was like, just get rid of everything, turn everything into cash. The house and the stocks and the bonds and everything. And so all that was turned into cash and put away in a savings account, from which I figured that that's what I would live on until the money ran out. I mean, I didn't think of actually making investments that would make the money grow, and I didn't know anything about that; I didn't know anything about money, period, other than, you know, don't spend what you don't have. And at that time until I had more charge account, and started -- well, we'll get to that. But so, let me see.
COLLINGS
It was an oil stock.
ARKIN
Yeah, so it was an oil stock, and I just got rid of it all. Of course, it subsequently, obviously, the Trans-Canada became a very good investment, and certainly one I would be horrified today to own. So on the one hand, oh, wow, one could have become pretty rich had I held onto it, and also, I'm very happy that I don't own it, unless -- or maybe I would have learned by that time to -- shareholder activism (laughter), and gone to those board meetings and complained about all the terrible things that were going on in the pipeline. But so then we were still back in -- we came back from Fuengirola, so during this whole time that I was in Fuengirola, of course, I was paying rent on my apartment in Los Angeles.
COLLINGS
And why did you decide to leave?
ARKIN
To leave Fuengirola?
COLLINGS
Mm-hmm.
ARKIN
Because I could see that I needed to get back to the States. When I went there, I was having the feeling that I could never really return to the US, that it was -- of course, it was those terrible Nixon years, which as I said is a teaparty compared to today. And I think that I already had a pretty good idea of American consumerism and how unsatisfying that was for me, and how cheaply I was living in Spain, and my knowledge of how cheaply one could live in other places, and even eventually work in other places, and so why would I return to the US? I had really nothing to return, no pressure to return. Except that I had this apartment and all this stuff that was in my apartment that I was paying $200 a month for, and so it was time to really go back and do the best that I could about being there, because of course I couldn't be spending $200 forever on this Los Angeles apartment. So it was really time to return, because the -- a year was enough, after having stayed for two weeks, and whether -- I didn't think that I knew what I was going to do when I returned, but I knew that I needed to return and tie things up. So I did do that, and so then that was in 1971 that I did return. I guess I still had the motorcycle. (laughter)
COLLINGS
You brought it back with you?
ARKIN
I think I had lent it to a friend in LA when I left for Spain, I had told him how to get it, I think -- no, I do think that I had my motorcycle, and that was my means of transportation for awhile. But I think then I got a new car; I think my parents gave me a car. I went to Michigan to visit, and they decided that I needed to have a car, and so they gave me a brand-new car, and I drove it out, and then I had a car for awhile. And then -- so here we were in 1971; I didn't know what was going to be next for me. And I had this -- I think I had started playing tennis before I went to Spain; I didn't get much of a chance to play in Spain, or on my trip around the world on the cargo freighter. But I did play a little bit, but I decided I really wanted to play a lot more tennis, and so I started hanging out at the tennis courts in Griffith Park. And promptly met a fascinating young man who I promptly engaged in a really fabulous relationship with, and he was also a bum like me at that time; I was truly a bum. And we eventually -- he maintained his place, but we essentially were living together, and he was -- he played guitar, and it was a time, you know, the music and the dropping out and so forth, and so we just had a wonderful time for the next several years, being lovers and making music and doing whatever we wanted whenever we wanted to do it, just being on the streets and eating ice cream, and I can remember things like standing over freeway bridges and looking at all the people in jammed-up traffic thinking, "Why do people do this? Isn't this ridiculous?" And just laughing, laughing a lot at how free we were, and how being, in a sense, that stereotype of a hippie, because -- here we were all free, and we have no responsibilities --
COLLINGS
And how were you supporting yourself like that?
ARKIN
Well, I was still living on my savings from all that stuff that I didn't know what do other than to live, but very, very frugally, and having a very, very high quality of life, but living at a very, very low income, so I could make the money last as long as it would. And I had no idea what was going to happen when the money ran out, but I knew that I wanted to make it last as long as it could, and that I was having a wonderful, wonderful time. And of course, I had gone on this cargo freighter trip to get my head straight, and I believe -- I really did believe that I brought a lot of joy to people's lives wherever I encountered them on the street, because I was just really kind of fun to be around and playful all the time. And then I would ask people questions, provocative questions, in very loving and friendly ways. But in that sense, actually -- I don't know if --
COLLINGS
Do you want to get that phone?
ARKIN
No. If you don't mind, I don't. And so asking people provocative questions, and essentially engaging in civic dialogue on the street. And I can remember like standing in a bank line and wondering, "Why is everyone standing in a bank line?" And so I would sit down while I was waiting and have conversations with people standing around me. And then I --
COLLINGS
Let me pause while the message runs. OK, here we go. And you were sitting down in a bank line.
ARKIN
Yeah, and I would look up at people, and we shopped every day for food, and we cooked together all the time, and we went to all the free concerts and the free plays, and we knew everything that was going on around the town that way. And we played tennis every day; we would start out 9:00 in the morning with our tennis gear and go up to Griffith Park and stay there for eight hours and play games, and hit balls with each other. We were essentially tennis bums; truly, we were. I know it's shocking to hear that about me, but I have to say that I did do that. And this is an authentic oral history, and then come home and make dinner and hang out; it was really a remarkable, remarkable life. Of course, we had absolutely nothing in common, practically nothing in common. He was 11 years younger than I was, and I thought that was kind of absurd that we should have this relationship with that much of an age difference. I think he was like 22 and I'm 33 or something like that. And so of course it was never going to go anywhere, but it was just something fun to do, because that was pretty acceptable to be doing just about anything sexually in the '70s. So -- and romantically and so forth, and so -- and he played music, and I loved music, and he started -- and of course we had an open relationship. And -- (phone ringing) I'm sorry about that.
COLLINGS
Now, what years were --
ARKIN
This is '72, I think, already '72. And -- I'm so distracted by that.
COLLINGS
By the phone? Do you want to go get it?
ARKIN
Let me see if I can turn it down, so that we won't --
COLLINGS
All right, we're back on again. Yeah, 1972, around thereabouts, you were saying.
ARKIN
Yeah, 1972. And so, as I was saying, we didn't have very much in common, other than having fun playing tennis and his making music, and having both of us be open to having open relationships. And so it went on for a few years, and of course, he was not very communicative, particularly about his emotions and what he was feeling. And I was of course kind of over-communicative. (laughter) And then also, I always saw myself as helping someone else to grow and develop and do personal growth and personal development, and oftentimes I knew what was best for them. So it was kind of a rocky relationship. He was Chinese, and born and raised in Hong Kong, went to school in London, and so that was also, in addition to the generational difference, there was the cultural differences. And he was of course much more serious about the relationship that I was. Fortunately, that -- I was able to recognize that, and not have expectations, or try not to raise his expectations that it could be anything --
COLLINGS
And you'd never met each other's families, I presume.
ARKIN
Yes, during that period, we did; we traveled to San Francisco. I had a fabulous relationship with his mother and his brother; we -- one year I remember we participated in making a float for Chinese New Year, his brother was a graphic artist.
COLLINGS
Oh, how fun.
ARKIN
We actually won -- our stuff won the award that year, as I recall, and we traveled back to Michigan and stayed with my family. It was very open; it was still just fun, though, I don't think that I was ever -- I think that the key to that relationship truly was that we didn't make a commitment to one another, and we -- every day was fresh, and we were engaged in that relationship as if every day might be our last day together, and so it made it pretty much very fresh and very, very special. And so it was with him, I believe, that I learned how to really love being what I referred to as a well-watered vegetable. We were so good at doing nothing together, and we so enjoyed doing nothing together. And so this business about getting my head straight by going on the trip on the cargo freighter was really extended into this kind of nothing, no planning, this kind of encounter each day as it comes, and it was very special to have someone as beautiful a soul as he was.Well, at any rate, by 1975 -- no -- '75, I guess it was, '75 or '76 or so -- no, '75, I'm sure it was '75. It was time for him to go on a trip to Hong Kong to visit his father and his grandparents, who were quite old. And so he did, and it was also a very, very bumpy time in our relationship, and I loved him very dearly, but I was so happy to have him go away. And if he didn't go away to Hong Kong, I'm sure that I would have had him go away somewhere else. At any rate, he went, and of course, we continued our relationship via tapes and letters, and he soon thereafter met a wonderful woman who worked for Capitol Records, because he was, at that time, in that year or two before he left, he had been writing songs, just wonderful, wonderful songs, I thought, of course I was biased. And so I had kind of thought, "Oh, this is really a great talent," and promoter that I am, "I'm going to actually be able to promote his talent." And so he met this wonderful woman who worked for a record company there in Hong Kong, and soon, he became a small star, and rapidly a rising star, and ultimately a very, very big star, not only in the Hong Kong area, but throughout China. Even today, he -- well, how old is today? I'm 70, so he's 59. But I remember, my sister and I went to one of his concerts in Hong Kong in 1985.
COLLINGS
Oh, wonderful.
ARKIN
And at Hong Kong Stadium, there were two posters, and Hong Kong Stadium seats 13,000 people. And there were the posters of upcoming events, and one poster was Frank Sinatra, who was performing for one night, and next to him was my old boyfriend, who was performing for 13 nights, sold out every concert. And when he traveled in China, people ride their bikes for 40 or 50 miles to see him. So he's quite an amazing star, and of course I felt very proud, and felt that yes, that time of doing nothing, and personal development, even if there was delayed relation, I kind of always liked to feel that I had something to do with that. Who knows? Oftentimes those things are truly just being in the right place at the right time with the right energy. And that was who he was and where he was, and I was always extremely happy for him. But before I knew that this relationship with Virginia was very serious, I really had decided that when he comes home, I'm going to be there to promote his music. And so in the meantime, in my do-nothing time, I decided I'm going into the music business. So here I am, like in my mid-30s, and what am I going to do? Go be a receptionist in a music company? No, I don't want to do that; I need to be --
COLLINGS
The president of the company. (laughter)
ARKIN
I need to have substantial connections in the music business in order to do what he is going to have to have me do when he comes back to Los Angeles. And so -- I remember taking one of his songs, and deciding one of his songs was just fabulous. Oh, I know; I envisioned this song as the theme song for the movie All the President's Men. The lyric was so appropriate for it. And the tune, too; it was a really, really terrific song, I felt. And so I decided, "Oh, I need to get to the director of this movie, or the producer, so that this song can be in this movie," which I knew was being made. So I started asking around, who knew who; I figured that oh, if you just ask around enough, you'll find someone who knows him. And I did actually get a meeting with one of the major people in at that -- I don't remember -- wait, what is it in Burbank, the Burbank studios? I know it was in Burbank. So at any rate, it was my first meeting with a big real honcho (inaudible).
COLLINGS
That's pretty impressive.
ARKIN
But of course, it was a hard lesson. What I learned was, oh, they don't take new songwriters; they've got all these people that why would -- it was such an important lesson, because it was -- for me, it was a lesson of, in this city, talent is a given. Everyone is talented; don't expect that you're going to get any special treatment just because someone is talented or gifted. But it is this business of being in the right place at the right time with the right energy, and no matter what, persevering, and that's what ultimately makes it in that business, and in any of the other super-competitive businesses.So at any rate, this was a time that I decided still to learn the music business. So I went around, and what I decided to is to go around and set up meetings with various companies, music companies, and I was going to offer myself as an apprentice to someone who could use all my extraordinary skills. And I was a very good secretary. And then I would learn the business; I would be that person's apprentice, in exchange for, three days a week or so, I would give them anything they needed me to do. And meantime, I had gotten my own -- because my money was running out fast, so I needed to work, and so I went and I created my livelihood opportunity with the LA County Probation Department by being a kind of on-call staff person, and in their juvenile facilities, so I could go and work two or three days a week and then I could apprentice the rest of the week, so it worked out just fine, because I didn't need very much to live on; we had already established that.So I did that, and I ultimately apprenticed myself to an extraordinary woman whose name is Helen King. And she was already at that time my age that I am today; she was 69 when I started with her. And she had a small secretarial business in Hollywood, and she was a secretary to the California Copyright Association, and she did all kinds of wonderful things for young songwriters. And she was really quite a radical socialist, and had come up in the '30s, and knew all of the old activists in this city. Just -- she was deeply committed to issues of social justice. I think the environmental movement was not so terribly strong then, but I'm sure she would have been, had she been living today. She said, you know, when I came in and offered her my services, it was like, well, why wouldn't she take them? I had interviewed several people, but it was Helen that I was attracted to, and I think it was -- surely it was because of her commitment to the idea of young songwriters. She ran -- her secretarial business ran -- was also based on protecting songwriters' songs before they were actually copyrighted.And so this was a very special service, and she was already doing some workshops for songwriters, and had a few people that she was working with them or helping her. But I came in for three days a week, and was available to her for anything, and so she sat me down inside her office in downtown Hollywood, on Cahuenga [Blvd] and Hollywood Boulevard, and one of those wonderful old buildings. And she sat me down in her office with a typewriter and a little typewriter stand, and she said, "Now, you're welcome to listen to anything I'm doing on my phone or in my meetings, and I'll just give you things to type for me." And so that's what I did. So I'd be sitting there typing away -- address labels, that was one, we used to have address labels for our newsletters and things.And one day, I'm sitting there overhearing a conversation that sounded very interesting, and once she got off the phone, she said, "How would you like to meet with Peter Yarrow and I tomorrow night, to talk about doing a music concert?" And I just -- my jaw just dropped. Peter Yarrow? Like one of my really -- from Peter, Paul and Mary, you know. And just one of my most favorite groups in the whole world, so of course I was very excited about doing that. And so we did have a series of meetings, and we essentially created the Festival of New Music for that group. Oh, one thing that precedes this -- no, I guess it's OK; I'll go back to it. So working with Peter and a group of volunteers with Helen, I've learned how to do music concerts -- actually, our concerts were to be able to promote music that was written from the heart, rather than for the charts. And we screened -- we set up a screening device, and it essentially was a contest, and we received songs from all over the country, and had two or three different levels of screening, and then presented these concerts. I believed that essentially, that that was the work that preceded the American Song Festival, and essentially, when we stopped doing it, the American Song Festival took over this concept. But we had several concerts in big auditoriums downtown; I think we did the Embassy Auditorium downtown, and we did at the -- oh, what's the one on Wilshire?
COLLINGS
Wiltern?
ARKIN
Not the Wiltern, but the one just west of that. The -- oh, I'm going blank on it. Anyway, big local theatre. And it was just such an extraordinary experience for me, to be able to learn that. The other thing -- so that was a very, very important aspect of my training; I learned how to do bookkeeping and how to set up, how to work with volunteers, how to produce a concert, how to produce a monthly seminar, we used to monthly seminars for the California Copyright Association. And at these seminars, the songwriters, all of the songwriters would come, the songwriters whose music I grew up with in the '40s and '50s, and I couldn't really believe I was meeting all these people, it was so extraordinary. And then also on the forums we did, the songwriters who were writing the music today. And it was always just such a treat for me too. And obviously, I was getting very well positioned for my returning lover. (laughterBut also, the work that we did in the social justice community was phenomenal; Helen was always there when people were calling on her with issues of hunger and injustices of all kinds. And then we would put the resources of her little secretarial service behind that. And meantime, her dream was to essentially create a non-profit organization, but she had never quite made it happen. And so there I was at that time, and decided, yes, this is something you need to make happen, and so I really did all the research and the follow-through to essentially make her dream come true of having a non-profit songwriters' resources and services organizations.So it was called SRS, and it went on for at least 20 years after I left the organization in 1980, which I'll speak about in a moment, and it was later renamed the National Academy of Songwriters, and it really grew to -- initially, under my tutelage, but continuing to do so, I think to a fairly major national membership organization as a songwriter service organization. But meantime, this was 1978 now, and Helen had become quite ill, my mentor who I was learning so much from; she had become quite ill. And she died shortly thereafter, in October.Also, I should mention that since songwriter boyfriend was away, I had taken on another very important person in my life, a young man whose name was Carl . He was in law school at that time and he owned a small bookstore in the area that I used to kind of stop by on my motorcycle on the way to playing tennis, and so we had struck up quite a wonderful relationship and were seeing each other quite a bit, and very intimate and wonderful relationship. And so a certain -- and it was bumpy from time to time; he had taken the Bar, and he was waiting for results from the Bar, and so meantime, when -- this was when Helen had taken sick, maybe six to eight months prior -- he knew all the people in the office, and he was very well-loved; he was really a wonderful, wonderful person.So we brought him in to work in the organization that summer in that Songwriters' Resources and Services, and he got along well with everyone. And meantime, I was not getting along well with everyone there, because I really wanted us, from the very beginning I had this vision of all of us working laterally, instead of hierarchically, and no one else really wanted to do that. And I had a vision of how we could do this, and I kept trying to share that vision with everyone, and no one believed in it, and it was so frustrating for me. And because of what I carried with me from Spain --
COLLINGS
Well, how did Helen feel about it?
ARKIN
Well, Helen was fine, and she was already kind of very sick and out of picture, but Helen of course loved it; she was a major person interested in issues of justice, so of course, why wouldn't she, what's not to love? And these people had essentially become -- I think had been hired after -- I don't know, maybe this is -- I'm getting a little bit mixed up in my timeline there, but Helen died, and Carl was working there now kind of coordinating and everything in the organization, and I was kind of not working there now because now Carl was there, and I didn't really need to be there. And but then -- oh, no, but then what happened is, three months after Helen died, Carl died.
COLLINGS
Oh, my goodness.
ARKIN
And so this was quite shocking for me, and --
COLLINGS
What did -- how did he die?
ARKIN
And Carl was 37 at the time; I was already in my early 40s -- 41 or 42, and he had been born with a heart condition, and he used to say things like, "Someday my doctor says I should have a heart operation, but nothing to worry about now." And we had been out the night before to a movie and to dinner, and he wanted me to come stay over at his place, he lived a few miles from where I lived, and we would kind of go back and forth to one another's places. And I said, "Oh, you know, I feel like I'm coming down with a cold or something, so not tonight." So I went home to bed, and the next day, work called, the office called me and said, "Do you know where Carl is?" And I said -- because he was extremely reliable, he would never not show up to work without calling. So I said, "No, we were out last night and everything was fine, so I'm sure -- maybe he just overslept," and so forth. So an hour later, they called again, and then I was really starting to get worried, this is very strange. So I went over to his place, and I opened the door, because I had a key there, and I heard the television going on upstairs in the bedroom, and so I went up, and I saw that on his bed, there was kind of a hump of blankets, and I thought, "Oh, he's just playing," and it was just a hump of blankets. And then I walked to the bathroom, and he was spread out on the floor in the bathroom, and I couldn't -- I knew he was dead immediately. And so it was just a horrible, horrible thing to discover that.
COLLINGS
Absolutely, my goodness.
ARKIN
And so then I had two deaths to grieve about. And I wasn't really doing anything at that point, and I think I had kind of dropped out of that organization and was trying to figure out what I was going to do now, and meantime, long before that, my old boyfriend had become already quite famous in Hong Kong and was (inaudible), and had really this wonderful relationship with Virginia, so that wasn't really going to happen for me anymore, even though we remained friends. And so I went back to the songwriter organization and promptly, the week after Carl's death, and said, "I am here to provide continuity to this organization," because everyone else was relatively new, the full-time staff. And actually, we had a CETA program at that time; we had actually essentially replaced me with three staff under that government-funded program for the arts. And so they were acceptable to my coming back and providing this continuity to this organization, which I then did for another two years or so. And then, interestingly enough, we had a retreat, we had a board retreat -- this was in 1980, I believe -- and I had already started the CRSP organization. CRSP stands for Cooperative Resources and Services Project, which was the original name of this organization, based on Songwriters' Resources and Services, based on everything I learned there, that's what we would ultimately do for co-ops, but I'll get to that in a minute. So let me see, I forgot where I was.
COLLINGS
Well, you had gone back to provide continuity for the organization. ARKIN: So we had this retreat of the board, and I remember, it was Flo Green, who now is the executive director of the California Association of Non-Profits, a very wonderful statewide organization that provides services to non-profits, and very well-known to the non-profits. At that time she was essentially doing more training with various non-profits, and so she was our retreat trainer. And she was -- I just found her so remarkable, and I remember part of the board retreat question that was being asked to board members was, what is your interpretation of the vision of this organization, and you would write that -- for the purpose of this organization, and you would write that in one side of a three-by-five card, and on the other side, you would write, "Why am I here?"And so this was an exercise for me, and I realized from that retreat that I didn't need to be there anymore, and that that vision was -- or that purpose was just fine without me, and so I was able to separate easily from the board at that point, and from the organization. So then, what I had learned from Helen is that she was very, very interested in cooperatives, and she wanted to create a cooperative publishing company. And what one of my assignments was to learn all I could about cooperatives, and how would we create a cooperative publishing company.In the process of learning about that, of course I learned about cooperatives, and, wow! How come I never knew about this before? It combined the best qualities of the for-profit world and the non-profit world, and the public sector; it was like just a remarkable, exciting thing for me, and I decided at this time -- this was maybe 1979 -- even though I said earlier I didn't know what I was going to do, I knew I wanted to devote a segment of my life to cooperatives, but I didn't know exactly what form that would take. And so when the separation from SRS was final, essentially what I did was I started going to co-op conferences all over the country, and learning -- meeting all the people that I could in the movement, and recognizing, and of course first trying to find out all that I could about co-ops in the Los Angeles area, and I realized there was nothing going on, it was just -- well, there were a few things going on, but nothing I could really put my fingers on, and that I realized that by that time, I knew probably as much as anyone in this city about cooperatives.Of course, I was fooling myself; there were a few people that were very knowledgeable about cooperatives in the city, and I did find out who they were, and they became my co-op mentors, really. People like David Thompson and Jerry Voorhis, a former US Congressman, became my most important mentor. And he lived out in Claremont, and had been the founder -- one of the main people in the Cooperative League of the USA, which is now the National Cooperative Business Association, and had been involved in international co-op development. He was also the first Congressman that was defeated by Richard Nixon, and he wrote books about it. He was also a Congressman that was voted the most honest, most -- highest integrity Congressman several years running, I believe.But of course, [Richard M.] Nixon had extraordinary lie machines set up about Jerry Voorhis being a Communist and being a Socialist and all kinds of terrible, terrible things, and he was just a remarkable human being whose life touched so many different people in so many different organizations worldwide. And a beautiful, beautiful person. And so he became my co-op mentor also, after Helen [King] died, and after I decided to create this organization, and he eventually donated his library to us, and so many of the books you see in this resource center are from Jerry Voorhis. And -- oh, my.
COLLINGS
Let me just ask you a very general question. Was it an unusual thing to go to these record executives and offer to be an apprentice? Was that something that seemed surprising to them, or was that a common practice?
ARKIN
Well, I think it was; I don't think that people really did that sort of thing, I don't even hear about people doing that sort of thing today, although I often recommend it to people who really want to learn something in-depth and they want to learn it quickly, I tell them, go get your livelihood in order, and apprentice yourself to someone, assuming they had the wherewithal to benefit from such an apprenticeship, and so --
COLLINGS
So where did you get that idea, do you think?
ARKIN
Well, you know, things just come out of the -- who knows? You channel them, or whatever; the mother of necessity is -- need is the mother of --
COLLINGS
-- invention.
ARKIN
-- invention. And you learn to -- it's amazing, because as you do more and more, and as your time gets less and less, the more creative you become, and -- or if you -- and this is one of the reasons that I think frequently, people that complain about money being a problem all the time; I kind of perceive that among a lot of people as simple poverty-consciousness, not all, of course, sometimes it's really an important thing. But people do not perceive themselves as the creative human beings that we all are, and sometimes, if you have too much money too quickly -- if you have vision, and you have too much money too quickly, sometimes you lose your creativity, you really do. And this is just a remarkable experience that I wouldn't have traded for anything. I don't think that anyone was particularly surprised; I don't remember actually being offered an apprenticeship by anyone --
COLLINGS
Other than Helen.
ARKIN
And it's fuzzy in my mind, but even though she was a for-profit sole proprietorship secretarial service at the time that I applied to her, she was functioning as a non-profit, doing public interest work. I don't think any of the others were, and so it was really my choice rather than anyone else's choice, that I saw the issue of social responsibility as important as learning the business, and the fact that she had it meant a lot to me. And so -- but I still think it's -- someone had the right stuff on their resume, and has the persuasiveness to have conversations with executives that they would like to do that with; I think there's got to be lots of opportunities -- obviously in this day and age, you have to prove that you're trustworthy of that position, but I think that it's possible.
COLLINGS
Well, you and Helen sound like a match made in heaven.
ARKIN
Yeah, she was just a --
COLLINGS
That was wonderful turning point.
ARKIN
-- wonderful woman, yeah. And then I also met some very close -- it was through Helen that I met people like David Arkin, who is the father of Alan and Adam, and the grandfather of Adam, and he was a remarkable songwriter, a wonderful songwriter and social activist, and his wife, Bea, they were both very strong social activists, very active in the Unitarian Church, and just so many wonderful people that -- oh, another woman that I had met through Helen was Harriet Smith; she was a peer of Helen's, and she had a very large home in Hancock Park, their daughters had been best friends.And so Harriet came on my board of directors, the Cooperative Resources and Services project, I invited her on mine, and she had this very large home in Hancock Park, so many of our early events were held in her home, which was a wonderful place, and she was such a gracious and loving hostess; she had also -- she was very active with KCET and the Experiment in Living, the international student exchange, and really a remarkable woman in her own right; her husband had been a banker, and had died many years before. And she was also very committed to issues of social justice and art and so forth. So these were, you know, a way of my really becoming comfortable in levels of society that through my early years and my hippie years, it was -- these were oftentimes people that were --
COLLINGS
Sold out?
ARKIN
Very kind of strange people to me. And so it was recognition that I had something to offer in my friendship with those people as well as in their friendships with me, and it was a way of really developing a tremendous sense of confidence. And what I learned also again and again from working with Helen was, I didn't know how to do certain things, but if you make a commitment out in time, then somehow you're going to figure out how to back up and do all the things that you need to do to make that commitment, whether it was a seminar or a conference or a workshop, a concert, that you were going to figure out how to -- and also to develop the confidence to -- even of writing funding proposals, oh, how do you do that? I don't know; I never went to a grant-writing workshop and I never did much of that, but I could see that, oh, just get a copy of someone else's that was successful and then adapt it to your need. So this kind of adaptive ability was ingrained in me.And I think as a child, and I think I mentioned this earlier, I remember feeling and being instilled by my parents, "You can do anything you want to, if you want to do it badly enough." And out of that, I can even remember -- I'm not sure I mentioned this -- oh, I can even remember looking at freeway bridges, because the curve of bridges and their circles, and then at that time, even later in the '60s and '70s when the freeways started becoming more and more complex, with four different levels, the downtown -- the four-level bridge downtown, I can remember thinking -- this is so interesting that I would be thinking this, because you'll hear what I have to say about cars later on, "These bridges are so exquisite," and the curves, and I can remember, "I can do that." I can remember feeling anything that any human being can do, I can do too. And what a gift that was. And it is that more so than any other gift that my parents gave me, that makes me a person of privilege. Had they been millionaires, I would not have been as much a person of privilege as the gift of knowing that I could do anything that I put my mind to. And so that is what I think privilege is made up of. Is this a good place to --?
COLLINGS
OK. All right, OK.
ARKIN
(laughter) I don't know if --
COLLINGS
Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. Let's see, let's --

END OF Arkin.Lois.3A.03.27.2007.mp3

1.4. Session 3b ( March 27, 2007)

UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 3B, 3-27-2007 Arkin.Lois.3B.03.27.2007.mp3
COLLINGS
OK, we're back on.
ARKIN
There's one other very, very important mentor in my life. Well, probably many more after this, but this person -- I talked about Helen and Jerry and my parents, but this person -- his name is Warren Christensen. And Warren -- I met Warren in 1971, when I was still involved with my young songwriter lover, and we had gone -- he had started something at his house called the Carriage House, which was adjacent to USC, and he had been a theatre arts major at USC, and he had started something called the Garden Theatre Festival. And it started in his backyard, at his house. And it was such a wonderful event, and in his -- or maybe it was his front yard, I don't know.But anyway, there was enough space that there could be several stages, several different performing stages, and so you might have a singer/songwriter over here, and you might have a poet over there and a comedian over, and they were all doing their work, there was just all this activity. And he had patterned it after some wonderful festival in Europe, someplace -- I'm not sure which one it was.But I remember visiting in his -- when I went there and saw what was happening, I remember it being so inspiration to me. And then when I went in his office and saw the entire three-week program -- or, I don't know, maybe it was only ten days at that time, or maybe it was three weekends, or I'm not sure exactly what, but I saw the whole program laid out in little pieces of paper on his floor, because he didn't have a desk so big, and it was like, I just -- oh, my gosh, the organizational genius of this person, and the program of course reflected this beautiful artistic program that was handed out to people as they came to this free front yard or backyard festival. It was so impressive to me, and I immediately developed a wild crush on Warren Christensen -- I was not alone. (laughter) And so -- because of his organizational genius. And so I wanted to really work with Warren, of course.So I eventually after -- I think he staged this festival every year; for a few years it was at his carriage house near USC, and then eventually, he made arrangements with the city to have it at Barnsdall Park. And that was, oh, just so wonderful. I'm not sure what year it started going to Barnsdall, maybe '73, '74, '75. Maybe it was '75, '76, '77. But I volunteered to help him with the Festival, and there was some connection with the Songwriters' organization there too, and it might have actually been that I worked more close with him after I was working with the Songwriters' organization on providing talent and so forth, because at Barnsdall, there were also many, many stages going all the time. It was fabulous, and it was also a time when the CETA program had come in a big way to Los Angeles. CETA, standing for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Program. And Warren was the first person to use that program for the arts in Los Angeles. And it was through Warren's work with the arts that the arts really, really began to expand and spread all over Los Angeles. Theatre and concerts and filmmaking, in terms of the grassroots, and comedy -- I think he was the -- Warren was the first person to feature Father Guido Sarducci -- do you remember him as the Catholic comedian?
COLLINGS
No.
ARKIN
He was a comedian that made fun of the Catholic church in a very provocative way. So remember that, because I'll come back to it a minute. So the Festival became very, very successful, and it started happening every single year for three weeks straight, every weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and it was one of those places where you go and feel really comfortable talking to strangers. And so it was a place where community happened, and of course there were so many of us volunteers working with Warren and learning so much from him. And many of whom went on to become Hollywood directors and producers and famous performers and so forth, and I can't even mention all the names that got their start at the Garden Theatre Festival with Warren.But there were people that were offended by some of the provocative art that was being shown, for example, Father Sarducci of the Catholic Church. And so there were people that were out to get him really, really badly, and Warren was working very closely with many city agencies and the mayor's office directly, but he was busted, because people were out to get him so badly. And he would never, ever do anything -- I knew him very well by that time, and I knew that his heart was so passionate for this work, but when you're producing something on that scale, very often you use -- you have to be a bit creative about your bookkeeping. So when it came time for audits, which the enemies --
COLLINGS
Demanded, yeah.
ARKIN
-- figured out how to do, there were little things that he could be caught on, with the creative accounting use of the federal monies. I don't know any of the details of that; I just know whatever Warren did, he did nothing that was not in the public interest. And because that was who he was.
COLLINGS
Now, was it just the Father Sarducci stuff, or were there other things?
ARKIN
Oh, I'm sure -- yeah, I'm sure there were probably other offensive things to the people who were out to get Warren. But -- so he essentially -- I headed up his support committee at one time, and we raised quite a bit of money for his legal defense, and I think that he didn't actually go to jail -- maybe he did, but for very briefly, and then was on probation for awhile. But a remarkable, remarkable human being that was -- that made enormous contributions to this city, in terms of the arts, and is still -- I'm not sure what Warren is doing now. Oh, he is an arts consultant; he works with young people, he lives in Mount Washington with his wife, who is an architect, and very, very environmentally-oriented.And there are still people, I think, from time to time, that get together from the Garden Theatre Festival days, but many of us became such tight friends, and had -- well, also, I would just say this, that the Garden Theatre Festival was also -- grew from his yard in USC to Barnsdall Park, and then when it stopped there, it was picked up by the downtown festival, the annual huge thing they have that's now like ten blocks in downtown every year. What do they call it? I forgot what it is. But it was essentially the growth of the Garden Theatre Festival into this larger Los Angeles festival. And so -- but he was the first, I think, perhaps in the US, I'm not positive, to essentially have urban festivals with many different stages, many different kinds of things happening. And I know that he influenced many, many other people throughout the spectrum. And he was definitely one of my most important mentors.
COLLINGS
In the sense of his -- the way that he brought his vision and his organizational skills together to realize this complex event.
ARKIN
Yes. Learning how to produce a festival, taking it one step further than the concerts that I had produced at the Songwriters' organization, and being able to produce things that had many, many more parts to it. So I could go on to produce and/or help other people produce all manner of things, because I have the confidence in being able to do that, and seeing the larger picture, and also seeing all the different kinds of committees that you have to have, and how they can work together.
COLLINGS
But your goal at this time was not to go forward in like arts administration; it was always --
ARKIN
No, by that time, I -- well, I would say by the late, late '70s, I was already committed to doing something in the cooperative world; I didn't know exactly what it was going to be. But after that retreat, I knew that I was free to pursue that.
COLLINGS
But it wasn't particularly an environmental focus at that time.
ARKIN
No. It wasn't. I think that there were a lot of things in me that were environmental, but not that consciousness that I later developed.
COLLINGS
At that time which we're talking about, like 1980.
ARKIN
Yes. Even 1980, which was the year that this organization was founded, but it was founded as the Cooperative Resource Center. And then -- we can talk a little bit about how the transition was to becoming an environmental organization.
COLLINGS
And do you have a mission, a founding mission statement for the organization, from 1980?
ARKIN
Well, I suppose I could dig one up. (laughter) It's kind of changed. But I think at that time, it was to essentially be an education and training center for cooperatives of all kinds. And that did transform into a much narrower mission statement, eventually, to be an education, training, and development center for small ecological cooperative communities.
COLLINGS
OK. So we'll have to talk about how it got from mission statement A to mission statement B.
ARKIN
Yes. That would be interesting. (laughter)
COLLINGS
Yeah. Yeah. OK, great.

END OF Arkin.Lois.3B.03.27.2007.mp3

1.5. Session 4 ( May 4, 2007)

UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 4, 5-04-2007 Arkin.Lois.4.05.04.2007.mp3
COLLINGS
Ah, I cannot even believe it. OK, Jane Collings interviewing Lois Arkin, May 4, 2007, in her office/home. OK, and --
ARKIN
So we are still in 19- -- oh, no, we're actually in the late '80s, after Rodney King, 19- --
COLLINGS
Well, you're just wrapping up with the Songwriter's Resources, and you want to found -- you've decided that cooperatives are where your interests lie.
ARKIN
Yeah. Oh, so we hadn't been talking more beyond that point.
COLLINGS
No, no.
ARKIN
Got it. OK. So here we are, and my friend and lover who went off the Hong Kong and became famous and lived, married, and had children. We have remained friends over the years and still stay in touch. But it was letting go of that relationship. And I think that I had spoken about my mentor at the Songwriter's organization dying.
COLLINGS
Yes. Helen. Helen King, I believe.
ARKIN
And then shortly later, the man that I was involved with that was working there also died, we did talk about that.
COLLINGS
Yes, yeah.
ARKIN
OK. Great. And so that was -- and then that was -- and I remained on the board of that organization; did I then speak about a retreat that the organization had?
COLLINGS
Yes.
ARKIN
OK, good. So then we're through with that. So, and I had been very inspired by Helen King, who really was my very important mentor, and a few others. And I decided that I wanted to devote a part of my life to cooperatives. And I didn't know how or what, and I didn't know that much about cooperatives. All I knew and was inspired by is that this sounded like a form of business that really incorporated social criteria and business criteria, and I didn't know yet how important the environmental criteria was for me. So I decided to, when I left working with the Songwriter's [Resources and Services] organization, I decided to travel around the country attending all the conferences that had anything to do with cooperatives -- this was before Google. (laughter)So it's interesting, I don't even remember how I found them, but I did. There was the National Cooperative Business Association, and the North American Students of Cooperation -- I'm not sure that it was even called the National Cooperative Business Association, it still might have been called the Cooperative League of the USA, CLUSA. And I also had the honor of meeting the honorable Jerry Voorhis, who had been a Congressman for many years. He was the Congressman that Richard [M.] Nixon first defeated, and I might have mentioned (inaudible), but I did. And so I had started to visit Jerry also, because he had also been among the founders of the Cooperative League of the USA, and he had just a long and extraordinary history with cooperatives of all kinds and all over the world, and particularly housing co-ops. And my passion was for housing, and that -- and cooperative housing at that, which I was just really learning about -- and my passion had to do also with breaking the back of real estate speculation in Los Angeles. And I have friends where I used to live, a few miles from where we are now, and I used to tell them that all the time. Someday, I'm going to break the back of real estate. (laughter)
COLLINGS
How's it going? (laughter)
ARKIN
It's very funny, because I'm still friends with a few of those folks that I lived with on that block, and they're saying -- they think I'm nuts. Well, anyway, we won't go there. So I traveled around meeting people in the co-op movement, as well as spending time with Jerry. And Jerry was not well, and ultimately, the summer before he died, a few years later, he donated much of his library to us. And it was just such an honor to receive those wonderful books on cooperatives, which we still have. And meeting people all over the country that were leaders in the cooperative movement, and I think there was California Cooperative Association, and there was National Food Co-op Association and so forth. And I started getting all of these publications and meeting these people, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do with cooperatives; I just knew I wanted to do something.And then of course, after traveling around and meeting people, and especially doing a pretty extensive outreach -- what I thought, at that time, was a pretty extensive outreach in Los Angeles, and finding that there was really no one that had any expertise of the kind that I was looking for and wanted to somehow provide to others but didn't quite know how, so I just decided to start the Cooperative Resources and Services, of course with the influence of Songwriter's Resources and Services, and all the things that we did for songwriters in the organization, why can't we do for people that want to have cooperatives, live in cooperatives, make food co-ops, child care co-ops, so I started kind of going around to various workshops here in Los Angeles, and spouting off at the mouth about cooperative housing mostly at that time. One Gary Squier, who at that time, in the late '70s, early '80s, was -- well, late '70s, because by the '80s, I had already started -- was attending a lot of these workshops and conferences locally around housing issues, and he had just come out of graduate school, UCLA graduate school of Architecture and Urban Planning, and was working at the Los Angeles Community Design Center. And we kept bumping into each other, and he says, "Lois, why don't you come and do your cooperative thing with the Design Center, and we can get you a VISTA grant."And so that's what happened; I went to the Design Center, which at that time was already maybe a ten-year-old organization, and started by Jim Bonner, an architect, and activist-architect in this city, who was at that time the executive director. And so they umbrella'd me in, and I was able to begin things. So the things that we kind of started out with were that we were a resource center for cooperatives of all kinds, and we started by having public forums, and we had Jerry Voorhis come and give us the speech and promoted it, and there were a few other little things.But then the big thing that I decided would really launch this organization was to have a big co-ops fair. And so we planned this co-ops fair, and I put together a committee of about six people that were working in various aspects, either volunteering or working in various aspects of cooperatives here in Los Angeles; we put this kind of fair planning committee together. And there was at that time -- (inaudible) my memory -- there was this wonderful, wonderful person who was visiting from England, who was a very strong activist in the United Kingdom. And he was visiting in LA just at the time that we were starting to plan the fair, and he said, "Oh, I'll help you plan the fair," and so I invited him to come and share space in my live/work home, and to have a place to stay. And he really helped lead the development of the fair planning committee, so it was very exciting, a very exciting committee, and very dedicated and committed, And that -- I believe it was the following April, 1981, that we did have the fair, and it was in Exposition, it was -- not Exposition Park, but it was at the Museum of Science and Industry, on the west side of the museum building, which was a very big open space between the museum and the Coliseum at that time; I'm sure it's built up now.
COLLINGS
Yeah, it's the Science Center now.
ARKIN
Yeah, and it was just this wonderful, wonderful space. And Kelly Lang [Channel 4], I don't know if you remember her, she used to have this Sunday show on the old NBC channel four --
COLLINGS
Oh, right. Yes.
ARKIN
And so she broadcast from the co-op fair that day, and Beverly Beyette from the LA [Los Angeles] Times came and did a feature story on the fair for the family section, I think it was at that time of the LA [Los Angeles] Times. And we had about 40 different co-ops with booths that somehow I found (inaudible), and they were little tiny -- little small buying clubs; they were tiny little worker co-ops; they were the food co-ops; we had of course Co-Opportunity at that time; we had the Venice Food Co-op, which is -- only just a few years ago finally went down. But it wasn't limited to that; we had Sunkist Oranges, which is a co-op, it's a producer co-op. And we had a stage that went all day, and Chic Streetman and Mississippi, two fabulous performers that were people I'd met through the Songwriter's organization, hosted the performances all day long, so there was a stage going. And all these booths, children's activities and so forth, so it was one of those things that my friend from England said this was the orgasmic labor, and he wrote an article about it, having a project like that where everyone planned and planned and planned, and then was very excited, and then pulled it off and was very happy; it was kind of like sex. So it was very cute; I still have this article.And it was just a remarkable event. It's interesting, though, because I was so anxious that everyone there connect with one another, and have a good old time, and I'm such -- at that time, and I suppose I still am -- idealistic about egalitarianism and democracy. I was certainly a case of the shoemaker's son going barefoot, because there really wasn't anyone working the CRSP booth, and there wasn't anyplace, anyone anywhere, that was -- oh, you know, this is the organization behind this kind of thing. So it was just kind of this --
COLLINGS
It just sort of happened by itself.
ARKIN
Yeah, it was just kind of like it happened by itself. And I think that I did a good deal of that for the whole history of our organization, I would say, for the first 20 years or so. So I think it's only been in the past few years that I felt strongly that we should really -- (phone ringing) oh, I'm sorry.
COLLINGS
That's OK.
ARKIN
-- we should really -- oh, it's already unplugged. It'll just ring, but I won't answer it. But I felt strongly that we should establish credit for the organization, because it really does help leverage other kinds of resources when you do have a track record, and when people know about that track record. And so it's really not me personally; it's about what a good public interest purpose is that you manifest by doing that. And so that was a long lesson, essentially, for me to learn. Initially, this organization, we had a business plan for how we were going to develop as an organization with an organizational chart and financial projections, and how the staff was going to grow, and what the sources of funding were going to be and so forth.But it was the early 1980s, and the Reagan Administration had just come into being. And the non-profit world was, for the most part, on [David] Stockman's hit list. So lots of programs were dismantled; remember, that was the era when so much of our social welfare system was dismantled, and when we started to see people on the street that were being released from institutions and had nowhere to go and so forth. And so my thinking was that I found it very hard to think about trying to do any conventional fundraising in that kind of atmosphere, in terms of what I saw the needs were. How could this little education and training center, which no one was particularly interested in anyway -- co-ops are not very sexy (laughter), I think I eventually realized, in the mainstream of society. And how could we compete, or how would we want to compete, with those kinds of needs for funding?And so essentially, we never developed any kind of a conventional fundraising campaign, and eventually, after a few years, as I got more and more into issues of sustainability and the environment and ecology, I realized that the fundraising program that we had initially planned for the organizational development scheme was completely unsustainable, and the fact that we had nothing -- I was at that time, and throughout pretty much the history of our -- 27-year history of this organization, have been a full-time volunteer, I have never -- I didn't receive a salary, when we had the VISTA grant, I think I got like $250 a month, and eventually, there were times when I got a little bit more, but I always called it a stipend, rather than a -- you know, I was not employed by the organization, because I was also a war tax resister. And my way of resisting the war tax was simply not to make enough money to file. And I felt that was the most legitimate and least threatening way to live, and I had learned how to live a fairly high quality life on a very low income already; I had done that in Spain, and through those years of my drop-out period. But my savings had definitely run out, and I needed to have some money to live on, so that was kind of how I resolved that issue. But going back to the business side --
COLLINGS
Do you remain a war tax resister today?
ARKIN
Kind of. (laughter) There was some other issues that have come up in the past few years where I found myself paying very small amount of taxes.
COLLINGS
But still, that's pretty good.
ARKIN
And I have actually -- you know, there have been conversations about this, and you pick and choose your battles at different times of your life.
COLLINGS
Yeah, of course, yeah.
ARKIN
But at any rate, the -- let me see.
COLLINGS
So you were starting this cooperative, and your idea at that time was to --
ARKIN
Of the organization, was to --
COLLINGS
-- was to be a clearinghouse of information.
ARKIN
Correct. That's right. And so, yeah, Cooperative Resources and Services was the name of the organization, until we realized, in filing our corporate papers, that we couldn't use the word "cooperative" in our name, because we weren't in fact organized as a cooperative; we were organized as a non-profit corporation. And so we essentially changed our name to CRSP, C-R-S-P, all caps, no periods, no spaces. (laughter) And that went through, and even with the little handwritten "P" on the articles of incorporation, because it was down there at the Secretary of State's office when all this happened. It was much easier in those days than it is today. And so as I think I started to say, we were a resource center for all kinds of cooperatives, and we were launched at the fair and we continued to do things like -- little dialogue, drop-in dialogue groups, having little house concerts in my live/work space across the street, which we'll -
COLLINGS
And that was just an apartment that you were renting at that time.
ARKIN
Yes. And it's directly across the street on Bimini and White House Place. It was interesting because how I got to move on this street, there was a woman that lived on White House Place at that time that worked for the National Endowment for the Arts, and I had met her when I was working at the Songwriters Association. And when my landlord in Lemon Grove -- my new landlord decided to evict me, because I was in a rent-controlled unit and she wanted to raise the rent, which I think I mentioned.
COLLINGS
No.
ARKIN
Or maybe -- so I had lived in that place on Lemon Grove for about 12 years, and the new landlord -- that was shortly after the 1978 rent control law came into effect here in Los Angeles, and so she wanted to evict me, and I was in this place, "I don't want to have any negative energy in my life," and so I didn't fight it, and I just went homeless for about six months. In those days -- well, it wasn't really homeless, because I just crashed at different friends' houses, and I house-sat and so forth, until I finally found this place on White House Place to -- at the suggestion of the woman who lived up on the end of the block and worked for the National Endowment for the Arts, and it was owned by the Los Angeles Unified School District, this old four-plex. And there were three four-plexes on White House Place, and they were planning to build a little school there, but I convinced the person in charge of real estate at that time to let me move in on a temporary basis, and that I would certainly know that it was going to be temporary, and I wouldn't be any problem. And I remember taking him out to lunch two or three times and making friends, and really convincing him that I would be a really wonderful tenant.So finally, I did get to move in, because the problem with relocating was, I was -- at that time, rents were escalating, and I was going to not be able to find -- and I wanted to have a place that I could actually have a live/work space. So I was going to have to settle for a space half as large as the one I was living in for twice as much money, and this was not acceptable to me on my budget, before I actually found the office that I was going to work in downtown with the Design Center. So I did finally move into White House Place, and after a few years at the Design Center, I did finally move my office home. And they needed the place to expand, and we weren't particularly going in the same direction by that time.And so I had all these meetings there, and so I had a real presence in the neighborhood, and it was only a few years into having this organization that I realized that what we needed to have is a neighborhood -- we needed to have a demonstration neighborhood that essentially manifested all the values we were now talking about, because we were talking about limited equity, housing co-ops; I was very enamored with the idea of mutual housing associations, as they have in Europe, in which they built up much of Northern Europe and Western Europe after World War II, via these mutual housing associations, where people would save on a large national scale, and so there'd be this kind of national bank for building housing, and people waited their turn to move into their housing, and it was cooperatively organized, and it was really a quite remarkable project.And so I wanted us to have a Mutual Housing Association, and started publishing fliers and documents and having forums on mutual housing. I think we had an attorney's forum on limited equity co-ops so we could teach local attorneys what that was and how it worked. We -- and then of course there were the food co-ops, and the shared houses; I thought, oh, there's so many shared houses in this city, but they're not networked, and so we wanted to network them, and so we had the Shared Housing Network. And then by 1985, of course, the co-housing movement was just getting started by these two young architects who had returned from research in Denmark, where the co-housing movement had originally started, and they were writing this book; it wasn't yet published, but even before the book was published, we started hosting them for talks in Los Angeles, because I thought we should have a co-housing movement.And it was, interestingly, during one of those talks, that a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, whom we had made friends with. I think it was the same one -- Beverly Beyette, who did the co-ops fair, did a front-page article in the family section on co-housing, this new idea for mainstreaming kind of intentional cooperative living. And that article was picked up by Associated Press, and it then spread all over the country. So actually, the cohousing movement actually started right here. So we did all these different kinds of things, and it had to do with every aspect of cooperatives. We published a newsletter called "Co-op News and Shared Housing Networker," something like that. We had all kinds of articles and ads.
COLLINGS
So you said that you felt that it was important to get the word out about what you were doing to the immediate neighborhood; is that right?
ARKIN
OK, but that was -- no, that came -- that actually came much later. So essentially, what happened in about '84 or '85, is we began to think about how are we -- what we need to do is have a demonstration neighborhood where someone could actually walk down the block and have this "ah-ha" experience, because of how everything was organized, in terms of sustainability, in terms of aesthetics, in terms of the way people were interacting with one another, and the eco technologies that were visible, and the connections that people felt and might not understand. Seeing how everything was connected. So that's when we decided to do a Los Angeles Eco-Village, and we began looking for property at that time, and we were able to find an 11-acre site about seven miles from here. That was an old landfill site owned by the Department of Water and Power -- did we talk about this already?
COLLINGS
No.
ARKIN
OK. And we were able to -- that 11-acre landfill was scheduled to go to public auction as surplus property, and we had by that time also had an architect that was working with us who was a volunteer architect, and he made us look very professional, with a 50-page feasibility study and three-dimensional models and sketches and everything. And so we began going downtown and knocking on doors, and letting the city know that we wanted to partner with you. And the city doesn't essentially know how to partner with anyone unless they're asking for money, so that was kind of interesting.But we did find a wonderful, compassionate, enthusiastic executive in City Hall in the person of Calvin Hamilton, who was the planning director at that time. And he loved what we were doing, and I think he lived vicariously through what we were doing, because his hands were somewhat politically tied to do anything, as most planning directors in LA have been over the years, hopefully not the current one. But so he started talking to all the other directors in City Hall, and setting up meetings for us to come give presentations. And it was really quite amazing, and we continued to advocate with lots of people downtown. And eventually, that public advocacy resulted in us actually winning, or being awarded, an American Planning Association award for advocacy planning.And it's funny, because I didn't even know what that was, but there I am, standing up getting this award about something I didn't know, it didn't feel like there was anything unusual about it to me; you want to let people know what we're doing and what's needed in the city. And so it resulted ultimately in having the idea of the eco-village written into the city's housing element, which is part of the city's general plan, and that gave us some real credibility that we really hadn't had before.But meantime, so we continued to hold meetings for this like 20-member planning committee that we had for the eco-village -- we didn't have the word "eco-village" then, but at any rate, then it was years later, it was 1992, and our city went up in flames. And our planning committee began to reconsider the question of, what should our priorities be, in inner city Los Angeles? Should we be building this sexy new solar ecological urban village with mutual housing, limited equity co-ops, ecological technologies, local exchange trading systems and so forth; people didn't know what we were talking about anyway, because we didn't have that word yet for eco-village. And -- or should we be thinking about retrofitting an existing neighborhood that was affected by the fires, and retrofitting where there was already all the infrastructure. And so that was a no-brainer for our committee, and we really enthusiastically started to make this the retrofitted --
COLLINGS
And were your committee members at that time already living in this neighborhood? No?
ARKIN
No one lived in this neighborhood. They were people that were constituents of our organization, and came over for meetings. There were a few volunteers even before we made that decision who were coming over and starting to garden in the front yard of the four-plex across the street. One of them was Esfandiar Abbassi who lives here today. And once we made that decision, in 1992, in December of 1992, to make the eco-village here, January 1, we hit the streets -- we being me, the only person who lived here --
COLLINGS
This was January 1, after the --
ARKIN
Yes, the uprisings (inaudible) --
COLLINGS
Uprisings.
ARKIN
And it took us an eight-month dialogue to come to that decision. And we hit the streets, walking up and down the streets in this neighborhood, which I had never really been committed to, because I was kind of always on my way someplace else. And so now that was my commitment, and I opened my door -- it was a very scary neighborhood; it had been fairly deeply affected by the uprisings, there were fires immediately back-to-back with the building that we're in right now.
COLLINGS
That shopping center behind us, did that --
ARKIN
(inaudible) Shopping Center --
COLLINGS
That burned, as I recall.
ARKIN
That's right. And there were fires in the middle of that strip mall; there were fires on the front porch of where I lived at that time. And within two blocks, there were like five fires, and so there was a lot of gang activity here; there was a lot of drug activity, prostitution. People were fighting one another; there was a lot of racism, people of one ethnic group didn't like their children playing with kids of another ethnic group. Kids were never allowed on the street by themselves. So it was not a healthy neighborhood.So we held our first meeting of the neighborhood shortly after, in the spring of '93, and invited neighbors. Not very many came, but those that came were asked: what are the strengths and weaknesses of our neighborhood? And we never got beyond the first one, which of course was crime, and people just wanted to talk about that. And what we knew was the fear of crime was symptomatic of the breakdown of community, and that the fear of crime was much more debilitating than crime itself. And what we wanted to do is work on community; that's what we all wanted for ourselves, for our organization, for the city. And so we just decided to work on community, and we did that in a variety of ways that were very organic, and not with very much thought, all that much thought. Volunteers would come in several times a week, and we'd walk up and down the street meeting neighbors, anyone that was on the block that looked familiar, introduce ourself --
COLLINGS
Was there any sort of language barrier that you came across in the course of these --
ARKIN
Many people spoke only Spanish, and many people spoke only Korean. And so, with the Spanish, sometimes we had people that did speak Spanish, and I think early on, I made friends with one of our neighbors that had lived on the block at that time about 25 years, I think, who was bilingual, and so we included her, and sometimes I would walk up and down the street with her. And so if someone answered the door when we were going door to door distributing newsletters and things like that. But also, you know, I speak enough Spanish to be friendly with people. And so it wasn't ever -- I didn't ever consider it a serious barrier. But we would walk up and down, we would meet people, we would learn as much as we could about them, and then we would do something that I call "positive gossip." We would meet other -- we would sponsor community events, and flier the whole neighborhood and invite people to come and share their food, and try to have some activities and entertainment.And then, when we would meet people, we would introduce them to one another very enthusiastically. "Oh, this is the person I was telling you about!" We wanted them to want to meet one another. And I also, one other thing I did was I opened my front door, decided that I would not be afraid, and I opened my front door during -- all day and all evening, sometimes I even went to bed and forgot to close it. And it was unlocked or open, so I invited anyone in the neighborhood anytime to come, stop by and talk, if you need any help or resources on anything, I was there, because I really was a resourceful person. And so the neighbors did start to drop in, and also, I was on the street every single day. And I eventually, within the next two to three years, knew just about every single person in the two-block area. Maybe not by name, but I knew which building they lived in, and I knew their faces, and they knew mine.
COLLINGS
Did their tend to be any internal cohesion to the neighborhood, like perhaps extended family members had told each other about vacant apartments, or perhaps people from the same village had ended up living on this street -- was there any of that?
ARKIN
So the big thing was, as is typical of Los Angeles, there was frequently community within a single building, but never building to building. And so -- and not necessarily in all the buildings. There are -- and that there certainly is a great deal of that in this neighborhood, as well as neighborhoods all over LA, particularly with various ethnic groups, although I don't know that it's limited. But I see that -- it could be quite a long conversation, but a lot of people hit themselves on the head, and particularly people from white, middle-class backgrounds whose organizations aren't particularly well-integrated ethnically or racially. And they beat up on themselves all the time, because, "Oh, here we are, one more annual meeting and we're still all white. We decided last year we were going to integrate." Now, this does not happen, I don't think, so much anymore as it used to, because I think there's been tremendous effort to integrate a lot of -- particularly environmental and environmental justice organizations, and all kinds of social justice organizations.But at that time, people were particularly still beating up on themselves, and my -- and also particularly within the intentional communities movement, which was our intent, to become an intentional community, composed of both our preexisting neighbors and new neighbors that would move here intentionally. And what -- and exactly the point that you're making, I think, is the point that I would try to make to a lot of people, is that oftentimes, low-income people of color are already an intentional community within their apartment buildings because of just that thing. There is -- whenever there's a vacancy, they would get a family member or a friend to move in, and then they would essentially have someone to watch their kids when they went to the market, or to trade off all kinds of things. I had also noticed, particularly when I was working with at-risk youth and their families in East Los Angeles and in South Los Angeles, so many, many years ago, before I started this organization. I also remember how many of the people I worked with treated money and things. They treated them, what's mine is yours, what's yours is mine; it was really, really amazing. And so there was so much sharing in ways that you don't particularly find among people from white middle-class backgrounds. And so, but it is people from white middle-class backgrounds more, I think -- in some respects, and this could be a very long sociological conversation, but systematically, the breakdown of community got started in the '20s with the advertising industry, and there was actually, I think, a conspiracy to break down community, because that enabled the corporate sector to sell more stuff --
COLLINGS
Right, you need more insurance when you have fewer community members to rely on.
ARKIN
Right, you need (inaudible), that's right, you need more vacuum cleaners and you need more lawnmowers and you need more washing machines and so forth. So it's very interesting, and then if you were really poor, you were already sharing, and you already had a community. And I think that oftentimes the very poor people, either the poor people and the people of color that would move into middle-class areas that no longer were doing that kind of sharing, and then became -- their lives became as problematic as the rest of the middle-class. And so it was very interesting, and so I did see that with this neighborhood, and I did see, when we would have our community events on the street, and we would invite all of our neighbors to bring food to share, it was so interesting because we'd just, you know, "Just bring a small dish, not anything big," but most of our ethnic neighbors, of Korean backgrounds and Latino backgrounds, would bring these big plates of things and not just a little bit.
COLLINGS
Yum. (laughter)
ARKIN
And where even today that happens when we sometimes invite people to dinner, they bring these humongous plates rather than just -- if everyone brings enough for four or five, there'd be enough for all of us. Everyone won't necessarily get something of everything, but -- so it was very interesting. So the big thing that we did initially was work with children. The parents were very protective of their children; we did things like get out in the street and play ball, and parents would open the window, "Oh, they're playing ball, so they must be OK." And so they'd let their kids come out to play ball, and eventually we went around and talked to the parents and we said we wanted to have a -- we wanted to invite your kid to come to a brunch on the sidewalk to taste some fruits, because we're going to plant some fruit trees. And so we had brunch on the sidewalk with about a dozen, maybe eight or nine kids, ages --
COLLINGS
Oh, that's a lovely idea.
ARKIN
-- four to nine, say. And we had them taste all these different kinds of fruit, and then have them select the kind of fruit tree they would like to plant. And then a few weeks later, we'd have them draw a picture of their tree, and we had them name their tree, and we had them put a stake in the ground and pin their picture to the stake so we knew where the tree was going to come up.
COLLINGS
This is really hearkening back to your earlier work with youth, it would seem, in the neighborhoods.
ARKIN
Well, no, this was the work that we did with the kids; this was in '93, '94 --
COLLINGS
No, no, I mean with the probation department.
ARKIN
Oh, with the probation kids. Oh, I suppose, but very, very different, because those kids were definitely teenagers, and we didn't ever do anything like that. We did take them --
COLLINGS
You did talk about the hairdressing --
ARKIN
We talked about -- yeah, different kinds of things. But yeah, I suppose it was -- I did love working with kids, and I did love working with youth, but this time, it was a very, very different kind of thing, and we knew that it was a wonderful way to start this project, and there were people here that were just wonderful, particularly Esfandiar Abbassi, and at that time Mary Maverick, who were very involved in the beginnings. Ian Mclvaine, who is still our board president, and eventually at that time did live in the neighborhood for a few years. And so we have this brunch; kids picked out their trees, you know. We had them plant the trees, after planting the trees, we all got in a circle, maybe 25 of us, at that first Earth Day tree planting in April 1993, and got in a circle, we asked the kids to talk about what they thought the problems of the trees were going to be, and how they thought they could help the trees, and what the trees were going to give us. And in that way, we had this kind of community dialogue of both the adults and the children, and it was a combination of adults, parents who lived in the community and the others that lived in the community, as well as the volunteers that were coming in at that time.And so but the thing that I always emphasize is that this process, working with the children socially, and the selection process for the fruit and then doing the ecological event of planting a tree, and ultimate economic event of being able to harvest the fruits so that their parents didn't have to go to the market to buy fruit. That showed so organically the integration of the social and the ecological and the economic systems of the neighborhood, and how that was just naturally happening. We didn't stop and think, "Well, let's see. How can we make this (inaudible) first? Oh, let's see, how can we make this --?"But it was that kind of almost spontaneous organic development of the tree steward activities, tree planting, child's tree stewarding program that we felt that we should be able to get our heads wrapped around everything that we do in the neighborhood. We might primarily start something as a social event, but eventually, we needed to look at how it was affecting us economically and ecologically. We might start something that was an ecological event, but eventually have to look at the social and economic end, and so we were always thinking holistically, understanding that an eco-village is a complex set of interactive processes that effectively integrate the social, the economic, and the ecological, and then also, the other things that we thought about within a few years after starting, were, "Gee, how did we start? What were the main elements?"And I believe that again it was a very organic process, but I think there was a lot of questioning and thoughts about what are the problems in our life support systems, in our bio region, with air, soil, and water? What are the issues in our political jurisdiction? Who are we in relationship to each other, and in relationship to the land where we are? And what can we do about all that, in terms of what resources we have? And so there were early decisions made, like -- and information that we had, studies at that time in the early '90s had just come out about children -- oh, no, this was -- yeah, that was in the early '90s -- the NRDC, Natural Resources Defense Council, had one study, but even before their study, the Labor Strategy Center had put out a study on air pollution and children, and we discovered that children in this area, and areas east and southeast of here, had 20% less lung capacity than children, say, in Santa Monica or the West Valley.And so, gee, it was a no-brainer: let's stop driving now. Let's stop driving? That's -- oh, just one or two or three or four people? What's that going to do? Well, the answer to a sense of hopeless; the answer to that is action, activity, activism. Do something; you'll feel better right away if you do something. So stop your driving -- and they were all very, very busy people. So, oh, gee, we could go out in the world as very, very busy people without cars, and without trying to hitchhike rides with our friends all the time. As a matter of fact, we often found, and still do, that people are constantly trying to give us rides someplace. And unless it's 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, it's kind of like, well, what would be the point of not driving if I'm always accepting rides from people? (laughter)But -- and then also that we were able to -- people were able to know we were very busy people who could live a very active life here in the city without owning a private automobile. And this was before the metro, before the rapids, before the subway, but we were still, and I used to say and I still do, we're still -- and this neighborhood is the most transit-rich neighborhood outside of downtown. We're within walking distance of 20 bus lines, and of course, now, two subway stops. And so it was not that hard. And we were all bicyclists, and so we started getting around by foot and bicycle and transit. And it wasn't that difficult at all, and it was -- I had three cars in the -- I had three cars, because people kept donating them to us, because I kept saying I'm going to start a car co-op, and they kept getting all these tickets because I didn't change the parking side for street cleaning -- that was also an incentive for getting rid of the cars. (laughter)But I have to say that for many years, on and off, I had given up my car, given up driving, and as long as I was "giving up" something, it was like smoking, giving up smoking, which I was a longtime smoker. Not now for 25 years, but -- you do a little twist in your head between the giving up and the getting rid of. As long as you're giving up, you're sacrificing. But when you're getting rid of, you're freeing yourself. And this is something that I think is really, really important for the way, the changes that all of us are making or are going to have to make, around global climate change issues. And so it was a wonderful freeing to finally get rid of my car, and to go about the city that way, and it still is; you smell things that you never smelled before, you see things that you never saw before, you interact in ways that you never interacted before, and I still contend to this day that the advancement of car culture in our society is at the root of the breakdown of community, because as long as we're locking ourselves up in these tin boxes, of course, we're segregating ourselves from people, and then that also helps us to develop fear of the other. Whereas when you're butt to butt with someone on the bus or on the corner, and people are smiling, and no matter how different they are, for the most part, if you have a smile on your face, people smile back at you, and it's a whole different world out there. So, at any rate, back to some of --
COLLINGS
Well, let me just take you back to the activities you were doing with the kids in the neighborhood. Do any of those kids still live here? I mean, you're talking about 1993, and now we're in 2007.
ARKIN
Well, I have to say that this neighborhood in one respect is really not different than other neighborhoods, and that is, on average, the American household moves about once every five years. So I would say that we have lost just about every single one of those initial eco-village kids, but they were so special. And the bonding was so tight; I was closer to those kids than I am to my nieces and nephews, I should say, and some of them still do call occasionally, and still do drop by occasionally. And it is so heartwarming, and it is really like family, because the bonding was so close; we took those kids on field trips -- you know, it was very interesting, one kind of field trip that we used to take the kids on -- bicycle trips, once we really got neighborly with our neighbors, and we would take bike trips sometimes through Hancock Park, and the kids would, because they had learned quite a bit from us, some of them, and they would say, "Gee, I wonder how many people live in that big house." And I would, "Oh, certainly two, maybe three or four," and their reaction would be, "Don't you think they get lonely?" Other times, I remember other kids saying, "Oh, look at that lawn," one of those great big, you know, at Hancock Park. "I don't see any weeds on that lawn. I bet those people are using pesticides or herbicides." So it was really, really interesting, the little lessons they picked up from working with us.
COLLINGS
So would you have the sense that when people left this neighborhood that they were moving to a quote-unquote "better" neighborhood, or they were returning to their home countries, or what?
ARKIN
I think that the immigrant community in this neighborhood is always and forever aspiring to the American dream, and I think that is one of our challenges in this neighborhood, it still is, not only with the people, the immigrant community that lives in this neighborhood but with some of our own eco-villagers, and to the extent that they use the neighborhood to make it to the next step.
COLLINGS
This is -- this neighborhood is sort of like a way-station.
ARKIN
A way-station; it's a first stop after LAX or what have you. So our challenge, because so many people who live here intentionally in eco-village are people who have come from middle-class backgrounds, no matter what their ethnic orientation is, although not all of them. And so they have seen kind of and experienced the vacuousness of that kind of life, and the consumerist culture, and essentially, are downwardly mobile. And I use that in the most positive way, and the people, the immigrant community is here and upwardly mobile, so our challenge is to intercept that, to learn -- we are both a teaching and a learning -- I mean, we have so much to learn from our neighbors, and they have so much to learn from us. And how can we ultimately influence one another in ways that they do not necessary go on to a conventional consumerist lifestyle, even if they move out and up.Many people in this neighborhood were dramatically underhoused, and although I am not a fan of necessarily the HUD standards for how many people to a room you should have. When we bought this building in 1996, I'll get to that, we had several families that lived in it, and also the building that we had bought a few years later next door that lived in it, that were like six people, parents and four growing boys from ages, say, 11 to 17, in a 550-square-foot one-bedroom apartment. So I consider that underhoused, and we had a similar family, I think, of six or actually seven, slightly larger, next door. So we helped them to relocate one family into another rental, non-profit rental place where they had four bedrooms, which was maybe a little bit too much, from my perspective, for that. But their rents continued to be totally affordable; I think they even were paying less than they were paying here for a place that was twice as large. And in another case, we actually helped one of our -- and both of these were immigrant families. And -- from El Salvador, in both cases, and the second family, we actually helped buy a house.And as I said, they were extraordinarily underhoused, although we do have policies in our buildings, not incredibly strictly enforced, where we don't want to have more than two people in a single unit; that's about 400 square feet, and we don't have to have less than two people in a one-bedroom unit. And we don't want to have less than three people in a two-bedroom unit. So that's -- so it might be between three or four people in a one-people, there might be five or six in a two-bedroom. So anyway, those are the policies that we decided to have, in order to manifest and to show that we can live at a lower income and in smaller housing, and actually raise the quality of community life. And that is really one of our primary public interest purposes; how do you have a lower environmental impact, and yet raise the quality of community life.And of course, in the real estate that we own now, we have lots of common spaces; we have a community room, and we have a lobby that functions as a community space, and we have wonderful outdoor courtyard space and front porch space and backyard, lower backyard space; we have many, many spaces that people can extend their social life into these social spaces. And even though many, many apartment buildings and condos in the greater Los Angeles -- I mean, all over the country -- have all of this additional social space; if people are not in the community, are not in kind of a cohesive relationship with one another, those spaces are extraordinarily under-utilized. And I think ours got fairly well utilized, although you don't always see someone out someplace. But there's plenty of space to be alone outdoors or be with people, and the same indoors. So going back, I guess, to the kids, so working with the kids in that way really was the initial eco-village start up activities, and we had so much fun in those first two to three years, and so many community events; we had a community newsletter, once I was going door-to-door handing out the newsletter --
COLLINGS
Do you have any copies of that, by any chance?
ARKIN
I do, and I'll give you some.
COLLINGS
Oh, yeah. I'd love to see that.
ARKIN
Actually -- yes, I will, I can do that. And the -- I have them all, from 1980 to -- I think the last one we published was 1994; I could probably give you a whole set, if you want.
COLLINGS
That would be wonderful.
ARKIN
I think -- I'm not sure if I did, to the social research library or not, but I'd love to have a set of those in the UCLA library. So -- oh, so one time, I was going door to door and knocking on doors, "Have you been getting the newsletter?" And one neighbor said, "Oh, yes, I've been getting that, but I thought it was a joke. Who would do such wonderful things in our neighborhood, in this neighborhood?" There wasn't a sense of ownership in the neighborhood. And then we did things like -- oh, there were a couple of women who lived across the street from each other for 30 years, they were both Latina, by the way, and they never met each other. And every day they went down the back side of their apartment buildings into their cars, went out of the neighborhood and back, and they never saw each other and they never met. And so that was fun for them. So we would introduce people to one another that way, so there was a lot of really fun things, being on the street in those days, knowing all the neighbors, answering questions, referring them to resources. It was working with the kids, taking them on field trips, even weekend camping trips. All of that was a very, very exciting time for us and for me.
COLLINGS
And were the owners of these buildings ever aware of all these exciting things that were going on?
ARKIN
In the first year of eco-village, I made contact with all of the owners and told them that whenever they were considering selling any of their buildings, we wanted to buy them. Now, of course we didn't have any money to speak of, but I knew that if we had a really good plan that we would do that. Of course, I don't think any of them took us seriously, because how would someone who lives in that neighborhood ever be able to buy a building. But then of course, the 1990 -- of course there was the uprising, which had crashed property values, and then a few years later, there was the earthquake, and that further crashed the property values. And people were leaving LA in droves; people that were staying were either people who -- I mean, obviously a lot of people did stay, but a lot of people left, and a lot of people stayed because they had no choice; they would have preferred to leave, they had no choice.And other people, of course, were staying because they were deeply committed to the city and loved the city, and I was one of those in the latter category, as all the other eco-villagers were. And it was at least two years, I would say, a year and a half or so, before the first intentional eco-villager moved to the neighborhood, but after the earthquake, as property values really did plummet, and the following year -- that was '94, the following year, I noticed from my four-plex across the street, I noticed a man with a clipboard and a suit and a briefcase looking at this building, and that was my clue -- I better go out and talk to him. And so it was that that was someone involved in the real estate sale of this building, and let me know that it was on the market. So that's all I needed to know. At first, we always knew that we would have to buy real estate if we were going to keep things financially sustainable; otherwise, eventually the neighborhood gentrifies, and it wouldn't be available to go to lower-income people.And so -- but I always thought it would be one of the four-plexes that would have gone first, and this happened to be the building, the 40-unit building, the one that we learned was on the market. But going back to the point, and I'll come back to this, we had contacted all the building owners, told them that we were available if they wanted to sell their buildings, and they laughed at us. And then we also got their permission to plant fruit trees, and of course, they did give permission; eventually, we realized they really didn't care one way or another, because essentially, most of the landlord -- they were all at that time mom and pop landlords, even for the 72-unit building down the block, all absentee mom and pop landlords, with the exception of one who was a normal occupant that we did make good friends with. And still do, and in her four-plex, all the other three units are occupied by eco-villagers, and she knows if she ever wants to sell it. And she's a very sympathetic landlord; she has not crazily raised her rents like everyone else. So going back to the --
COLLINGS
You realized that this building, the 40-unit building was for sale --
ARKIN
It was for sale, so we had to buy it. How were we going to do it? We had, I'm happy to say at that time, $20,000 in savings. Savings -- this was monies that had been donated to us that we knew -- you know, like any family that's saving for a house or a new business or their children's education, organizations have savings too, for a rainy day and/or a new -- so we knew we were saving some money from those large donations that had come to us, and so, "OK, how are we going to use that $20,000 to leverage the $500,000," which I decided was the maximum that we were going to pay for this 40-unit building, which was in terrible disrepair. And the landlords were very, very nasty people, the owners were very, very nasty people.But we had a marvelous real estate broker that was a longtime personal friend who decided to work with us, and she said, "You let me work with owners; you just go out and raise the money." And so our initial approach to that was, well, we'll just do what other non-profit housing developers do; we'll just get a jigsaw puzzle of money, a little public money here, a little foundation money here, a little bank load money here, and we'll jigsaw puzzle it all together and make it work. Well, all of those funding sources had all kinds of conditions called underwriting criteria, which is a good thing, and it was -- there were several that really did want to loan to us, and we did put together a 30-page prospectus that talked about our vision and how we would pay the money back.But in the meantime, what we decided to do is just keep growing our community loan fund, because that would be kind of the ace in the hole, if everyone else fell through, or we decided we didn't want to take this money or that money. We didn't -- we got assistance from a major non-profit's technical support organization, LISC, the Local Initiative Support Corporation, they loaned us one of their wonderful people who crunches numbers, and he worked side by side with the -- on several occasions; I'm trying to think of his name -- a wonderful person, still in the non-profit -- no, maybe he went to the profit world, but I'm not sure -- but he kept encouraging us to borrow $1.5 million.But that's what it was going to take to rehab the building, and what I knew -- I did know this much -- that means we have a very big debt service, and there's a payment due every month that is much more than the half -- there were only 23 units occupied in this 40-unit building, and I didn't want to have to rent up units fast and indiscriminately in order to meet an oppressive debt service. So I kept saying, no, I don't think we need to borrow that much money; I don't want to borrow that much money. I want to be able to go slow and do the rehabs at our pace, and not only not have to rent up in a hurry, but also to be able to rehab in an ecologically sensitive way, using non-toxic building materials and paints and varnishes and certified woods, and things like cork, real cork and real linoleum, and take -- all kinds of things like that. So I knew that we couldn't do that if we had to do everything in a hurry.And so I kept just raising more money, and with this prospectus, I started sending it out to everyone that we knew personally that were among our constituents for 13, 14, 15 years, and knew us and trusted us, and people that I knew had money, and it took us nine months, but we raised about $500,000, and through our ecological revolving loan fund. They were loans, and they were all simple loans; they were loans without leins. At first I think I had developed a six-page loan agreement, because I wanted them to feel really confident about everything, even though there was no collateral, other than the building itself. But no leins on it. And then I wanted them to know, eventually, that their loans were to our loan fund rather than to the building itself. So they were like handshake loans. But one lender, who was loaning us $100,000, he read the loan agreement, six page, and he cut it down to half a page. And I thought, "Wow! Well, if he's loaning us $100,000, and he's willing to do it on just this half page, then we'll just do that for the rest of our lenders.
COLLINGS
So this was your ecological --
ARKIN
-- revolving loan fund.
COLLINGS
That's right, the ELF program.
ARKIN
Yeah. And so we paid -- so all of the -- and the other way we structured the finance, we structured it so that we didn't even have to start paying back on those loans for at least three or four or five or six months after we'd closed on the building to give us some breathing room, and the other thing that we did is that we made all of those initial loans interest-only, so we didn't have to start paying back on the principal for at least, I think, 18 months, so that would give us some further breathing space, and then we have the pro-formas, so that we knew we would be able to afford to do all of this, even with only the 23 units rented, we'd be able to afford it. And then the third thing we did is we really wanted to pay our lenders quarterly, instead of monthly, to cut down on the paperwork, because we had 35 loans. And so all of that was done, and we never -- it's quite embarrassing, actually, but I think the first set of payments we went, we sent them the wrong -- we sent them from a closed checking account. (laughter) It was very embarrassing. But other than that, we never, ever missed a payment in the ten years that this building was being paid off. And as of December of 2006, all of the loans outside of the organization were actually paid back.
COLLINGS
How exciting.
ARKIN
Now we have internal loans, because we have loans from our -- we still have each building debt service, and we had put in about $150,000 of our own money that had been actually donated for eventually what ended up being $815,000, because we paid $315,000 for the building next door.
COLLINGS
Now, did your any of your board members have a financial planning background? How were you able to structure this very complicated debt?
ARKIN
And it's such a good question, and I think the main thing is, by knowing so little, that sometimes the less you know, the more you're able to accomplish. And I think a lot of people in positions like mine, if they could see ahead what they were going to go through, with so many things, it would be so overwhelming they wouldn't begin. But if you keep your eye on the ultimate vision, and just take, essentially, one -- if you have a sense of what all the steps are, but you don't go into any of the details.
COLLINGS
Yeah, because it sounds like you took a lot of stuff from your dad, in terms of the building and what have you. But financial planning was not your thing; you wanted to sell the stock rather than take a look at it.
ARKIN
Yeah.
COLLINGS
But did you do anything along these lines for the Songwriter's Resource?
ARKIN
Oh, yeah, I was responsible for all the income and (inaudible); I certainly had some expertise, even at a fairly elementary level, at bookkeeping; I was always wonderful at balancing my check account, my checkbook. And of course, by that time I had already been running a -- doing all the bookkeeping for the non-profit organization for that time, all the 15 years. You know, if you have the basic intelligence, you don't have to be super-smart or anything; it's not like a science -- if you see an example of what someone else did, then you just adapt it to your own needs, which is what I did with the prospectus; I got an example of another non-profit developer that was doing something, and I thought that looked really good how he did that, and I just adapted it to our needs. And the same thing with the pro-formas that the wonderful LISC person did; he crunched all the numbers, and although I didn't have his crunching program, I could see how the numbers flowed, and I could do like a 15-year spreadsheet. And then I just kept doing that and re-doing that each year for the various lenders, all the lenders and the payments due, and I could pretty much do it. And no one -- of course, my board president is an architect/builder, and so he had some -- he asked good questions, he knows a bit about this.
COLLINGS
Yeah. But is ELF your term? Is this something -- when you referred to this plan in your book here as the Ecological Community Revolving Loan Fund: is that sort of the formal name that you gave to this plan?
ARKIN
Yeah. And to the project of CRSP. So it's one of the projects that was under CRSP's umbrella, and just like there were times in our history where we've umbrella'd probably eight or ten different emerging organizations, including the Los Angeles Film and Video co-op, which won a big award in the '80s, or (inaudible). And we umbrella'd another organization that was a video group that was doing environmental films years ago, Turtle Island, I think it was called. And we umbrella'd Co-op Camp Sierra, which is a seven-five -- when I said umbrella'd, we were the fiscal umbrella for, in some cases the startup of an organization, and in some cases, taken on that fiscal responsibility from another organization as we do the Co-op Camp Sierra, which I believe at this point is a 75-year-old two-week summer camp for people involved in cooperatives held up in the Sierras. So we passed that along to another non-profit about a year or so ago. And then we've umbrella'd, of course, the Bicycle Kitchen.Oh, let's see. I don't know, it seems like a half-dozen or so of these organization that either use our umbrella to do what it is that they wanted to do when their project finished, and the umbrella finished, or they were incubated and became successful and went out on their own. So it's a wonderful thing to be able to do that. And so we have many internal projects now, the ELF being one, which someday I would hope is going to spin off. The other organization, emerging organization, we've umbrellaed in the past few years, is the Beverly Vermont Community Land Trust, which is finally going to manifest that early vision for the LA Eco-Villages, that the land should be owned by a land trust, and the buildings are to be owned by a co-op, and so the land trust is happening; I believe the articles of incorporation are being final this week, next week, and we've worked on the by-laws, and we've had a volunteer legal aide attorney working with us, developing it. And the CRA is excited about it.
COLLINGS
Now, this is another site, because Beverly is south of here --
ARKIN
The Beverly Vermont Community Land Trust essentially will -- we don't have firm boundaries, but essentially, we talked initially about the areas within a specific plan known as the Station Neighborhood Area Plan of the City of Los Angeles that many of us were very involved in helping to formulate. And then also, the community -- the Wilshire Center/Koreatown redevelopment area, of which we were also in by choice, both of those areas. And so this is kind of the overlapping area around those two areas.So -- around those two planning areas. And those kind of planning areas, of course, bring with them the potential for quite a bit of public money as well as private money. But our idea is that we should have a community land trust, which there is an emerging land trust movement in Los Angeles and across the country, the past -- across the country for probably the past 20 or 30 years, but in Los Angeles, just the past year or so, and it's coming up fairly quickly now, and we're kind of in the forefront of it, along with the Figueroa Corridor and several other grassroots groups.And so this area, Beverly-Vermont -- we don't have firm boundaries, but it's kind of a hub, a transit hub. And theoretically, our area would be within a few-mile radius, but we didn't want to say, oh, we wouldn't take housing or land that wanted to come to us from outlying areas, because we want to primarily serve this area, and in a way that really is both about ecological land and building stewardship, as well as affordable housing, social and ecological justice issues, and essentially breaking the back of real estate speculation in the area. (laughter)
COLLINGS
OK. Well, there's a lot more that we need to talk about regarding eco-village, of course. But I think we should probably mostly talk about it next time. But before we end today, would you mind going back a little bit and just talking about your initial plans for eco-village at the 11-acre site, and how far along you got with those? I mean, you write about a meeting that took place with the Montecito Heights Improvement Association, where neighborhood people were present but did not speak in favor of the site, even though you believed that they were interested in it. And I'm just sort of wondering about what some of the dynamics were, and really how far the planning got for that before you change course in the aftermath of the uprising.
ARKIN
I want to mention the person whose name is Maria Davalos; she was an early co-visionary with eco-village, and she -- her co-visionary approach really had to do with children and fruit trees, and it's where all of our ideas for the fruit-tree program, where the kids, it might be fun to -- I haven't talked to her in several years, and I'd love to chit-chat with her, and she doesn't live that far away, but she's not online, and it's almost like, when we all went online, I lost touch with so many people, I didn't stay in touch with. But Maria and I, I met Maria, incidentally, through Andy Lipkis, because she was a friend of his.
COLLINGS
Oh, really? Small world.
ARKIN
I think she had -- I met her that way because she had invited Andy to her house, and -- I don't remember (inaudible), but she was definitely a friend of Andy's. So Maria and I, before we had all of this architectural support, and we would do -- go door to door talking to people. Now, that area of Montecito Heights had both a valley that's called Happy Valley neighborhood that is mostly lower-income and mostly a Mexican population, in many cases second and third-generation population where the properties are handed down through the generations, and so they actually had quite a bit of real affordable housing by keeping a lot of those houses in the families. And as you went up the side of the hill, of course, and the top of the hill, it got much more affluent, and the demographic was considerably different. It was quite mixed, ethnically, but substantially white middle-class or upper-middle -- middle-class even at that time -- well, no, I guess -- yeah, because property values had already crashed at that time.So we would go door to door in both areas, and we would find that there was great enthusiasm at the lower end of the Happy Valley, at the lower end of the hill, but we never really identified any leadership, we could kind of get involved with what we were doing. "Oh, let us know when something happens." And at the top of the hill, there was very extraordinarily limited enthusiasm. Most people at the top of the hill that looked out at this three-acre shelf, and then there were -- it was no landfill, so there were angles, the land angled down like a 45-degree angle and then there'd be maybe a 30 or 40 foot shelf and there were several levels. But the three-acre shelf at the top was buildable, and the rest of it was not buildable. But gardens and porches could be planted on those shelves and on those hills.And so we envisioned this wonderful -- several co-housing communities on the three acres, and mixed uses, and we envisioned -- we were right adjacent to [Deb's] Park, and we were -- the Southwest Museum was at the bottom of the hill across from the Pasadena Freeway on the other side of the hill, and then there was the historic [Carroll] Street -- not Carroll Street -- the historic -- the old historic buildings on our side of there, and also -- anyway, close by. Trying to think of the name of it; I'm so embarrassed not to be remembering that. And so our visions took us to -- and also being adjacent to Deb's Park, it's really interesting, what's across, not so very close but still pretty close, the Audubon Center, which was one of the most environmentally sustainable buildings in the country, LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design], the national standard for sustainability] platinum, but we envisioned a center like that adjacent to the three-acre shelf there in Deb's Park, which the Audubon Center is in Deb's Park, and so eventually in the long term, we could see electric shuttles going from the Center like the Audubon, Center down to the Southwest Museum, which was ancient --
COLLINGS
Well, now there's the Gold Line running right through there.
ARKIN
Well, yeah --
COLLINGS
It's nearby.
ARKIN
You'd still need an electric shuttle going up and down the hills, connecting the eco-center, such as the Audubon, to the ancient Southwest Center, to the old historic houses that had been moved there as a tourist attraction, and then the eco-village, and I could just see all that being tied together. And of course, I still can, because that shelf is still there. Now that landfill site was scheduled for public auction, did I say that?
COLLINGS
Mm-hmm.
ARKIN
OK. And we did have it removed from public auction, and it is still currently owned by the Department of Water and Power, and I still think the time is approaching where it could be an eco-village, and that would be manifested perhaps not exactly as I envision it, but as we did our community organizing at the top of the hill, we -- and also at that time, we were in close relationship with Cal Hamilton, the planning director for the city, and somewhat naive -- I loved Cal; I thought he was just a remarkable and wonderful human being, and of course, everyone is not a fan of his, but I think he really meant well, even if he wasn't able to manifest any of his visions for a sustainable Los Angeles; I think he had a lot of them. And he later had Alzheimer's; I visited with him several times after his retirement when he was ill. But we even -- so we even asked the Homeowner's Association to set up a meeting where we would have Cal come and talk to them. Little did we understand that they were very anti-city.So essentially, the people that we talked to on the topic, they didn't want one grain of sand moved from that landfill; they just wanted it to stay the way it was, nothing. And they didn't trust us, as often as we tried to go to their events, we didn't really know -- we did eventually get to be friends with one or two people, people that would turn it around, and so the issue -- they didn't really understand, no matter how much we tried to explain, and no matter how many sketches we showed, they didn't really understand any of the things that we were trying to do, and they didn't want to, essentially, and they didn't really care. Actually, I have a cousin that lives up there now, so.
COLLINGS
So what was it that they objected to? Just that there would be construction?
ARKIN
Well, the construction, affordable housing, obviously, so it was early NIMBY-ism. There was no eco-consciousness about anything at that time. And so just -- "We don't want change." So that's how it was, then, and that is how it is still -- not necessarily there, because I haven't been up there in a long time, and I don't know who lives there know; I mean, they might have gotten quite a progressive community up there. But so many neighborhoods that kind of have their heads in the sand about the times we live in and the times we're moving into, and it's kind of like, they just go on like America owns the world, like my job in the world is to get the best bargain I can at the most malls I can go to, and I think that I don't want -- I mean, obviously a lot of those people are people that I love very dearly, including my own family (laughter), and people that I know that are wonderful people, so I'm not -- one of the great challenges in this work is essentially to avoid judgement -- being judgmental and self-righteous about anything.But the reality is, of course, that we're seeing in the mainstream media, and that we see as soon as we walk out on the corner of First and Vermont and see the traffic that has doubled or tripled in the past year or so with cars growing six times faster than the number of people. And 33% of global greenhouse gas coming from vehicle pollution, and another third of it, I think, coming from buildings and households. So we are essentially not doing very well. So that's who a lot of Americans are still today, and here in Los Angeles, among the most progressive cities, theoretically, in the world, but we are still very spread out, and sometimes I think people don't know how to connect -- they know that something need to be done, and I want to do something, but I'm not sure what to do, in spite of the fact that they oftentimes are not reading the papers. Things are changing very rapidly. So at any rate -- did I answer -- let me just finish. When the earthquake came, and when we started -- at the -- excuse me, when the uprisings came, I'm so sorry, in 1992 --
COLLINGS
Spring of '92.
ARKIN
That's right, April 27, 28, 29, or something like that, I had just come back from an international eco-cities conference in Australia, and the next day, the city went up in flames. And -- I forgot what I was going to say, I'm sorry.
COLLINGS
Well, we were talking about how far the planning had really gone with the first vision.
ARKIN
Oh, yeah. So when we started to -- after the uprisings, and we put this committee that had been meeting -- well, we put this committee together after that; we actually changed its focus, it was kind of the planning committee for the eco-village, and it was a combination of the planning committee from the eco-village planning, and something we called the Los Angeles Eco-Cities Council, which had been put together by my organization and the Eco-Home network after the first Los Angeles Eco-Cities Conference, out of which this book was done. And so that was the committee that we put together, and on Monday after the riots, that weekend, while people were out in our adjacent strip mall sweeping and cleaning and so forth, I was here in my computer, envisioning an eco-village, envisioning, in a way that I had, essentially taking what was in this book and putting it into a form that would be meaningful for a neighborhood that had been deeply affected by the fires.And so that six months of meeting with that committee was dialoguing around the question, what should our priorities be in inner-city Los Angeles, which I think I mentioned before. And it was out of that six-month dialogue, seven-month, eight-month dialogue that we unanimously decided to drop our intent to work on the landfill site and switch to this neighborhood. This neighborhood, and essentially part of that dialogue was about what some of the problems were that were going on up there, that we really were not invited, we were not wanted; there were going to be battles, there was essentially the issue of creating infrastructure -- the closest bus line ran only -- there was only one bus line that was in easy walking distance, and it only ran up once every 45 minutes. So it was going to be 15-20 years to create the infrastructure in that neighborhood that we already had in many of the other neighborhoods that had been deeply affected by the fires.So it was, as we considered all of that, it was ultimately a no-brainer. The big thing during the discussion of those six months was, where will we have it? Where will we do this in a neighborhood that was deeply affected by the fires? And no one on that committee, in spite of the fact that that committee was well-integrated, ethnically and racially, none of those people wanted to move to any of the areas that had been deeply affected by the fires. And so it ultimately, for me, because a no-brainer. Well, I already live here, so at least there's one person living intentionally, because I felt passionately that wherever we would do the eco-village, it was a place that the people who wanted to do it would live, that you don't -- we're not a traditional community development organization that goes home to our house in the suburbs every day, and then comes and works in wherever we're going to do this thing.And so I was passionate about that, and so that ultimately became a no-brainer choice. Well, we have, after considering several other neighborhoods in South-Central that no one wanted to move to, well, we had fires here too; we had a fire on the front porch of the building was living in then, fires back to back. So let's do it here. And it became just a very enthusiastic unanimous decision to do it that way, and then it was a matter of beginning the processes. So most eco-villages will begin with the kind of planning processes we did with the three-dimensional models and the architecture drawings and the participation of community members and the design and where we're going to get the money all together and people putting in their money, and we kind of did things backwards in that sense.We had all of that planning done and then decided not to do it, and it was -- although there was a lot of process in that planning there, here, when we decided, oh, we're already built up, so what's the word that we use for making an eco-village where you're already built up? Oh, no-brainer -- "retrofit," as distinct from rehabilitation, building rehab, housing rehab is what you hear constantly. For example, the redevelopment world, or in the housing development world, where if someone's buying your old building and rehabbing it for -- to bring it up to snuff. But the idea of retrofitting for sustainability is the way in which we wanted to think about. So it wasn't -- it was retrofitting not only physically, but retrofitting socially, and retrofitting economically, one of the different forms, one of the different ways, in the many, many systems within those macro-systems, the social, economic, and ecological, that we would --
COLLINGS
So I guess that sort of speaks to one of the questions that I had, because when I looked at the plan that was described by the study group from Cal Poly for the original eco-station, eco-village site --
ARKIN
Oh, the Diane Herring thing?
COLLINGS
No, it was under Professor -- let's see -- it's this one right here.
ARKIN
Oh, wow. This is so interesting, I don't even know about it and I wrote it. (laughter)
COLLINGS
Yeah. The interesting thing about it is that -- it's kind of going through step-by-step what the ecological features of the 11-acre eco-village site will be, but it doesn't really emphasize the neighborhood, the social retrofitting that you're talking about, which has become such an important part of this site. And I'm just wondering if you had proceeded with this. I mean, see, here's the sort of the list; it's solid waste, renewable energy, passive solar, but it doesn't discuss things that have to do with the people.
ARKIN
OK. So that was --
COLLINGS
And that's more of what I see here, so I'm just -- that's just an interesting --
ARKIN
So that was -- I have to tell you, I think that it was an academic; it was something I knew academically, that the people had to come first, the people that lived there, the neighbors that were going to be -- I knew that academically, but I didn't know it emotionally until we spent those three or four years, five years, trying to organize in that community. And that hit me really hard, and I became a very, very strong advocate within the intentional communities, the co-housing and the eco-village movement, do not plan things without having made friends with your neighbors first about where you want to do something, and that is a message that many intentional communities of various sorts, and had very, very hard lessons. And so the fact --
COLLINGS
That's the thing that's so striking about these conference proceedings; there is so much discussion of infrastructure. They're like these uninhabited spaces because there isn't this other discussion.
ARKIN
Yes, that's true. Those were obviously lessons from that. (laughter) This conference was much too physically-oriented, I should say. But there have been many lessons, and of course, many -- of course the whole co-housing movement, many of those developments are emerging eco-villages, and many eco-villages use co-housing as their housing component. But it takes a long time to kind of develop all of that, but co-housing is a very, very social kind of thing, because all the households that are going to live in it, of course, are planning the whole thing and going through the whole two-to-five-year planning period where you get to know each other very, very well, doing that kind of thing. To me, that was a very big lesson for -- on an emotional basis, and why, in a way, it was so wonderful that we didn't have an instant intentional community to move to this neighborhood, but there were volunteers that came in.I would also say, and sadly, sadly so, in a way, that it is much easier to do something like this in a neighborhood like this, than in a more affluent single-family neighborhood. And yet I see the future of eco-villages, whether urban, suburban, or rural, that we have to retrofit, particularly our residential urban, single-family detached housing neighborhoods, and our suburban neighborhoods. The great example for that, which you may be familiar with, is the [N Street] Co-Housing Group in Davis, which is a suburb, and they essentially did a whole block of single-family homes, where they opened up the backyards and little by little, over 10 or 15 years, (inaudible) --
COLLINGS
Yeah, I was reading about that, it's -- and people just consider it to be a very desirable place to live.
ARKIN
It's wonderful, it's really great. So we have to do a whole lot more of that sort of thing. But my lessons were certainly, make friends with your neighbors, and we had three years to do that before we bought our building. And of course, when we bought this building, we already knew all the 23 households that lived here from that three years, and also, I knew some of them from before we started eco-village, because even though I didn't know anyone well, I had already lived on the block 13 years when we started, so faces were familiar; I would have some very casual conversations with some of the neighbors. But -- so they were very, very grateful and happy that we bought the building, because -- and we even lowered their rents (laughter) within months after buying the building, because they were too high for the time, they really were. I mean, not so terribly much; I think $50 or something. And so, let me see.Oh, so the emphasis in this community, over this past 14 years now, 13, 14, has really been creating social foundation, but what I learned, and I think you heard me say it, and if I didn't say it I will say it now, that what I knew from being a co-op consultant in the early days of CRSP, was -- because I trained boards of directors, and I gave advice to staff of food co-ops, housing co-ops, childcare co-ops, worker co-ops all over the country. And did some traveling, particularly training boards of directors, because I had become like a certified board trainer, and I'd become a certified non-profit board trainer as well as a co-op board trainer too, so assisting local non-profits that way. And the thing that I had learned is what kind of co-op I didn't want to live in, because all of the housing co-ops that I was assisting and continued to, were having horrible, horrible problems. There was litigation among board members, between the residents and the board, there was so many tensions; I found this in food co-ops also, incredible tension.I mean, their organizational growth, their organizational development patterns, and organizations, regardless of whether you're a co-op or a conventional corporation or an intentional community, they often parallel what the stages of development are of human beings. There's planning, pregnancy, birth, infancy, childhood, preadolescence, adolescence, youth, adulthood. And so this intentional community has gone through all those phases, and I would say -- and so i think it's really important to understand that, and not to expect instant success; no matter how much planning you do, at a certain point, you have to let go of certain things. You don't want to let go of certain things too early, because you don't want to compromise your vision; that's advice I got from James Rouse. James Rouse is the person who actually ultimately started the Enterprise Foundation, but he's a very, very big, important guy. I think he died some years ago. But very big developer, nationally, and particularly with shopping malls and for-profit housing and eventually non-profit housing, and eventually his passions were for affordable housing, and that's why he started the Enterprise Foundation.But I saw him speak a couple times here in LA, and one of the things he had said is, "Beware of early compromises of your vision." But at a certain point, you do let go, and then you -- if you're still involved, you're kind of like, oh, how can I kind of jiggle this, what's going on toward what I envisioned going on, without overlaying your authority onto a social group. And so there was lots and lots and lots of that that has gone on. We also, in our intentional community, which is now almost 40 people, I think. We made -- and I take responsibility for this, we were much too -- we were much too accepting of people in the early -- and even the middle stages.Now, I'm hoping that we don't have to learn those lessons all over again, because this is a year in which pretty much most of the membership activities are being -- membership selection activities -- are being passed on to the community. And I probably will not have too much to do with it much longer, other than just be one of the people that can give input, which I always saw myself as doing anyway, but the community didn't see me that way. I guess we'll probably maybe save that whole history of my relationship with the community for next time, but the whole emphasis has been on pretty much the social foundation for moving on to a more economic relation.So in other words, if we're going to be 40 people that own $1 million-plus dollar -- a couple million dollar business together, don't we want to be in loving trust with one another before we take on those business arrangements? And that was what I worked for, my early co-op consulting days. I did not want to be in business with people who were at war with one another. And that was not something that I successfully avoided here, because I was in business, even if I was not co-owners yet, with the people that I was community with, that community -- there were many, many dysfunctional aspects to it, and many, many wonderful lessons that I and others here have learned since we started, since we moved into this building and had the intentional community. But there were warning signs even before we bought the building and expanded the community, even with the initial seven or eight people that lived here before we bought the building that lived in rental housing in other parts of the neighborhood. We definitely still had lessons from them. So -- or I did.
COLLINGS
Yeah. Well, we'll have to get that on the record.
ARKIN
Did I get all those basic questions, though, do you think?
COLLINGS
Yeah, I think we did, and I think we can expand next time.
ARKIN
Oh, you are so good at getting me back on track with those questions. (laughter)

END OF Arkin.Lois.4.05.04.2007.mp3

1.6. Session 5 ( May 11, 2007)

UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 5, 5-11-2007 Arkin.Lois.6.05.23.2007.mp3
COLLINGS
Jane Collings interviewing Lois Arkin, May 11, 2007, in her office.
ARKIN
Live/work space.
COLLINGS
And workspace, yes. Good morning.
ARKIN
Hi. So I suppose I really want to emphasize, also particularly to try to inspire other people to begin, because lots of times, people think, oh, they have to go out and raise lots of money and find property, and it's very, very complicated to begin an eco-village.
COLLINGS
Right. Well, your original plan was very complicated, the 11-acre site, yeah.
ARKIN
This is true. (laughter) And it's not that where we're at now is not complicated; it certainly is. But whether we were starting the hill, or whether we were starting in our existing neighborhood, the important thing is that it's process-oriented, rather -- from my perspective, other people have a different idea, they're maybe architects that are very, very physically-oriented, and so they maybe start with big drawings, and other people that are really, really passionate about saving a piece of land that might go to conventional development of a landfill or something like that, and so end up emphasizing certain physical or economic realities. But from my perspective, and I really think that this is important for those people who start from a physical perspective or an economic perspective too, if you don't have the social properties down pat, and even when you think you do, it can be a very, very difficult path to travel.But I wanted to emphasize that we didn't really have the kinds of resources that we were aware of to begin an eco-village, and so we began with our -- basically our extraordinarily grassroots interactive processes, talking to neighbors, as I think I mentioned, working with kids on the street, and that was the way we began. One thing that we did do in those early days is, within the first few months, is that we put out a flier throughout the neighborhood, and invited people to come to a meeting, in which we would ask them what they perceived as the strengths and weaknesses of our neighborhood. And of course, we never got beyond the very first one, which was crime. That's all they wanted -- there weren't that many people at the meetings.
COLLINGS
How many people were there?
ARKIN
Oh, maybe six or eight. (laughter) So not too many. Probably half of those six or eight people were people that were part of our volunteer team in the beginning. But all the neighbors wanted to talk about was crime, and we kind of talked amongst ourselves after that, and if we were a conventional community development organization, we would have immediately gone out and organized a neighborhood watch. But because we understood, and believed that crime was symptomatic of the breakdown of the community, and that the fear of crime was so much more debilitating that crime itself, we decided to really work on the community aspects of things.And that's when we -- I think I talked about last time, we went out on the streets every day meeting neighbors, doing positive gossip, working with the kids, doing little tree plantings and little garden plantings and so forth, and simply being a real presence on the street. And then about six months later, we had a similar meeting; a few more people came, but again we asked people what the strengths and weaknesses were of the neighborhood. Within that six-month period, with all of that kind of process on the street where crime came on the third page of our brainstorm list, and it came as an afterthought. "Oh, yeah, we still have to think about crime." And one of the things that I think was real instrumental in that switch in people's heads was that because we had been putting out this newsletter, which I do believe I talked about last time, is that correct?
COLLINGS
You mentioned it, but you didn't talk about how it was put together, what kinds of things you chose to include and so forth.
ARKIN
And I did say I'd give you a set of -- OK, yes, I will. Well, it was a newsletter that talked about things that were going on in the neighborhood, things that we envisioned to go on in the neighborhood, how to get involved, what kinds of committees were forming, if we were having special events in the neighborhood, who the speakers were, and so forth.
COLLINGS
Would it be in English and Spanish?
ARKIN
And some of them were in just English, and eventually, some of them were bilingual and even trilingual; we did a few in Korean as well. And so when we did those newsletters and/or those information sheets, we went door-to-door, and then with a bilingual person, and so we were able to really talk to our neighbors. And so, let's see, before I started that --
COLLINGS
Well, let me just ask you -- I have two questions. One is, who is we? Because you are living down this street, but don't have the other cast of characters. And what do you consider the boundaries of the neighborhood?
ARKIN
Well, the "we" is, in those first year, year and a half, were the group of volunteers that came in regularly; there were about half a dozen that came regularly to the neighborhood, where we'd walk the streets, or we'd do gardening together, work with the kids and so forth. And I would say it was about a year and a half before people actually started moving to the neighborhood intentionally, and that was actually before we owned any property, so they just like moved into other rental housing, essentially pretty much the four-plexes on White House Place. There was one very large unit, White House Place, where one, two, three, four -- at one time, five people were living. It was a very large two-bedroom unit, but eventually, I think only three people lived there for awhile. And down the block, other people moved into a few other units. So then that became the "we," along with the volunteers that were still coming in regularly, working with the gardens and the school and so forth.The boundaries in, I believe -- I'm not sure if I actually gave a definition of an eco-village, but a couple of the components of the definition are that an eco-village be small enough that everyone knows one another face-to-face and can influence the direction of the community. And from that perspective, if you stand in the intersection of White House and Bimini Place, you have visual access of the entire two blocks. It's kind of like an unbalanced T. And there's about 500 people that live in those two blocks, which I think I mentioned earlier; 162 units of housing. And so those became our self-selected boundaries, White House Place to its dead end on the east, and Bimini Place from 1st Street on the north to 2nd Street on the south.
COLLINGS
Not 3rd? 2nd?
ARKIN
No. 2nd Street.
COLLINGS
You went down to 2nd.
ARKIN
Yeah. And so those were the boundaries, because that is what we had visual access to; those two blocks contained about 500 people; its land uses were mixed and/or adjacent to many other mixed land uses, where we could do shopping. Another component of an eco-village is that it is full-featured, and in urban terms, that means that its land uses are mixed to the extent that people can meet their daily needs within or adjacent to the community, or at least not have to get into a private automobile to go off to get their basic shopping done, education, livelihood, spiritual and religious spaces, and so forth. So obviously, not the chi-chi shops in Beverly Hills.
COLLINGS
Well, and speaking of the shops, does that strip mall that is directly behind you -- do the shopowners there have a palpable sense that eco-village is here?
ARKIN
No, I don't believe that they do. From time to time, some of them have, because there was one little restaurant there that many of us used to go to regularly, and so any time you would walk by, you'd kind of see if -- oftentimes, especially in the evening, a few eco-villagers having dinner. And so I think we got to know some of the proprietors there and the waitresses fairly well. But that most of the businesses on Vermont are franchises, and large global franchises, and it's not -- those are not the kinds of businesses that eco-villagers generally patronize, for the most part. And their staff are changing constantly, and these are kind of low-paid jobs that people going to school, retired people, immigrants are working in, so they're not very permanent in any way. They're also a leaky barrel, in terms of the money that comes into the community, in terms of global corporations; that money generally leaks out of a neighborhood pretty intensely. And those -- oftentimes, those businesses -- and again, I don't want to overgeneralize, but generally speaking, global corporations of that nature are responsible for the most debilitating practices, oppressive and exploitative practices, and so we're not great fans.Now, we do live with our neighbors, and we certainly interact with them; I am, like others, shop fairly regularly at Radio Shack to purchase little electronic things that I need here and there, and I am a great fan of the Subway franchise, just because I think that of all the fast food places that I've ever been to, they have -- not to be the promotional person in this oral interview, but they do actually have the low-cal veggie sandwiches, and very affordable. I'm trying to think of -- I think I stopped with -- we have some chain pizza place around the corner, and I think I stopped that several years ago. So this is kind of what the nature of -- now, some of us really have a very strong vision of bringing one of the very small mini-malls adjacent to us under community control --
COLLINGS
That's the one right behind you.
ARKIN
Yeah. And that we would like to see that happen, and eventually integrate with eco-village as part of a mixed-use development. Some of us have a vision for doing several more developments in and adjacent to our two blocks that would be included in the eco-village, using, for example, co-housing as the housing component, but doing it in a way that the land uses are mixed. And also, our vision takes us to really passionately, some of us, wanting to do a car-free development. So we talk about making, initially, the north end of the block car-free, or maybe the south-end, and maybe have --
COLLINGS
Turning these into walk streets.
ARKIN
Turning both Bimini and White House Place into 100% car-free streets. This is not to say that people couldn't still own cars, but over the years, we could see -- or at least, I could, and some of my neighbors along with me, could see radically reducing the number of automobiles, and perhaps within a certain time period having no privately-owned automobiles, but just having access to car-sharing organizations, like Flexcar, to have automobiles on the block, and a variety of different kinds of vehicles, so there's motorcycles and scooters and little neighborhood electric cars, and an SUV for when you need, or one of those large passenger vehicles for when you need to take a lot of people someplace, or little flatbed truck things and so forth, so that there is the sharing of vehicles that way. But for the most part, our basic transportation is by feet and bike and --
COLLINGS
Public. But while we're on the subject, it's a little sort of off the chronology, but where do people who live here tend to shop? I mean, are there certain businesses that people agree are the best places?
ARKIN
Well, you know, that's a really interesting question. I keep saying I'm going to actually create a list of all the thrift shops in the area, but I do think that people do a lot of thrift shop shopping for clothes; we also do quite a bit of sharing, so we have, for example, in our lobby, a large white table, and whenever someone doesn't want something or doesn't need something anymore, they put it on the white table -- sometimes it tends to get very messy -- and people go through that and pick things up, whether they're clothes or shoes or handbags or wallets or books, we actually have a free bookcase, so anyone can take a book from that bookcase, and then we have another common library; we have people now have a food co-op, so they're getting their fresh -- a lot of us are getting our fresh produce weekly from our food co-op from one of the organic farmers that comes to the Hollywood farmer's market Sunday, so then they deliver to us after the market, and they've kept our boxes fresh for delivery in their trucks.But then, I believe that there are a lot of people here that shop regularly for groceries at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods and Nature Mart. I tend to do a lot of my basic shopping at the corner at Vons, and that is because of the convenience, and also Vons now is carrying a very strong line of organic everything; we call that "industrial organic," because of course, when the Fed passed the new organic laws, they significantly reduced the requirements that we had, California-certified organic was of course the standard for organic in the whole world, and then when the Fed passed the law, they actually lowered the standard, so now we have what we call industrial organic. But nonetheless, tried to -- I think most people here tried to buy things that are local, that are used. There are people that do a lot of garage sale and flea market shopping.
COLLINGS
There's one down the street on Vermont [Ave] every Sunday.
ARKIN
Yeah, but there's also front-yard garage sales all around this neighborhood all the time. Many people bring things home that they found on the street. And I know that I have, from time to time, found things on the street that I brought into the office, bookcases and chairs and tables and so forth. And then sometimes when we're out walking or biking and are not able to carry something home, we'll come home and put it on our internal listserv: "Oh, on such-and-such a street, I saw blah-blah-blah, and it looked like it was in perfect condition. Does someone want to go pick it up?" That sort of thing. But I think that -- you know, I imagine that there are also people that occasionally stop in kind of the mainstream places, but I think overall, we don't shop very much.And part of being an eco-village, I think, is reducing consumption and demonstrating that we can live at a higher quality of life with less stuff. And because we live in small spaces, we don't have room for much stuff. And actually, there are a few of us that it's very, very hard to resist stuff, good stuff that we find on the street, or bargains in the thrift shops, or things that -- oh, maybe I don't need it right now, but I bet maybe someone else might need it, and can't resist bringing it home or buying it, and this does become a very serious problem. And the housekeeping and the junk factor are issues that have been ongoing -- along with cats -- continuing issues of contention in the community. And so we're getting better at it, but there have been times where just -- have too much junk around.And it's interesting, because we have one actual junk room that's been cleaned out at least three or four times in the past ten years, including like major garage sales in front of our building that went on all day, and (inaudible), and then they get all cleaned out, and then a year later, they're so full of junk again you can't get through them. But the community is now, I think, really -- there are some people that are getting much more militant about it, and it's hard, because I happen to believe that if you have the junk, quote-unquote, really well organized and accessible, and know what you have and where it is, and you've created the storage space to make it accessible, and not unattractive, then it's a good thing to have a lot of that kind of stuff around. But we haven't been so good at it. Hopefully that will change.
COLLINGS
Right. So how many people are we talking about now? And then we really need to backtrack to the early days.
ARKIN
Sure. Well, the number of intentional neighbors that have moved here is now at about 38, I believe. And of those, I'd say 20 to 25 are pretty active, and maybe a dozen not so active.
COLLINGS
And those 38 live in this building and in the surrounding four-plexes.
ARKIN
Most of them live in this, the big building, a few in the smaller building next door that is owned by our non-profit, and a few down the block. So there's quite an extent. Of course, the original vision was that not only would we have people that moved here intentionally, but the pre-existing neighbors, as well as people that just might move into the neighborhood and bypass a very complex process, moving into the buildings that we own, would eventually all become eco-villagers. That is, people that want to live in a more cooperative, in a more ecologically sensitive neighborhood. And so -- and that is still the vision that I have, and I think that maybe a few of my neighbors do share with me, where -- and I feel that I want to focus a lot more on that, as we did in the very beginning. Those first two years, those first three years, all of my time was spent on the streets; I knew pretty much every person in the neighborhood, or at least where they lived, and they knew me. And that was true of a few others of us that were organizing and interacting in those early years. And then when it was time to buy property, I think we talked about this last time, to some extent.
COLLINGS
Yes, how you organized the funding for the -- yeah.
ARKIN
Yeah. And so there was no time to do anything else but bury myself in learning how to be a real estate developer, that kind of thing. And then of course, once that happened, oh, it was managing a building that was like a total slum, and half-vacant, and also not really being experienced in that, and initially, we were planning to essentially farm out the management to a west-side firm that really wanted to learn about sustainability from us, and we wanted to learn about management from them. But as it turned out, it just didn't seem very viable that we would do that, and that we really needed to learn how to do it ourselves. And so we didn't eventually remain hooked up with that organization.But we did learn a lot about management, and we learned a lot about community development, and development of community, and I distinguish strongly between those two phrases, because most community development work is really about economic development, although maybe it's changing a little bit now. But the development of community is really about the social processes of learning to care about and love your neighbors. And being committed to learning to get along with them. And so that was probably the biggest challenge that we face, because in terms of an intentional community, people are moving to the community with all of the baggage that they have from mainstream society, and we were deeply committed to a very diverse community. And so it was not only the baggage from the mainstream, but it was the additional baggage that each of us was raised with, in terms of our particular class, gender, ethnicity, race. So it became -- and the one thing I would say, and I -- again if I'm repeating myself too much, you'll remind me that in spite of all that diversity, we were all somewhat weird, because we asked that people that came into our process would be committed to ecological and cooperative living, and those two expressions had radically different meanings to different people. And so it became, of course, communities, like human beings, go through different phases of development.
COLLINGS
And you had said that last time, the infancy, the adolescence, and how -- that you were going to talk about that this time. OK, so last time, you did sort of go into how you funded the building and paid off the loans and so forth. But let's just kind of go back, it's like the first day that you have the key to this building.
ARKIN
Oh. (laughter)
COLLINGS
OK. You walk in, and then what happens?
ARKIN
Oh, boy. Well, I should share with you that of course, we knew all the neighbors that already lived here, and they were very relieved that we finally closed on the building, because we kept telling them that it was coming, it was coming, it was coming, and you know how real estate closings go. And I, quite frankly -- I wish that I did, but quite frankly, I don't remember the first day that we walked into the building that we were owners; I just remember overall it being somewhat overwhelming, those first few weeks, and I think that essentially, I felt that the most important thing I needed to do was to find someone that would function as a manager. And that knew how to do some repairs. And because it was pretty --
COLLINGS
What kind of repairs did it need?
ARKIN
It was pretty awful. Well, for example, in one unit, when we opened the door, and it was about two weeks before we actually got in every single unit, and we opened the door, and there was overall about two inches of water on the floor and a faucet in the kitchen that was still going the size of a finger. And so that was pretty shocking. So the first thing we did was turn the water off, and the people were living in very slum-like conditions; I think I did talk last time about some of the families that were living there.
COLLINGS
You said that they were living in quite crowded conditions, and in fact, you lowered their rent.
ARKIN
Overall, within the first few months, we lowered rents about $25-$50, depending on what the rent numbers were. And we had believed, and when I say the "we" now, I'm talking -- essentially talking about my board, the board of CRSP.
COLLINGS
And what are their names?
ARKIN
At that time? Oh, gosh, it was a larger board than it is now. But Ian McIvaine, who was an architect, and he lived here in the community at the time, and now lives and works with architectural firm with his wife, who's also an architect, in Venice, and they have an architectural firm called Tierra Sol y Mar. And very sustainability-oriented, I should add. Jesse Mormon, who did not live here at the time but later moved into the community, and he is a human rights attorney, and an immigration attorney, which he and his partner, which is now his wife -- very interesting, isn't it? -- run an immigration law firm in downtown Los Angeles, and also started a non-profit organization involved in human rights issues.Ross Moster, who never lived here, but was a wonderful resource person, and is still kind of on our board; he was the founder of the Venice -- here in Venice, Los Angeles, food co-op, almost 30 years ago now. And he was their volunteer general manager for almost all of that time, and unfortunately, after he left, a few years after he left, the co-op actually folded. But he actually moved to Vancouver and is active in various things up there now. A wonderful person. And also, Ross was the person who did, in the '70s, the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. And I happen to believe it was the first People's Yellow Pages -- I'm sorry, not the -- the People's Yellow Pages, which was all about social justice and environmental things, and I believe it was the first People's Yellow Pages in the country, or one of the first.We had at that time Didicus Ramos, who was a very local environmental activist, and eventually went to planning school at UCLA. And then after that, he was a planner working for one of the small east county cities here in Los Angeles County, and very committed to recycling issues, gardening issues, he had done a lot of aquaculture issues, and I believe he now lives -- he moved away from LA about, oh, four or five years ago; I believe he lives in Atlanta. We haven't kept in touch, but I have reason to try to find him. Let me see who else we had at that time. Oh, we had Dwayne, from the beginning, Dwayne Wyatt, who also came out of UCLA planning school back in the early '80s, I believe, and he's a planner for the city of Los Angeles, and he has been very, very active in -- he created -- I believe he started the Black Planners Association in the city of Los Angeles, he was very active in planning in South Central Los Angeles.Let me see, I'm trying to think -- was that it? Didn't we have a few more, maybe a few more? For awhile, [Lara Morrison], who was our buildings manager here, was on our board, and at a certain point, I think we all felt it was better not for her to have that conflict of interest, being that she was an eco-villager that represented first eco-village, and that we were going to be going into negotiations at some point. And I'm trying to think of who else might have lived at one point. Ian, Jesse, and I, and there was one more. So, at any rate, those were the main folks on our board at that time. At this time, our board is only four people, but we take a lot of advice from the intentional community, and essentially, I would say that most of our proposals now come from the intentional community, and that we consider them, and they're oftentimes invited to or present at our board meetings now. And especially with the move forward with the limited equity housing cooperative and community land trust, so those are two things that we are kind of -- the board is following very closely now, because hopefully at the time that those transfers actually take place, it's going to be really, really simple.So that's my vision and my hope, and in spite of the tremendous contentiousness that there's been from time to time between -- or shall we say tension between -- and sometimes contentiousness between certain members of the community and the board and members of the community and myself, and certain members of the community and my organization, things at this time in May of 2007, are very mellow, and I think very loving and mutually respectful all the way around. So that is, I think I mentioned, into our kind of more mellow adolescent stage.
COLLINGS
So what's the relationship between your organization and the board, then?
ARKIN
My organization is called CRSP, C-R-S-P, Cooperative Resources and Services Project. And its organizational structure is, because it's a non-profit corporation, it has a board. And so the board I described is the board of my organization, and they are my boss, so to speak, even though --
COLLINGS
Now, you don't have a board for eco-village as a separate entity, or --
ARKIN
No. The Los Angeles Eco-Village is an unincorporated association that has no formal legal structure at this point. However, in any eco-village, there are many types of entities that will eventually, if not at the start-up, will eventually be associated with the eco-village, from unincorporated associations to various types of ad-hoc committees to various types of formal committees to non-profit organizations to for-profit businesses and so forth. And so at this time, I can name a number of different kinds of organizations that are already associated with LA Eco-Village. But LA Eco-Village itself has no formal legal structure. However, it meets weekly, and it makes all kinds of decisions about the buildings that are owned by CRSP; it essentially manages the buildings that are owned by CRSP, and it essentially makes pretty much all of the maintenance and repair decisions, it makes the rehab decisions, it makes the decisions about who will move here and who will not, who will be in our process. It certainly has a tremendous amount of input about what will happen in the neighborhood. It led the -- there was an eco-village that essentially led the movement to make Bimini Place an official shared street that will -- I'm not sure if I mentioned it or not.
COLLINGS
No, no.
ARKIN
One member, Joe Linton, who I believe was the person who essentially, on behalf of the city, wrote a proposal to the MTA to make Bimini Place a demonstration shared street, or traffic-calmed street. And it was -- the MTA funded that proposal to the city of Los Angeles to the tune of $250,000, and that was back in 1999 or 2000, Joe had organized a number of community workshops, ultimately -- I shouldn't actually tell you, maybe Joe will tell you this, but he might not, so you better get it here. (laughter) And he organized a series of workshops, including a workshop on the street, with like a canopy, it was hot, and all kinds of display boards about what a shared street might look like, and of course and fliered the whole neighborhood and invited neighbors to stop by and input in, bilingually as well. And so that was some of the kind of work that he did to prepare the proposal in the first place.And then when it was funded, it was funded as these kind of public bureaucracy's work for the money to become available six or seven years later. And so this is the year, and so -- or I should say last year, 2006, was when I think the city started to see, oh, this money is going to be available, we better do this. But it was six or seven years later, and so we kind of needed to go through workshops all over again for the final design, working with the department, the Bureau of Street Services and the Department of Transportation and the Council Office and the Planning -- well, the Council Office; I would say those three entities for sure, and the neighborhood. And so working with Council Office and Bureau of Street Services, Department of Transportation, and Joe and a couple of other eco-village volunteers organized a series of -- I believe of three or four meetings that we inputted as to how we wanted that design. And so the construction on the re-design of Bimini Place to make it this hopefully beautiful kind of -- my vision curvy, but I'm not so sure how curvy it's going to be with new trees and street furniture and permeable paving and art and so forth, it's going to start, theoretically, in December of 2007.
COLLINGS
Oh, fabulous
ARKIN
And the wonderful thing about it is that it is going to be certainly much more attractive than what we have now. The sad thing about it is that if we haven't brought more of the housing in the neighborhood under community control, it will radically gentrify --
COLLINGS
Raise rents, yeah.
ARKIN
-- the neighborhood.
COLLINGS
I was thinking that.
ARKIN
Thank you for reminding me; this is what we should be working on right now, is getting at least one of the larger buildings down the block under community control.
COLLINGS
And how do you go about that?
ARKIN
Well, there's an 18-unit building down the block that I haven't checked in on for the past several months, but I know that it was a very troubled building, and there was a lot of environmental and housing department violations, and there were some legal issues with that building, and I believe that the ownership was transferred to someone else, who was, I believe, a friend of the original owner. And I do believe that they do want to sell the building, and so I think that what's really important for us, at this point, is to essentially work with our larger constituency who has discretionary investment income and be able to get an offer going for that building as quickly as we can right now. And so I'm reminded of that, and it's on my to-do list to try to do that, and we do know some folks that are interested.So, and then -- well, there are some other issues that we're concerned about; the small school across the street, which I may or may not have mentioned. We would like to see that whole property come under community control for community development, and we do believe that the changing demographics of the Los Angeles Unified School District justify that letting go of that particular property for mixed-use development that would include a small charter school in it. There's a lot of tension now, between the school district and the charter school movement. (laughter)
COLLINGS
Yes, there is. (laughter)
ARKIN
You may have been reading about it in the LA Times. But since there's -- we're within -- I would say there's one -- there's a half a dozen brand-new schools either already built or on the drawing boards for the area that's walkable from here, and/or additions to existing elementary schools. And so I happen to feel that we probably got enough classrooms to cover the 200 students that currently go to this school. But, you know, the school district is its own form of government, whether or not we can work that politically or not, we don't know yet.
COLLINGS
Absolutely. OK, well, let's go back. So you come into the building, and how many -- (laughter)
ARKIN
(laughter) Occupied by 23 -- is that where you were going?
COLLINGS
Yeah.
ARKIN
There were 23 units occupied, and out of the 40, the other 17 were vacant, and all major slummy -- we thought that the reason that they had been vacant was because that the rents were too high for the area.
COLLINGS
40 were vacant.
ARKIN
No, no, no. The size of the building --
COLLINGS
14 were vacant.
ARKIN
Well, 17.
COLLINGS
17, OK.
ARKIN
17 and 23 is 40.
COLLINGS
Oh, OK. 23, you said.
ARKIN
So, yeah. 23 were occupied; 17 were vacant. We believed that the vacancy rate was so high, not only because it was still the fallout from the earthquake and the riots of '92 and '94 -- we bought the building in May of '96 -- oh, goodness, we have our 11 year anniversary coming up this month. But I think that what we realized, and it was a very, very contentious negotiation, but I think what we realized eventually is that units were not -- the vacancy rate was not that high because of the high rents; the vacancy rate was that high because the units were so dilapidated; they were so blighted; they were so slum-like that the money that would be required to bring them up to code would not be worth it to them, what they would have to put into the building up front would not be worth it to them, in terms of this particular landlord, which so many of the landlords, older absentee landlords of much older buildings in neighborhoods like this, are in very slumlike conditions. And it was before the systematic code enforcement unit of the LA Housing Department was in effect, and so a lot of the code violations are being rapidly corrected now, the past five or six years, seven. But this was still before that time, and I think that's why it was in such slumlike conditions. They were on their way to foreclosure, and this was a mom and pop operation that owned a lot of property in Los Angeles, and were probably a lot of other slum property that they probably were just making lots of money on. They were attorneys; they were very, very -- father and son attorney, very savvy, and very nasty and untrusting. We thought that we were actually working out a deal where they would be able to get a very good tax break that would be more valuable than some of the additional money. We could have foreclosed on them, and we chose not to, because we thought we would give them this other kind of break, but they didn't see that we were really trying to help them; they just thought we were trying to rip them off, when if we really wanted to rip them off, we could have foreclosed on them. It was a hard lesson for us to learn. But we were still in that place of -- we don't really want to put negative energy into anything we do; it was kind of like when I moved from that apartment from that landlord that wanted to raise my -- "I don't want to be involved in the negative energy" kind of thing. Well, we had a lot of hard lessons. (laughter) And we also had a policy that we didn't ever want -- that we wanted to not only break the back of real estate speculation in Los Angeles, and I say "we" -- I use --
COLLINGS
That's the royal we, now.
ARKIN
I learned from my community-mates over and over and over again, particularly one, that -- "To use the word 'we' is presumptuous on your part, Lois, and so would you please speak for yourself and not for me?" (laughter) And so I have come to be very cautious of that word. But I have learned many, many lessons, and I do think -- I believe that some of my neighbors who have been in leadership positions with me during these past 11 years or so have learned those lessons with me, and it's that we that I speak of. But I certainly had a vision that we would learn -- in eco-village, we would be a post-classist, post-racist, post-litigious society, and that was my vision.And I felt that I wanted to select residents in the front end of the eco-village formation that shared those values, that they too considered themselves post-racist, post-classist, post-litigious -- I should say post-genderist, post-sexist, kinds of people, that I had certainly done a lot of work on my head on the baggage of my upbringing, which was certainly just from a white upper-middle-class suburban Jewish family that was certainly of the '40s and '50s and '60s that was certainly racist, that was certainly sexist, that was certainly classist. And believed that I had done tremendous amount of my own personal growth in transforming myself away from those kinds of ways of being, and that was a very hard lesson in the intentional community to be constantly confronted personally by people, both persons of color and persons of different classes, and white folks from middle-class backgrounds similar -- perhaps similar to my own, perhaps not, with what others perceived as my shortcomings in those areas. And that was very, very painful for me, very painful kinds of things.And what I think I learned from that is as much as I believed that I had transformed myself from those -ist, -isms, you never stop; you never stop in this particularly society. That even if you personally think that you have done that, the institutional issues are so pervasive, are -- I mean, just the other day, I did something that I didn't even have second thoughts of, and one of my neighbors, in a very nice way, confronted me on it. And I thought, "Oh, wow. That was an elitist thing that I did."
COLLINGS
What was it?
ARKIN
And I -- (laughter) we were at a party, it was actually a housewarming party, and at a certain point -- we had had this kind of very intense dialogue going on with that person's friends, who were not at all connected to eco-village, other than they were friends with her, and she's a relatively new resident to the neighborhood. And so at a certain point, I was standing and talking to her, and I looked around the room, and where we had all been one big circle at one time, now there were little groups scattered all over the room. And in each little group of two or three or four people, there was one eco-villager present in each of those groups. And I said to her, "Oh, wow, look: there's one of us in each of the groups of your friends." (laughter) And she looked at me kind of weird, and she said -- I don't remember exactly what her words were, but the implication was that that was a little bit elitist. Why wouldn't it have been as, "Oh, isn't it nice how everyone's mixing together?" She said that would have been better wording for me to hear from you. And of course, I stopped and thought about it, and I thought of course, she was absolutely right, and that was --
COLLINGS
So you were sort of thinking of the eco-villagers as a sort of tribe, and that they were like inseminating --
ARKIN
Exactly.
COLLINGS
-- these little groups.
ARKIN
Exactly, because the whole group discussion had been very, very intense, about a number of ecological and sustainability issues that we were having with this group of people that were extraordinarily bright, well-educated, up-to-date on so many things, but their first exposure to eco-village, and their first exposure to their friend's new friends. And I do believe that from that very intense full-circle discussion, they might very well have gotten the impression of us being somewhat cult-like, as we talked about our passions for lowering our impacts, and our bicycle culture, and our feelings about cars and global greenhouse gases, and our friendships and our community dinners and our community meetings by consensus. And even though we are this extraordinarily diverse community with no common spiritual or religious orientation, which is oftentimes associated with cults, I could imagine how it could -- as I thought about it later, I could imagine how it could be perceived that way. Of course, I think too that -- sometimes we have visitors from lots of cities and rural areas from all over the world. Particularly I'm thinking of Sweden and Denmark and Germany. And when we take them on tours and then have dialogue afterwards, it's like everything that we do and that we're so proud of are kind of totally woven into the fabric of their everyday life where they live. And so it's nothing unusual; it's certainly not cult-like.And so -- but good things come out of a lot of these things. It's kind of like, OK, I went away from that party and thought, oh, what would really be a really good idea amongst -- here in eco-village, not only eco-village, but our larger constituency that we email regularly to several thousand, is to have drop-in dialogue groups for people that want to learn to be effective, most effective agents of change in the broader society, and how to engage people in those kinds of conversations that don't alienate them. And all of us have friends and families, and I regularly test out my ability to interact with the mainstream in those ways on my own family, who are going to love me no matter what. And I've seen changes, obviously, at this time in our lives, we have tremendous support from the mainstream media in terms of the criticalness of the changes that are going on in the planet. And I think I mentioned before, 20 years ago we had a 20-year opening to try to change things incrementally, and now we don't, and now we're even I think reading in the mainstream press that we need to make the changes deeply and quickly.
COLLINGS
Which is unlikely to happen, so --
ARKIN
Well, I don't know. I have done kind of a personal study of -- what kinds of things motivate people in the mainstream to change quickly and deeply? And I've come up with a list of about eight different things, and I think that it's a matter of those of us who want to facilitate that kind of change, it's learning how to address populations that are susceptible to radical and deep changes from those particular perspectives. And some of them -- is that something that's interesting to you?
COLLINGS
Yes, please.
ARKIN
Some of them are economics.
COLLINGS
Right, that's central.
ARKIN
So we have a Congress, potentially, and potentially a President in another year and a half, potentially (laughter), that could introduce -- that could create legislation that change things very radically, economically, in terms of taxing carbon, taxing the -- right now, we subsidize the non-renewable resource explorations, and we don't subsidize things that are renewable particularly heavily. So that could change very quickly. Also, the carbon -- just a plain carbon tax on things that we buy. There are -- so economics could also give tremendous breaks to the things that are much more ecologically/sustainability-oriented, like renewable energies, and authentically green products and so forth. Also, congestion pricing, in other countries they already have this technology, it's so easy, that people actually pay for the use of our freeways and highways and so forth, directly, rather than just through their taxes. So economically, for me, it's a no-brainer; it can happen, and it can happen locally as well as on a county and state level as well as federally, in terms of the global movement for more sustainable ways of being. Fear is one way that people change radically and deeply, but depending on what it is that they're afraid of --
COLLINGS
Yeah, but not always rationally.
ARKIN
Right. But health issues, for example. Fear for their children or their grandchildren; fear for -- obviously, fear has been -- fear combined with health issues has been a major way that we have radically reduced our smoking and been able to pass our anti-smoking and secondhand smoke laws all over the country now, and spreading throughout the world -- not fast enough, from my perspective, when I go to visit other countries. But still, fear and health issues. Art, all forms of art, have been a way that people have changed radically, whether it's fiction or movie or music or poetry or dance or theatre, visual arts, that has changed people's lives, quickly and radically and deeply.
COLLINGS
Absolutely.
ARKIN
Charisma, whether it be the charisma of a leader or the charisma of a non-profit organization, or a movie star -- I'm sure that Ed Begley, Jr., and many people that have worked -- Daryl Hannah, I'm sure have been a great inspiration to many people that might never have made the changes, but they have made such incredible changes, and they speak so eloquently of those, how to live on this planet, and they have a lot of charisma. And then love, you fall in love with someone, or you love someone who's your family member, and the condition of continuing in those relationships sometimes is that you change or I leave. (laughter) So that sometimes works too. Or that you want to please your loved one, and then through the process of learning to please them, quickly and deeply, you'll find, "Oh, wow, this is a better way of living."
COLLINGS
Yeah. "This actually works."
ARKIN
"I'm actually raising the quality of my life and lowering my impact." So -- and a few others.
COLLINGS
Yeah. So you were talking a little bit about relations with the community, and you mentioned that the board -- not the board, but the members meet weekly and made decisions which they submit to the CRSP board, makes recommendations.
ARKIN
Well, I would say that there are actually very few that they submit to go on to the CRSP board, because the board has essentially empowered them to pretty much run the buildings. And if they are going to make major architectural changes to the buildings, that is something that needs to go -- minor architectural changes is not something we take to the board, but if it's major, like they're going to want to start building a third story to a two-story building, and then also, if it's a major expense, that's something we want to take to the board. Like when we were recarpeting all of our halls, or when we were putting solar power on the building next door, these were major expenses that needed to be approved by the board.The other thing that goes to the board that comes out of the community sometimes is if they are proposing a new business of some sort, and want to use the property in some way to support that business, such as the Cultivating Sustainable Communities as a new non-profit organization -- I shouldn't say new, it's relatively new, maybe six or seven, eight, ten years old now. But has a small staff now, and an executive director. And they are a sister organization; they're an organization that is working side-by-side with us to create the community land trust, and they wanted to have an office in this building, and we're very aligned with our non-profit sustainability-oriented purposes, and so that went to the board, to give them a space for their office here in the building at a very, very low rent.And the Bicycle Kitchen -- somehow, the Bicycle Kitchen that started here now has a commercial space; I'm not sure that it ever actually got permission, because it grew so organically and we all loved it so much, including the board, half of whom lived here at the time -- or, not, maybe not, but some of them.
COLLINGS
So how are these meetings run? What are the -- I'm sorry.
ARKIN
Yeah, but before I go into that, let me just say that from a legal perspective, what the board of directors is responsible for in a non-profit organization, according to state law, it is ultimately financially responsible for the financial and legal aspects of the corporation. And so anything that significantly affects finances or legal stuff, we go to the board. We are considering an eviction, we go to the board. And that is something that has happened from time to time, unfortunately. And so my dream of being a non-litigious society was not fully manifested, but for the most part, we are very fortunate, in that we really haven't had much legal issues in all of these 27 years of our corporation, very, very minor.
COLLINGS
Yeah, that is very fortunately, actually.
ARKIN
A few very justifiable evictions, and other than that, that's all. Although from time to time, there certainly has been a covert threat, but not any kind of overt.
COLLINGS
Now, what kinds of things would cause people to be evicted, or to be covertly threatened with eviction?
ARKIN
Well, in one case, we had someone who moved here that was a charming, absolutely charming, charming person, and a singular exhibit of leadership, and we were very thrilled to have her come here. But it soon became apparent, after three or four months, that she was here to pay her rent for two or three months, and then she stopped paying her rent, and then to be in a very ugly relationship with the organization while we went through the two or three-month period of going through an eviction, which she had apparently done with many other landlords, which we unfortunately did not check out her references before she moved here, and that was a very strong lesson. And so we did finally end up in court, and the arrangements that were made with her on a regular basis is that just prior to eviction, she negotiates to leave. And so this was a very clever person.Another person that we evicted was someone who lived in the building when we bought the building, and was obviously a mentally deranged person who had been on the streets, and also did not pay her rent, and moved, as with the prior person, had moved a boyfriend into her unit with her, and this one had also -- or a male friend, anyway -- into her unit with her, who was also somewhat weird in ways that we were not. And this mentally challenged person, shall we say, or mentally disabled, or psychologically ill person, was a person who would walk around, go walk out on the middle of Vermont with a blanket wrapped around her in the middle of the night, would knock on people's doors in the middle of the night asking them for money, was very, very disconcerting to have that person here. We worked diligently with resource organizations to get help for her and her family, to get help for her and find alternative housing for her where she could get more help. She continually refused, and so we ultimately ended up evicting her. And even in the courtroom, there was no -- she wasn't present, as I recall, but we tried to get the judge to do a court order to -- I think, I'm not sure, to get her some mental help, but -- I don't know what happened to her. So that sort of thing.So what we did more recently, more recently -- last year, there were still a few people here that were people that weren't a good fit, were not participating, were quite contentious, that I certainly preferred not to live here. And with respect to the community, because those persons had very good friends that lived here, and even though -- what we decided to do is, in conjunction with our board, who authorized it, is to provide a no-fault separation option, so we sent it out to anyone in the community, but essentially, it was -- what we hoped would happen is that the people that were not really a good fit for living here would pick up on it and take advantage of it.
COLLINGS
And what would be an example of not being a good fit?
ARKIN
Not being a good fit is, particularly after we created participation requirements that we had never had, we had always told people that we expected their participation --
COLLINGS
Participation in what sense?
ARKIN
In terms of coming to meetings regularly, functioning on committees, coming to community dinners, to community special events, to community retreats, that we had an expectation of all that, but we didn't make it a requirement. And the community in the past few years has been working on these kinds of things, and has eventually -- did make a requirement, and asked members of the community to sign to a rental addendum about certain kinds of ways of behaving in the community that had to do with recycling and kind of things -- not having overnight guests forever, or visitors without permission for more than two weeks, or something like that.So -- not making major changes to your unit without going through the building committee. All these kinds of things. Plus the participation requirements, and so people had the option of signing onto that or not, and several people did not sign onto the participation requirements that were here intentionally, and several people that were here intentionally did not even sign onto the rental agreement addendum that the community had established through lots of hard work. And so those people increasingly became people that were kind of inappropriate for living here, because our purpose, at least my purpose, in starting the eco-village, was to demonstrate that the processes are for creating a healthy and sustainable community, and that we do that by our participation in the community.And so that was a lesson learned for me, that that is something that I believe in the beginning I should have required people to sign onto; I did not essentially create a structure in the beginning, me and my board, and those founding people that I worked with in the beginning, my attitude was, and no one corrected me on it, and not because I think they were trying to make a mess of things, but because none of us had the consciousness as to what was essentially required, although I certainly had the academic background in the development of intentional communities, but not the experience. And so essentially, I think, in my head, what I had was, "Oh, let's just get as many people here as we can that are interested in more ecological and cooperative living patterns, and when we get them all here, we'll figure out how to make it all work." And that is something that I cannot advise people strongly enough against doing. That is not workable, unless -- it's like winning the lottery, that somehow that happens. (laughter)Founders of intentional communities, eco-villages, co-housing communities, shared houses, even, need to have a strong vision as to what it is that they want to do, and a mission statement that people sign onto, and a structure for people to move into, and signed agreements as to -- people agree to certain initial policies or rules that you establish. And if it's like, if within your first year, you need to volunteer ten hours a month in one of the following committees, or two of the following five committees; you need to come to community dinners at least once a month, we have them weekly; a community meeting at least once a month, we have them weekly. And so forth, so they do have this kind of a structure that people understand what kind of a commitment they're making. And then you need to hold them accountable to those commitments. So that's what I didn't do, and that's what the early founders and the early members of the intentional community didn't do.The other major thing that we learned from is that I was -- I have always been an idealist about democracy, and to me, the ultimate in grassroots democracy is consensus decision-making. So of course, the way we will develop this community is through consensus decision-making. And so CRSP, the non-profit organization, always provided a variety of workshops, forums, special events, speakers, on all manner of the subjects that we're all about, but we never required eco-villagers to attend any of those workshops. Not even the ones on consensus decision-making. And so we had a decision-making process that people were not very adept at, and didn't know how to use it. And yet they were fully empowered at every week's community meeting, and so people might come to a community meeting, and find, "Oh, there's this particular issue on the table," and have no background in the issue, no background in how the consensus process really works, but, oh, they were, "Oh, I don't agree with that, so I'm blocking." Or, you know. So this became the basis for tremendous contentiousness within the community, and eventually was such that people in the community, as people in -- I don't know if I've mentioned this before -- oftentimes people in condo associations --
COLLINGS
I was thinking about that when you were talking last time.
ARKIN
Yeah. Other kinds of non-profit and community organizations that maybe are not particularly empowered in their families or in their work: "Oh, here's a way to climb right up the power ladder and be in charge." And so that's what people could do here, and they could then, if they were not trained in the processes for healthy, sustainable, cooperative, consensual community, could hold that community hostage to their wishes, if they showed up to the meetings each week, they could -- you know, a particular issue that they were passionate about, or in some cases, there were people here that just really loved to fight; that's what got their juices going. They loved a good battle. And so whatever was black then was going to be white to them.
COLLINGS
What were some of the issues that people would --
ARKIN
Cats. (laughter) It's so funny, when I was at an international conference last year on eco-villages in Tokyo, Japan -- I didn't mention that?
COLLINGS
No.
ARKIN
And I was on a panel, about half a dozen other people that were eco-village founders around the world, and we had fabulous translators, and double translators doing simultaneous translation and everything. And so when it came time to wrap up the panel, and the moderator said, "So, if you could say the one or two issues that have been the most problematical in your community, what would you say they were?" And I was the first one to speak, and so I -- just like I just did with you, I said, "Cats." And it was so funny: there was silence, total silence in the audience with two or three hundred people, and between the translators. And they said, "Would you repeat?" And I said, "Cats." And they looked at each other quizzically; they couldn't figure it out. And I said, "Cats, as in an animal," -- finally, I said, "Cats, as in animals with four legs." (laughter) So we didn't really have time to discuss it very much, but that is an issue that has come up again and again and again, regularly, every one or two years. When we acquired the building, we had probably about a dozen cats, most of which were feral cats, and there had been a woman who lived here before we bought the building who had all these litters of cats and left them here when she left, and then we had people who already lived here who were passionate cat-lovers, and other people who came to our block to feed the feral cats, and then people who moved in that were in love with cats, and people that dropped off more cats here.
COLLINGS
Oh, no. (laughter)
ARKIN
And we had cats that pooped in the halls and urinated in the halls, and we had cats that were in and our of people's units, or cats that urinated in the units. And you know, once -- if you have wood floors, once that gets into the wood, it's very, very difficult to get out. And so it was a very contentious issue, and in spite of the fact that many of us who did not want cats roaming the halls of our building and our community spaces, because we made -- eventually made a wonderful community room a few years after we bought the building, was very, very hard once they were in -- and the cat lovers were passionate, totally passionate. So it's interesting.So we say -- on the tours nowadays, we have about a 300-400 foot animal enclosure; right now we have only one rabbit, but at certain times, we had two rabbits, and half a dozen chickens, and we're getting half a dozen chicken again soon, but it's been many years since we had them. But we say, when we bring the tours to the animal enclosure, we say, "And here we come to the issue of the animal versus the vegetable people. The vegetable people think that this animal enclosure is a really nice place for rabbits and chickens that are very social animals, and that are always sticking very closely together, and that it's quite large enough for them, maybe even for a little pygmy goat, or small pig, and animals that all get along together." And so they're very pleased with this. And then there are the animal people, who really think all of the vegetables in our garden should be caged and the animals run free. And so that kind of contentiousness ran wild for years after we started the gardens. The one wonderful eco-villager here, who is one of our founders, and just an extraordinary human being and a master gardener, who was gardening initially, and then when cat poop was regularly found in the gardens, decided he did not want to garden anymore. So we have lost, over the years, have lost many years of him gardening. Now, eventually, the community -- also the community has created -- I know this all sounds very silly, but --
COLLINGS
No, I mean, this is what really happens.
ARKIN
[Diana Weave Christian], who wrote a fabulous book called Creating -- let's see, the name of the book, shame on me. Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools for Starting Eco-Villages and Intentional Communities. And she goes all over the country and gives workshops and talks on this sort of thing, and she says, over and over again, the three most common problems that people have in intentional communities are: pets, pets, and -- (laughter) no, she doesn't actually say pets, pets, and pets, but pets are one of her three main ones. I think pets and -- because they have been so dominant in our community, and I forget what the other two are, because apparently we haven't had a problem with them. Maybe money, I'm not sure. And children, children -- pets, children, and something else, but I forgot what the third one was. And there are some eco-villages in various parts of the world, particularly in rural areas, although it applies to urban as well, do not have any domesticated animals such as cats or dogs, because of their tendency to put the wildlife out of balance in the area. And so that's happened here; we have some of the cats that live here who have been observed over and over and over again attacking songbirds.
COLLINGS
Oh, yeah. That's what they do.
ARKIN
And because so many people feed the cats, they don't even take care of the mice. So from time to time -- although in the beginning when we bought the building, that was one thing we never had, was mice. And eventually we did from time to time have mice and have to use traps -- but not poisons. And so anyway, this has still been an ongoing problem. Oh, the thing that's interesting is that over the years, the community has actually created policy that said, "OK, there will be no more indoor/outdoor cats. Exclusively indoor cats will be considered for residency on a case-by-case basis." And so there are today probably a half a dozen people that have exclusively indoor cats.But then there came someone along that adopted this stray cat from someplace who was just the sweetest, most friendly cat, who ignored the rule, and raised her cat as an indoor/outdoor cat. Obviously, lots of eco-villagers came to love this cat very much, and so in spite of the fact that she was in violation of the policy that the community had consensed on, the cat remained. And this became a cat that -- again, as sweet as it was, constantly attacking songbirds. So now that person has moved and taken that cat with -- the person has taken the cat, so we are very relieved, and now it's a new era, where at this point, we have no more -- we have only one indoor/outdoor officially owned cats, and we have three feral cats, which the community has agreed will be caught and taken to shelters. And so we'll see how it goes, and if this will be the end of the decade-plus-long era of cat contentiousness, or if it will continue on and through the indefinite future.
COLLINGS
Now, you said that she violated the policy. So do you have a process, sort of an eviction process that is not a legal eviction process? You know, obviously, if somebody doesn't pay their rent, there are clear city -- yeah. And in fact, if they have signed something and they're not allowed to have a cat and they do have a cat, that's also grounds. But do you have something that is just sort of like a kind of community based eviction process that doesn't actually go through the city?
ARKIN
Yes. Well --
COLLINGS
And how does that work?
ARKIN
Well, we don't, because there's no such thing as such a --
COLLINGS
But I mean, I'm talking about --
ARKIN
(inaudible) city, through the legal system, yes.
COLLINGS
I'm talking about like pressure that would be put to bear.
ARKIN
Yeah. Right. Well, this is something that the community has on its to-do list, the intentional community meeting has on its to-do list, is to actually develop an exit strategy for people who are not a good fit in the community. Now, two things -- a couple of things are in process; I started to say earlier, we had, last year, we had something we called a no-fault separation agreement, and so that went out to the whole community, but essentially it was targeted for people who were non-participating, to give them an option. Because most of the people who live here are fairly low-income. If you're fairly moderate to middle-income, and it's not a fit for you, you can pretty much afford to go move anyplace. But if you're a low, very low to low-income person, and you need several thousand dollars to get a start in a new place, you don't have that option unless it's coming to you from someplace. And so what we decided to do with the approval of our board was to be able to give people up to $1,500 in cash to move, if they wanted to take advantage of the no-fault separation.
COLLINGS
And what if they felt like there was no fault on their own and they weren't interested in moving?
ARKIN
Well, that's the exact idea of the no-fault separation: no fault. They're not at fault, we're not at fault; it's just obviously, by this time -- and it's voluntary; you can take advantage of it or not. And because -- until the community actually comes up with an exit strategy that becomes consensed-upon policy, we -- now, the other thing, of course --
COLLINGS
Because through the city, you can't evict people just because they're not liked, right?
ARKIN
Well, the -- we have a very special arrangement with the city. And I think there are probably several non-profits that do. Because we're non-profits, and we applied for an exemption from rent-control, we did actually receive an exemption from rent-control. And so we just with our current residents, we were on a month-to-month rental agreement, and so we legally could give anyone 30-day notice to leave.
COLLINGS
Oh, OK. That's how you do it.
ARKIN
But we -- no, we don't do it. We believe that we are people that kind of go by the spirit of the rent-control law, even if not by the letter of it. And so we have never evicted anyone that wasn't for a legal reason, not paying your rent. And even when we were threatening eviction, to let them know that we needed to do this, because it was our fiduciary responsibility to proceed with an eviction proceeding when they weren't paying their rent, we, in most cases, never did go all the way to an eviction, and did end up giving them the back rent that they -- did not collect the back rent that they were responsible for. And so in the no-fault separation, I think three people have taken advantage of it now, and it not only included the back rent, anywhere between one and five months of back rent, plus cash to go forward with. So it was very -- much more generous than we needed to be with any of them, and had no legal obligation to do any of it.And with some of our pre-existing neighbors that were underhoused, I think I did mention that we helped them buy a house in one case, and help them get a much better apartment in another. So we were -- I'd like to think that we were a landlord with a conscience, and certainly understands issues of social justice, and the issues of housing in Los Angeles. And we have told some of our other neighbors that were pre-existing neighbors who have been there for many, many, many years, and we have told them, assuming that they have a good rental record with us, we would be able to help them acquire a house, because we have those kinds of resources within our networks of affordable housing. So, but so far, we haven't, other than the one that I already mentioned; they're not prepared to move at this point.But we do see ourselves moving forward with becoming an increasingly car-free neighborhood, particularly when we're going to lose quite a few parking spaces with the new street design. And I do believe there's a way to help radically reduce the number of automobiles in the neighborhood, and we need to be working on that right now, so that we don't have the contentiousness that conceivably could come with the new street design, but also, we don't provide -- for any of our intentional neighbors, we provide no auto amenities; they have street parking only. And for our pre-existing neighbors in the smaller building next door, where all of them are driving households, they -- several of them already had off-street parking when we bought the building, and so little by little, we're going to essentially take back that off-street parking and the garages that some of them have, that some of whom have in their rental agreements and some of them who don't, who are just using them and don't have them in their rental agreements. And so when that happens, and we hope that we can do that in a very friendly, non-contentious way, then that maybe a reason why they might decide that they want to leave. And we would find a way to help them. So.
COLLINGS
OK.

END OF Arkin.Lois.6.05.23.2007.mp3

1.7. Session 6 ( May 23, 2007)

UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 6, 5-23-2007 Arkin.Lois.6.05.23.2007.mp3
COLLINGS
OK, good morning, Lois. It's May 23, 2007. Jane Collings interviewing Lois Arkin in her home and office. And last time we discussed the formation, founding/formation of eco-village, and we talked about the community and how you keep it together, some of the ground rules and structures for community organization and so forth. And I thought that this time, we could talk a little bit about the philosophy of the community, with regard to sustainable technology, your gray water system that you have out in the back. Ideas that you might have regarding solar -- I mean, one of the things that's been interesting is how developed your community is, in terms of its social mores, and so I thought we could just talk a little bit about the --
ARKIN
-- more the physical aspect.
COLLINGS
The physical aspects.
ARKIN
And perhaps the economic as well.
COLLINGS
Yeah. So before we get into all of that, just as sort of a follow-up to our last conversation, what aspects of your original vision have changed? Now that you're sort of in it on the ground, and what have your biggest surprises been? I mean, you wanted to sort of move forward with an intentional community; you're now living in an intentional community. Is it what you thought it would be?
ARKIN
Well, let me just preface that with your introductory comment about me being the one that keeps it all together. And for several years in the beginning, I was that person, but for many years now, I haven't really been. What I think I see myself as is a holder of the vision, and so there's -- and the only person that has full continuity from the very beginning to the present.
COLLINGS
Institutional knowledge.
ARKIN
Exactly. So, but believe me, my other 35-40 intentional neighbors have really been the ones keeping it together for many years now, and I've been saying for probably about five years that, oh, it's OK, I could die tomorrow, and eco-village would go on. And that's, you know, I think I might have mentioned before, that's the dream of most founders, is there a life after you of what you founded. And so I'm very pleased about that. But in terms of the physical aspects of eco-village, or the ecological, I think I've said earlier, that an eco-village is essentially the integration and the maximization of connections within and between the physical or ecological and the social and the economic systems of a neighborhood.And I would say that a lot of people do come here, and they go away, and they -- "What really makes that an eco-village? I didn't see any gray water system or any solar or any wind energy," or stuff like that. So it's a big disappointment, and I always have to try to pull that out of people who come on tours: what was a disappointment to you? What did you like about it? What stayed with you, what did you learn from it? And because a lot of things are hidden, and a lot of times, you don't see them, you forget to mention them. So for example, on our smaller building, the eight-unit building, very large units but a smaller number of units adjacent to our larger 40-unit building, there are three units which are about 1,000 square feet each that are completely solar. And so they're net metered, which means, of course, that the meter runs backwards, if there's enough sun to make it happen. And we have a vision for this larger building to at least initially become -- to have a solar hot water system. It actually did have a solar hot water system when we bought the building in 1996, but that system was an old system that had been installed in the early '80s, when that first started becoming popular in the state administration, and there was all kinds of extraordinary rebates for doing that, and very, very quickly in that era, there were all of these scam hot water, solar hot water contractors, and this building, the prior owners got one of those scam contractors, so the system didn't really work. So eventually, we dismantled that system and haven't replaced it yet, but we hope to do that in the not-so-distance future. So that's what that is.But the things that we really focused and concentrated on, physically -- obviously, we talked about the first three years, and it was like on the street and working with the kids, doing little micro-gardens and fruit trees and so forth. And also eliminating cars from the lives of most of the people who founded the village; all of us got rid of our cars. So that was a major physical aspect of our lives. And then when we bought our first building in 1996, the building was in such extraordinarily poor condition, and such slumlike conditions, our thing was to essentially get the units livable. And to do that, in as practical a fashion as we could, using the policy in our rehabs and maintenance and repairs of trying to use materials that are most local, most recycled, least toxic and least polluting. Did I say all of this already?
COLLINGS
Just, in the way that you just did, kind of like outlining it, we didn't talk about any specific renovation projects.
ARKIN
So this -- number one, did I talk about scraping the paint and wallpaper off the unit walls? So all of the units, as happens oftentimes with landlords in neighborhoods like this, whenever they're renovating them for the next tenant, they just slap another coat of paint on. So our work, initially, in rehabbing, was number one, turning off the water. (laughter)
COLLINGS
Yeah, you talked about that. (laughter)
ARKIN
I think I did. (laughter) But also, scraping 10 to 12 layers of wallpaper off the units as we started to rehab them, and then, at that time in 1996, there was such a thing as no-VOC primers and paints and finishes, but they were hard to find, and they were expensive. But we were determined that we would use them, and so we hunted them down. And we did find them, and so everything, the wallpaper and the paints were scraped off down to the [lathe] and plaster -- the building was still pretty free of drywall; it was lathe and plaster that we scraped it down to, and then used these no-VOC primers and paints and finishes. What we did with the floors, all the units were carpeted, and of course, what we had been learning is that carpet, no matter how eco the carpet might be, is fairly unhealthy. And so we decided we were not going to have carpet in any of our units, and of course, the carpet in most units was in terrible condition anyway.So we really struggled with what to do with our waste, what to do with the carpet that we are taking up. So we ran free adds in The Recycler, and eventually on Craig's List when it became popular, free ads, we thought, oh, sound studios might -- you know, people that were making home sound studios might take the carpeting, and then we learned that, permaculturally, there are people that will use the carpeting on the ground to make ponds and pools. And some of the underlayment of our carpeting at that time was jute, it was an organic material; it was so old there was no chemicals -- it was before the chemical age, so to speak. So we started using some of that in the gardens, so that just kind of decomposed naturally. And -- but there was a good deal of it also that went to the landfill, but we did give away quite a bit, and we composted some of it. But eventually, we got rid of pretty much all the carpeting in the building that was in the units, including -- interestingly enough, our halls were bare when we bought the building, floors were bare, and the sound, because that -- I'm not sure; I don't remember whether we took out one floor, and one floor was bare or not, but at any rate, the building is not very well-insulated, sound-wise, and it was just like a drum every time someone walked down the hall.But we lived that way for about two years, and then we made a connection, I don't remember exactly how, with the Palm Springs Convention Center, and they had a contract with Interface Carpeting Company, and incidentally, in yesterday or today's -- I think yesterday's New York Times, there's a fabulous interview with Ray Anderson, who's the founder of Interface, which is the most -- supposedly the most eco carpet company, certainly in the US and possibly in the world, and certainly the first in the US; I'm not sure about the rest of the world. But he's a very, very strong advocate for sustainable development and sustainable business processes. And so at any rate, the Palm Springs Convention Center was getting rid of their old carpet tiles. These were like 18-inch squares that were made by Interface, and Interface was moving toward the idea of leasing the carpet tiles, especially to commercial users. And so at the end of life, they would take the carpet tiles back, melt them down in a closed-loop system, and remanufacture them. Obviously, the carpet tiles are still made out of chemicals, but closing the industrial loop was an innovation that Interface was doing, and the idea of leasing carpets -- and so at any rate, Palm Springs, they were not taking back their initial tiles; they were happy to give them away.And so we had one of our board members who had a little pickup truck and bring two or three loads back of these tiles, because they were very, very heavy, and then we carpeted with those old ugly -- they were pretty worn, I mean, not very attractive at all -- carpet tiles, and at least that cut down on the sound for awhile. And we weren't in a position, financially, at that time, to do anything major, in terms of carpeting the halls. And then eventually, we did have a hall carpet committee that worked for two years, coming up with a plan for the hall carpeting. It was very, very ugly, what we had in there, and people were very embarrassed about having -- I mean, they were more embarrassed when the floors were bare and ugly, and now they were a little bit less embarrassed, but it was still slummy-looking. And so eventually we got these new Interface carpet tiles which you see now, which are really quite attractive. And we got lots of extras, so if a couple get soiled, you can replace them with the extras that we have.So we had this four-policy item, least polluting, least toxic, most local, most recycled, for materials, but also, what I really wanted us to have too was always a waste disposal plan. And sometimes it's easier said than done, and just like the policies for how to -- least toxic, least polluting, most local, most recycled -- if you have an emergency, you have an emergency plumbing problem, and you got sewage coming out here or there or whatever, sometimes you don't have the time to do the research, and you just go to what's at the local hardware store as quickly as you can. And so we did have plenty of that; I assure you, we have some disgusting PVC in our building here and there. PVC is disgusting because the manufacture process is polyvinyl chloride; the manufacturing process is extremely toxic to people who work with it. There's a fabulous documentary about this. And it also leeches, and I'm sure that it's a very unhealthy thing, but hasn't been outlawed yet, but hopefully soon. So that is what happened with building materials.We didn't do any more wallpaper, and we did uncover, interestingly, several tags, that when the building was built in the 1920s, 1922 to be exact, many of the tradespeople tagged the wall before painting it or wallpapering it, and we uncovered a lot of that. Some of them we saved, and it's kind of interesting; there's one in the community room from the wallpaper hangers union, and of course, the union movement was just coming up strong at that time, so it was very, very interesting to discover those and save them. What was really interesting is how beautiful the handwriting was of these people. Yes, those were the days. Handwriting class; I can even remember in the '40s. So, at any rate, then -- let me see, what else? Our -- so our ecological way of doing things was more about conservation than it was about sexy technology. We did have someone that lived with us, whom I believe I mentioned, T.H. [Thomas Henry] Culhane, and if I talked about this at some length, I don't want to talk about it again, but he lived off the grid unit that he created. Did --?
COLLINGS
You mentioned it, yeah.
ARKIN
So he -- his philosophy was that anything -- and he was with us for about five years, I'd say. And his philosophy was that anything that can be done in a middle class home, suburban home, using conventional energy systems of any kind, I can do in my 435 square foot apartment unit in eco-village and demonstrate it to the world as the community tours would go through. He was working on a PhD in international development at UCLA, and was using LA Eco Village and his unit as a demonstration for teaching himself how he would teach other people around the world. And so he had a television and an answering machine and a freezer and a fridge and a television set, every electronic device that you would want, and he had what we called guerilla solar on the roof. I think I did mention this. And then he also had a little living machine in his bathtub, with aquatic plants and animals, and recirculating the 20 gallons.
COLLINGS
No, you didn't mention that.
ARKIN
OK, so he's got like 20 gallons in his bathtub, and a wonderful little platform that he would stand on to take a -- it was actually a stone, a nice big flat stone in his bathtub, and these little aquatic plants all around and little animals in the water in the bathtub, and about 20 gallons that kept recirculating all day long, so he could take a shower in the morning, and the water would recirculate, he could come home at night, take another shower with clean water. But the filters -- eventually, I think he discovered something was not quite right in the filtering system, so he needed to do more research.But that was kind of interesting, and -- oh, he was a musician; he had all kinds of speakers and electric guitar, and all of that was hooked up to his guerilla solar on the roof. And we always felt that, oh, if anyone ever came and inspected our roof from the city, we'd be in deep trouble. But they didn't, and he did that, and it was very -- he was a wonderful spokesperson, and did several interviews; I think we had a really good write-up in the Christian Science Monitor once, and in the LA [Los Angeles] Times that really focused on him and what he was doing here. So it was really good. And so that's where a lot of people that have seen that publicity from around T.H.'s work believe that we're much more advanced, technologically, than we actually are.Oh, he also had a composting toilet; he took out his regular toilet and put in a homemade composting toilet in his bathroom, which was a wonderful piece of technology, very, very simple technology, and I'm hoping that we will have more people here in the future that want to do that. No odors, nothing, and the human waste condenses radically within a fairly short period of time, and within two years, it can easily be used in your gardens. Unless it gets heated to a certain amount, I think it's 167 degrees Fahrenheit, if it gets heated like that for something like 64 or 72 hours, it can be used fairly quickly in the gardens. But also, I happened to believe that if one is a vegetarian, the human waste is a lot safer than if one is not. (laughter) But at any rate, those are things that I'm sure that our technology will advance very, very quickly as we rapidly are threatened with our local water supplies throughout this country and all over the world, of course. And interestingly, my mother, who lives in South Florida, says they are on extreme water rationing right now, and there are police officers scouting the neighborhoods, and anyone that's like watering their lawns when they shouldn't be are getting $100 tickets. So I thought that was pretty interesting; I don't know why we haven't done something like that here.
COLLINGS
That was put in place at one point, but it was mostly ignored, and there was no enforcement.
ARKIN
Yeah. So -- well, now with our neighborhood council system, maybe there is a way of helping one another be better neighbors on behalf of all of us. But at any rate, that was what happened on water. Some of us do probably the simplest kind of gray water thing, and we don't all do it all the time, I don't think, but some of us do it some of the time, in terms of dumping our dishwater out the window. And I mean, I also use tapwater right now; I have used filtered water in the past. But since our tap water tests better than most purchased water, I guess I've been using tap water. But I do know we have some lead in our pipes, but we've been advised, if you run the water for 20 to 30 seconds, that will flush the lead out, that if you haven't run your water for six or eight hours. So when I put the water on in the morning, I do collect it and kind of spill it outside. But now that may be contaminating the soil. But the answer to pollution, when it comes to lead in the soil, is dilution. So the more organic material you add, the less problem there is with lead. And there isn't any significant lead take-up into plants, so that's another issue that we actually researched and had one of the nations topmost researchers actually come and give us a talk on that.But getting back to the water, so we little by little installed water-saving devices throughout the building, in terms of our faucets and our low-flush toilets. And so many of our toilets were the original toilets that were installed in the '20s, and still working, amazingly. Oh, the quality of the things that were built then, it was truly amazing. But they were seven-gallon toilets, and so now I think we're all down to 1.4, 1.5-gallon toilets and a lot of us don't flush regularly. What's the old saying we used to have? -- "If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down." And so a lot of us don't flush regularly, but then I have to tell you, there are trade-offs in that sort of thing, and that is that if you let there be too much toilet paper building, you're liable to plug up the drains. So be sure to flush at least every three or four times, even if it's yellow. (laughter) So at any rate, so that's essentially our water conservation.In terms of our gardens, we try to -- the garden committee tries to teach people how to feel the earth to know whether it's watered. And we don't have any drip irrigation system or anything like that, but we water, try to water in the morning, and we're talking about watering vegetables, so then we're buying less vegetables that have come 1,500 miles by truck. So we tried to water in the morning or at dusk, but the way in which it's important to find out whether something really needs to be watered or not, number one is to keep everything well mulched, but number two is to stick your finger in the ground, and if the earth falls apart like sand, then you need to water, and then if it sticks together a little bit, like just even a little bit, it's still doing OK. And so we tried to, many of us do try to teach all of our neighbors involved in watering that that's the way to determine whether the gardens need water or not, regardless of just whether it's your turn or not to do it on the watering schedule.And so that's where that -- but what we found overall -- well, then the other -- let me just talk about the trash for a minute. We have two -- when we bought this building, the big building, we had two three-yard trash bins, those huge things, and they got picked up twice a week, and there were 23 units occupied. Within two years of buying -- less than two years, I believe, of buying the building, immediately we changed it to one pickup a week I think fairly shortly after we bought the building, and we put out opportunities for people to recycle and to compost, and tried to teach them how to do that. But years later, we have only one pickup once a week, twice as many people, and we were among the very first, even before we had a pilot program for multifamily building recycling, we kind of commandeered the city's recycling bins and recycled anyway on things, and -- but now the city officially has multi-family recycling, and so we still have twice as many people, one three-yard bin, pickup a week, and recycling of the metals and glass and plastics and clean paper and cardboard, and then composting with pretty major composting going on. And so -- and we think that -- several of our pre-existing neighbors are doing all that along with our intentional neighbors, but still and all even so, I look in that three-yard trash bin, and sometimes my heart just sinks -- oh, who's doing that? Who's putting that clean cardboard in the trash bin, or their veggie scraps? So I think we still need to do more in-house education on that, really seriously.So let me see, we have trash and we have -- oh, the point I want to make on energy, both on gas and electrical, is that our bills -- we're master-metered, so -- but our bills for gas and electric actually went down for -- within a few years of buying the building. We had increasingly more people and increasingly less gas and electrical usage. Right now, we're not -- for awhile, we were tracking it every month, in relationship to how many people were here and how many kilowatts and/or therms and/or [hectares] of water used, and we haven't been tracking it lately but we really need to do that and quantify that and see how we're doing, and also give people incentives to do even better. 'Cause we do talk the talk, but not all of us walk the walk 100%.
COLLINGS
Now, does every unit have a mini-fridge like this one?
ARKIN
OK, so that was another thing. When we bought our building, all of the kitchens, most of which are maybe smaller than this one, had conventional-sized appliances. 24 to 30-inch stoves, and 9 to 11 cubic foot refrigerators -- you had to be an acrobat to get around the kitchens. And so little by little, we have replaced almost all of the appliances with more like hotel-sized appliances, particularly on the fridges; they're one to four cubic feet. And still a few larger ones, and the stoves mostly have gone to these 18-inch stoves -- I think they're 18-inch, or 20, I'm not sure. And some people don't even have stoves; for awhile we had some raw food people here, and they wanted their stove removed, and then a few other people didn't want a stove at all; they just wanted a microwave, which they provided their own. So that is also one of the things that happened on energy. So we have electrical -- now, we have visions of going photovoltaic, 100%, which is also very, very expensive. But we also have the potential for rebates, and we have the potential for seeking out funds that we could get, particularly as a non-profit, to get reimbursed even if we went 100% solar electric. So that is something that hopefully the community will work on in the next few years.And the -- it would be wonderful to get off natural gas, which is definitely a global greenhouse gas, and is certainly promoted by the gas companies throughout the world as the most ecological thing you can do, but it's truly a greenwash; it is better than coal, and -- but it's not at all an ecological source of energy. So -- and then on water, I think that we should also be doing a living machine, and really taking all over our gray water, and eventually our black water as well, doing composting toilets so we have a minimum of black water. And recycling that in a decentralized neighborhood sewage system, which would be this gorgeous beautiful greenhouse that takes the gray and black water and feeds it through the biological living machine like T.H. had in his bathtub, but on a much larger scale, but a much smaller scale than Hyperion or our centralized sewage treatment systems. I think that in the future, in times of disaster, that we really do need to have decentralized as much as we can, water and energy. And so that's the work, I think, of an eco-village, ultimately in an urban setting. So -- but we're not quite there yet, and remember, an eco-village is -- all eco-villages in the industrial world are aspiring, or eco-villages in process, rather than done deals. So, let me see. So we've covered, to a certain extent, energy and water.
COLLINGS
And do you have one hot water heater, or --?
ARKIN
Yes, we do. And --
COLLINGS
A central -- one central --
ARKIN
We have one central one that is gas-driven, and it is much better than the one that we inherited when we purchased our large building, but it is still not what it could be when we go solar hot water, which is still a combination of gas and solar, but you're going to use a lot less gas in that kind of a situation.
COLLINGS
When I was living in China in sort of a dormitory situation, the hot water was only on after 6pm until -- I don't know when. It certainly wasn't on in the morning, I can tell you that.
ARKIN
I can imagine, yes. That's interesting, and I can imagine being fairly common here in the states within a decade or sooner. So I think we're going to have some very, very big issues around all of our energy, and that --
COLLINGS
But you have hot water, 24/7.
ARKIN
We do have hot water 24/7. But we do have a very wonderful system of circulating hot water, so you never have to wait for it to get hot when you're at the opposite end of the building from where the hot water heater is, because there are pipes -- the building was designed amazingly well, and it was designed with these hot water circulating pipes all the time, so you're never more than a few feet away from -- the hot water is right at your tap as soon as you turn it on, so that's a tremendous savings in most places that don't have on-the-spot hot water heaters, those other kind that heat it on demand there in the bathroom or in the kitchen. So it's almost as good as that. And we have a device, an electronic device that essentially measures how much water is being used at any given time of the day, so it adjusts it so that sometimes the heater is much lower, and other times it heats it up more, depending on usage. So we did have that installed as an energy-saving device.
COLLINGS
And how are the units heated in the winter?
ARKIN
We have complete illegal not-up-to-code heaters there, these old wall heaters -- I guess some are more -- with holes in the walls, so there's a little heater in each unit. I mean, I never in my -- since I've lived here, I've never turned on my heater; I have it blocked by my desk, and I'm not -- (laughter). And I think a lot of people here don't use heaters; we don't like the nature of the heat. Some people can't live without them, but some people just layer and don't want to have that kind of heat. And I imagine there is a time when we might have the dialogue within the community that lives in this building about, oh, what should we do about heat? Should we just kind of give it up, as many of us have already, and don't suffer any particular hardship? And particularly with climate change coming upon us, winters are probably going to be warmer, although they could be colder too. So that is definitely a discussion we haven't had. So I would say probably about half the people in the building use their heat at a minimum, even in the wintertime. It is -- in a sense, it's indicative of the privileged society that we are that our building codes require us in Southern California to have the same kind of heating capacity as you might be required to in a cold northern climate. And we have truly all year round comfort, for the most part, if we just would layer a bit. So I expect that will maybe change in the future, those building codes, and we won't be so required to have these very energy-intensive systems.
COLLINGS
OK, would you --
ARKIN
And we have no, none of our intentional neighbors that I am aware of -- well, I think maybe one -- has air conditioning. And although it's not written in our policies, I think most of us have always made an assumption that people that moved here intentionally to live more cooperative and more ecologically would never choose to have air conditioning. I think it has been up for discussion once or twice, but I don't think there's anyone here that's actually purchased an air conditioning system for their window, but --
COLLINGS
Would that be a problem if somebody did that?
ARKIN
It would for me. (laughter) It would for me from a -- you know, what an eco-village stands for.
COLLINGS
So would that be something that would be brought to the group?
ARKIN
I think that if I saw intentional eco-villagers starting to do that, or even our pre-existing neighbors starting to do more of that, if they didn't already have them when we bought the building, that I would want to have that up for community discussion and what it means. And I do know that there are some eco-villages in certain parts of the world that have had major, major policy discussions on air conditioning, and particularly where some -- in very hot, humid climates where there are older people within the village that -- I don't know; I would just really prefer us never to live with air conditioning. I prefer us to think about how do we balance our lives with what nature is dealing us, and/or work for the change that we want to see happen on the planet, and air conditioning just isn't in my idea of what an eco-village should be about. But there may be other opinions, and I'm just one of many these days. (laughter)
COLLINGS
OK. That's very interesting. Would you like to talk about the Bimini Ecology Park?
ARKIN
Yes, I would, but I would just say, regarding our energy and water use, I would say that overall, just to sum up everything I said, our approach to it has been conservation as distinct from just technology. And that I want to just say that oftentimes when I read about things in the mainstream around energy use and how we have to reduce it, and that we should be buying Energy Star appliances. On a few occasions, I went on the web to try to find some Energy Star appliances, particularly refrigerators, and in the size that we were looking for, they don't even have them listed on the Feds website. And so it's kind of like we were so under the radar in what we're doing here. And then of course, Energy Star air conditioners and Energy Star, you know, humongous electric ovens and stoves. And it's kind of like, OK, people are surprised that they don't see more kind of technology, ecological technology, but compared to a mainstream -- actually, we had an intern here once who did a study between a comparable 40-unit mainstream apartment and ours.
COLLINGS
Oh, interesting.
COLLINGS
And I think we did substantially better than the mainstream apartment building. But we are so far under the radar in a lot of ways. For example, significantly less than half of our intentional neighbors don't own automobiles, we talked about that. So all of these things put us, as a demonstration, a radically different way of living in our city. So on to the Bimini Ecology Park. Well, I have to tell you. There was this remarkable man whose name was Jeff Carr, and who will be a fabulous oral interview for UCLA. He was in Washington, DC for a few years but he's returning to LA, so I want to connect you with him. And he was the executive director of the Bresee Foundation, and if you have been on their website, bresee.org -- B-R-E-S-E-E dot O-R-G, and they are a multipurpose center targeting youth and their families, and they have a neighborhood healthcare clinic -- I'm probably -- OK, they have a neighborhood healthcare clinic that provides free medical care for low-income people; they have a neighborhood computer center, for $5 a year, anyone can belong and go in there during regular working hours and have access to their top-of-the-line computers and website and email address. So if you're low-income and you don't own a computer and you live in the neighborhood, it's a great thing.They also have a computer classroom where they teach youth and adults too, I think, computer software stuff and so forth. They have a big youth center there, and homework mentoring rooms, and all kinds of volunteers that come in, and all kinds of workshops. For example, an eco-villager provided them with a bicycle repair workshop, and also with -- another eco-villager did a nutrition class with them. So it's a really wonderful thing. And they have a multipurpose room where we can have neighborhood meetings down there and so forth.So their executive director, Jeff Carr, had a vision that he wanted a place outside where the kids could hang out. So he decided that he would get the street closed down adjacent to the building and make it into a park. And so, because we worked very closely informally, we soon learned about that, and I soon said to Jeff, "But Jeff, Jeff --" all he was thinking about a park, a park with just some grass and trees. And I said, "Oh, but Jeff, this could be an ecological park." And Jeff didn't really, at that time, I don't think he knew very much about ecological. His social justice IQ was like way up in the top ranking in the whole country, but his ecological IQ left something to be desired. And so I just kind of kept pounding on him, and finally, I connected him with a non-profit ecological architect, and they came up with this idea of -- where the park is the convergence of two streets. Both of those streets are on a slight angle, maybe five degrees, so all the stormwater goes down to where the street was where the park was going to go. We're talking about a 20,000-square-foot park, which as parks go, is a very small-sized park. One block long, adjacent to the building, to the youth center building.So they came up with this idea that there would be like a little stormdrain under the curb, so not only the stormwater, but the water that comes from car washing and all the other things that happen on the street with liquid would go through this stormdrain and then there would be a metal catch basin on the other side of the stormdrain that would catch the trash. And then there was this beautiful 500-foot winding streambed that would go out the stormdrain, that had a stormdrain on the other end of it. And meantime, in that streambed that was depressed, maybe three to four feet, it was layered with sand and gravel. And so if when the water came in through this stormdrain, it would percolate back down to the water table through the sand and gravel and be cleaned on the way down of its toxins and particulate matter. And if there was a big storm that was rushing -- oh, and incidentally, it was not only layered with sand and gravel, but all these different kinds of grasses. Initially, all of those grasses were also natives. So if there was a big storm, the water would rush through the winding streambed and go out the other end, what was left over that didn't percolate down would go out the other end in a more cleaned condition.And what happened was that every time we had a big rain, the Department of Public Works that was involved in the funding of it would come and -- no, I guess they got some money for it later -- would come and measure, take some samples of the incoming water and the outgoing water, and be able to statistically show the difference in the quality of the outgoing water going through that stream bed. And this became a demonstration ecology park, but that was one of the most main feature that made it a Bimini Slough Ecology Park. Other features of the park are a tot lot, little playground for children, with a very thick and soft recycled rubber surface, and then there are also many, many native plants planted there in the park, including some sycamores, I think, and any number of other natives. And they have a list, a plaque, that lists a lot of the native plants of the area. So that's kind of really neat about it.Now, the history of why it's named the Bimini Slough, S-L-O-U-G-H, which actually means a seasonal wetland, is because there was a seasonal wetland called the Bimini Slough that used to wend its way through our neighborhood and out to the Ballona watershed; we are in the Ballona watershed as distinct from the LA River watershed. And one of my very knowledgeable LA Eco-Village neighbors, Joe Linton, whom I think you've met, who wrote a book about this, informed us at dinner just last Sunday night as to why we are the Ballona watershed as distinct from the LA watershed. And that is, when you go downtown from here, and downtown is on -- you go up kind of after Alvarado [Street], there's several hilly streets, and the final entrance into downtown is down a very kind of steep hill over Wilshire [Blvd.] and 6th [Street] and 4th [Street] and so forth. And it's like, oh, so that was the dividing thing where the LA watershed went -- the water that came down from the mountains on the downtown side went into that watershed, and then on our side, I think this side of Alvarado, approximately, went into the Ballona watershed. So it was very, very interesting.And so the Bimini Slough was one of the many, many streams or little seasonal wetlands that came out of the mountains, and so we wanted to honor that essentially geological history of our neighborhood. And there's -- if you go on the internet, and you google Bimini Slough, B-I-M-I-N-I, Bimini Slough, Bimini Baths, Bimini Place, Los Angeles, a lot of this history will come up, and some wonderful pictures too. So that's the -- oh, in the park, too, they also have -- they have used a lot of urbanite -- urbanite is broken-up concrete -- to create benches. Teenagers love to hang out on -- sit around and talk to each other on these benches, so there are these little paths with -- fairly narrow paths with these benches facing one another so kids can sit there and have a conversation.So it's a very nice little park, and there is a grassy area, and there's benches; of course, I would have preferred to have had community projects to make the benches and so forth, but we're beginning to have dialogue with Bresee leadership and staff as to how to involve the kids and kind of re-owning the park and re-learning about the park and what it does, and what kinds of trees could be there; we think we could get the kids involved in planting and stewarding a lot of fruit trees in that park, and other kinds of things that are currently there. There's a few, but they're all guava trees, and we'd like a little bit more biodiversity.
COLLINGS
Well, you have a very vigorous program of public information; you have a lot of speakers coming through.
ARKIN
Yes, we do.
COLLINGS
Would you care to introduce that program?
ARKIN
Yeah. Remember when, in the very beginning, I talked about some my pre-history in the Songwriters Organization. And we used to have -- so much of what I initially learned, how to run a non-profit organization as a resource center came from that experience. And we had regular speakers there, so when I started CRSP, I thought, oh, we're going to have regular speakers too. And so even before we started eco-village, we always had speakers come, and we did workshops, sponsored workshops and so forth. And -- but essentially, I would say during the two or three-year period when eco-village was getting started, that went way, way downhill. We still had some speakers, but they were few and far between, because my energies were just so preoccupied with the neighborhood and raising money for the buildings and so forth. But now that things are running fairly smoothly here, and I've been able to focus more, and we had a board retreat of the CRSP board I think about three years ago now, we should be having them at least every two years, hopefully every one, but we haven't in awhile. And we talked about, as the buildings transition, both buildings, which I think we talked a little bit about them transition to both a community land trust and a limited equity co-op, and if we didn't, we will --
COLLINGS
No, we did.
ARKIN
OK. As the buildings transition, and certainly the past few years, as I have not been at the pinnacle of the decision-making function, that really is for pretty much 98% of the decisions today, the community, the pro-active members of the community make those decisions. I'm just the bookkeeper. And I am anxious to get rid of that in a responsible way, and hopefully soon. But -- oh, wait. What was I going to say?
COLLINGS
We were talking about the speakers program.
ARKIN
Oh, yes. So at the retreat, we talked about what will be the -- how will CRSP really focus its energies as the transition is complete. And it was very enthusiastic and unanimous that we -- with all that we've learned, and particularly with our, at that time, the relationships between CRSP and the community were not ideal, but they have been increasingly ideal the past year and a half or so. And assuming that they're pretty ideal, we would want to stay here in eco-village and share what we have learned, and particularly share it in a way that includes so many of the eco-villagers that have been the key people that have been learning with me, as a representative of CRSP and some of our other constituents, and that we are the people that could actually help a lot of other neighborhoods get started in the central city, particularly, but certainly in the suburbs as well, and outlying areas, especially if they're urban, that we can teach neighborhoods how to transition to more sustainable neighborhoods. And so we named it, in that retreat three years ago, we named it the Institute for Urban Eco-Villages, and we began, probably about a year and a half ago, just calling ourselves that on our website, and putting out our notices of our speakers.Now, how are all these speakers coming to us? Well, a couple of different ways. One way is chutzpah. (laughter) You decide you really want to have someone that has information you want to have, and you just call them up and tell them. And at this point in our history, if you're at all involved in anything sustainable, in terms of sustainable community almost anywhere in the world, you've heard of Los Angeles Eco-Village. And if not, you know, "Oh, just google us, and a lot of things will come up." And -- but in many, many cases -- in fact, I would say -- in such a significant amount of cases, it's that the speaker is coming through LA, and is interested in either staying in eco-village or -- "I'm going to be in the area; would you like me to give a talk?"And so I mean, that happened just last week. A couple months ago, this person from the Worldwatch Institute, Eric Assadourian, who's a research associate there and does the vital signs each year for the past several years, which is the vital signs on the ecosystems of the planet. And the Worldwatch Institute is just one of the most amazing, incredible organizations in the world, and it was started by Lester Brown, who is certainly one of my mentors, even though I've never -- well, I guess I met him once, but even in the '70s, I remember when he first started the Worldwatch Institute, I was so impressed with the information that was coming out of that organization about the planet's ecosystems. And so when Eric called, he said to me, "I'm coming to the West Coast, and I'll be in the Bay Area, and I'd like to come down to Los Angeles to see what you guys are doing, because I want to include you in next year's Vital Signs, which is going to be on sustainable communities." Oh, I was so honored and so thrilled. So we had this conversation, and said, "Well, gee, Eric, would you be willing to give a little talk while you're here?" And he would have been thrilled to give a little talk while he was here, and so we did have him give a little talk last week, and it was delightful, and he came and spent two days with us, and talking with several eco-villagers, and I think we will be in next year's Worldwatch Vital Signs Report on sustainable communities.
COLLINGS
And are the talks mainly attended by the eco-villagers, or do you have community members who --
ARKIN
We have a mailing list of about 2,500 names now. In the olden days of CRSP, I think it used to be up to 5,000, and we used to do it hard copy with labels. But now it's email, just strictly email, and I think we have about 2,500, primarily in the greater Los Angeles area, but reaching throughout the world, the country and the world. And so we send out a calendar about once a month as to what's coming up, and many of the speakers are people that come through that we draw here, because they're part of our eco-village network, and/or part of our permaculture network. Bill Mullison, who started permaculture, we sponsored him in a talk here in the mid-'90s. And we used to frequently pull in many, many organizations to co-sponsor these talks with us, so I think at that time we had TreePeople, we had the talk up at TreePeople. And I guess -- yeah, that's right, so we had a long-standing relationship with TreePeople and Andy [Lipkis], I think I mentioned him. Albert Bates, for example, who was one of the co-founders of the Global Eco-Village Network, and runs the Eco-Village Training Center at the farm in Tennessee, has been here a few times and done public talks and workshops. Diana Leafe Christian, who is with the Fellowship for Intentional Communities and has a wonderful reputation for the talks and workshops that she gives is a very close colleague of mine, and she's the editor of Communities Magazine, which is the national trade publication for intentional communities and eco-villages. And so I'm her editor of one of the regular columns in that magazine, called the Eco-Village Living Column. So we've worked fairly closely for well over a decade now.So we've had her -- this summer will be the third year that we've had her come and give a two-day workshop on how to start an eco-village. And Pacifica, KPFK, has been the media sponsor of her workshops; I'm not sure whether we're going to have them do that again this year or not, we're going to see. And so there's any -- now, one of the most -- so, oh, in answer to your question about, oh, who's the audience? So it's generally a combination. I would say for the most part, we get about a dozen eco-villagers to almost any of our public talks. And at least to our full-day, two-day workshops, generally five or six eco-villagers that come to those. We've had two-day workshops on -- well, we've also had a number of retreats specifically for eco-villages. And in some cases where we've had those retreats, we've had a Friday night public talk that would be open to both the public and the eco-village. Sometimes we'd do mainstream publicity in addition to our calendar, our website, and our email calendar, and sometimes we don't, depending on how glamorous, quote-unquote, the speaker is, as to whether we want to do that, and how much space we have or what our venue is. Generally, the venue has been here at eco-village, but sometimes we'll have something on an outlying venue that can accommodate more people. So that's how that all happened.So now in relationship to that Institute for Urban Eco-villages, we want to -- and I think it was also starting in our retreat three years ago, one of my colleagues, whose name was Liora Adler, and her now-husband Andy Langsford from United Kingdom, started something called Gaia University, which is kind of a hands-on, interactive learning institution, which now is an accredited B.A. or M.A. or PhD degree, but it's on-site learning, or it's distance learning, it's interactive learning; the focuses is on sustainable community, and it is really a remarkable program that's growing very rapidly right now. And our Institute for Urban Eco-Villages eventually will merge with that program. And another -- and I'm going to be meeting with Liora next week in Brazil at the Eco-Village Network of the Americas meeting that I'm headed for. And then also, there's another educational component called Gaia Education, which was designed and developed by the Global Eco-Village Network, and a committee of about a dozen people from around the world that created this 12-week curriculum that can actually be inserted into neighborhood associations, local colleges and universities, or local non-profit organizations. So that's another academic program that we expect that we will be incorporating into the Institute. And that's a developed curriculum that people can learn about by going online, and -- I think they have -- both Gaia University has its own website, gaiauniversity.org, and gaiaeducation -- also dot org, I believe. So it's very interesting. So lots of opportunities for learning much more about sustainable living in any area, urban, rural, or suburban.
COLLINGS
So would you like to say something about what's going on now with your relationship with the LA USD? You're trying to turn the street up here into a walk street, but there's an obstacle to that.
ARKIN
Well, actually not. The shared street -- we did talk -- did we do kind of an overview --
COLLINGS
Well, you said that you wanted to turn this -- you wanted to block off the ending, and you wanted to turn this into a car-free --
ARKIN
Right. Did we talk about our shared street program with the MTA [Metropolitan Transit Authority]? And the city and the -- OK, so let me do that, and then if sound familiar, you can interrupt me. In 1999, Joe Linton, and maybe he'll tell you this, had this great idea -- I think he was working for the city at that time, and kind of knew how to do things from the inside. But he had this great idea to apply for -- to become one of the MTA, Metropolitan Transportation Authorities' annual call for projects. Each year, the MTA had so much money to spend on whatever proposals came through that they approved of that would enhance public transit, so to speak. And lo and behold, he as a volunteer for eco-village, but actually because it was in our interest for him to do this, but on behalf of the city, because I don't think that a private, non-profit could apply for these projects at the time, I think it had to be like a public agency that was in the MTA's district, but I'm not sure.And so he wrote a proposal to the MTA on behalf of the city, and it was funded. But the funding was projected for seven or eight years in the future. And when Joe did that, he did remarkable, wonderful things; he coordinated workshops that we had in the street, because it was pretty hard to get a lot of our neighbors to come to a meeting to give input, but if we set up a workshop in the street, then as the neighbors were walking or driving by, "What's happening?" "Oh, come on, look at this." What I call front-porch planning: you go and sit on people's front porch, or make yourself so obvious, and ask them questions; they'll give you the input that you really want to have. And so it was fun. Now, it was -- this year and next year that those funds had to be spent, or we were going to lose them. And that whole process needed to be updated. It needed, from seven years ago, a lot of the people have changed, a lot of our consciousness has changed about what could go into a street.So it was called a shared streets project, and it was also informed by something -- by the specific plan for the area called the SNAP, or the Station Neighborhood Area Plan, I think it has another name too, which is a specific plan that we put a lot of energy into when it was formed also, including, I believe, the Mayor Riordan at that time actually vetoed the plan when it was passed by the Planning Commission and even the -- oh, passed by the Planning Commission and the City Council. And Joe helped us organize -- I think it was -- organize to actually go and lobby every City Councilperson to override the mayor's veto to get that specific plan in place; it was very, very innovative, in terms of things like shared streets and live/work spaces, and developer money going into public parks, really a very innovate plan that actually the city planners Lynn Harper won an American Planning Association award for the innovation of that plan.So at any rate, getting back to it, so it was seven or eight years since the money was approved and now had to be spent, so we had a series of workshops or meetings this year to bring the plan up to date, meeting with the Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Street Services for the City of Los Angeles, and the Council Office and the community groups that we could get represented to come to those meetings. And so, that said, the money is being spent by all this planning in city agencies, and we've had several weeks of city people out here taking various measurements and so forth, and the construction of the street will begin at the -- in December, the new shared street, and it will have park-like features and trees, the kinds of trees that we want to have, and it will be just phase one of what some of us envision as ultimately becoming a car-free street. And but that will be a later phase.Now, the school district, the small school that is situated within eco-village called White House Place Primary Center, people there, parents and teachers and principals, were invited to those planning meetings. I don't think anyone ever showed up. And we are going to be making it more -- perhaps more difficult for school drop-offs at the school there, and hopefully, eventually, we'll prohibit any school drop-offs on the main streets of eco-village. But we have a vision. You know, whenever you're trying to solve a problem of your own, and you make problems for someone else, you need to try to figure out how to solve their problems too, because otherwise, you're going to have a war, right?So some of us have a vision for making the main street that the school backs up on, and also has entrances too, which is 1st Street, which is a main street here, intersecting Vermont. But because there are schools on both sides of First Street between Vermont and Virgil -- we think it would be fabulous to make that a slow street also, and we think we could get support from the city for doing that, and then all the school drop-offs could easily be there instead of on the eco-village streets that are headed toward going car-free.This morning, while you waited for our interview, I was, and Lara, my neighbor and colleague here, were out schmoozing with some of the honchos from the school district that are planning to demolish the very deteriorated four-plex across the street that eco-village started in, and was my home for 12 years, and before that, in the building next door for 12 years, before they built that little school there. And I imagine that we did talk about the tremendous battle, or the struggle that we had launched to save that four-plex, and how closely we had worked with the school. And so we gave them a little bit of that history, but most importantly, we informed them that we are very serious about the sycamore tree in the back that's 100 years old, and sycamores are now a protected species in the city of Los Angeles. You cannot take them down without a special permit. And I hope that the school district is not exempt from those rules and regulations, because they are exempt from so many rules and regulations that are local; they operate as their own legislative jurisdiction, and very often do not work with other local agencies. So I am concerned about that, and I kind of wanted them to know a little bit -- because I think the one person we were talking to is a fairly high-ranking official, general design management.And so one senior project manager, very interesting, wanted them to get the feeling about what happened here in 1997, where this was the subject of an international struggle to save that corner and the gardens that the children were learning so well in. And that let's do things with some community input here, and the LA USD is going through some changes, and I'm not about to radically badmouth that amazing bureaucracy, amazing in so many ways, and I leave it some space for doing some transformation; there are some fabulous, wonderful, extraordinary people that work within that district. But we have not had a relationship with the school in some years, and I think that it's time to rethink that relationship.And so I was out there this morning talking about, well, isn't there someone now within the school district that specializes in joint uses? And might we get involved with that person? And then I said, you know, the best thing that could be done right now, especially as you're having some problems with funding for the multi-purpose auditorium you want to build for $2.5 million, which we stressed to him very strongly, that we can help you do what you want to do for under $50,000, which of course they didn't believe, but of course, I know that if it's a multi-purpose auditorium, you want a shelter where the kids can eat, and a place where they can perform and so forth. It's a very easy thing to make a protected outdoor space that does all the things you want to do to make a $50,000 indoor space. (laughter) But also, we have lots of other sources of money, so work with us, and we'll help you get to those other sources. Don't work with us and we won't. That was the covert -- kind of the covert threat. But also, don't go messing with that 100-year-old sycamore tree. Covert threat.The big thing, I think, for, sometimes, people to understand, without -- that there is a covert threat, that it's better to work with your potential partners than to go to war. And that -- don't go making problems for us; we don't want to make problems for you anymore. Let's figure out a way to work together. And so I suggested to this person, who is a very senior project manager consultant for the design and technical support, that we should be having a community charrette, which is a community design workshop that includes the parents and the teachers and the principal and the various organizations within the neighborhood. "Include us, and we will solve your problems, I promise you. Exclude us, and we will be a problem for you." I didn't say that, but that's what I meant. So at any rate, that's what was happening out there.
COLLINGS
And speaking of the street outside, I see that you also have a lot of posters up regarding the MTA proposed fee. What is this?
ARKIN
Well, there are several eco-villagers that are members of a bus riders union, and the bus riders union is taking the tactic of this impending vote tomorrow among the metro board that they are going to radically raise the fares for buses, and so the bus riders union, of course, has the taken the tactic, not only is this unfair and unjust, but it is also racist. And so that's the signs that they put out. Some of us don't really necessarily feel that it's intentionally racist, although it's certainly unintentionally -- maybe it is intentional, but maybe it's not. But it does end up being certainly very, very oppressive to both people who are very low-income, or low-income, or even moderate-income, and it also ends up being -- you know, if you're radically going to increase the fare, you're going to have a lot more people driving that right now are moving toward not driving.
COLLINGS
Fares are already pretty high, I think.
ARKIN
Yeah. And so we have a lot of ideas. Lara is going to the meeting in the morning, and she has some wonderful things that she's going to present, I believe things like congestion pricing. In many other cities now all over the world, cities that really do not want so much congestion or so much pollution, have little devices, I think they're quite inexpensive, that fit on all of the cars, and when you use the highways and roadways, it ticks away, and you get charged. So people that use them the most are getting charged the most for the use of them. So I think that's a great idea. Another thing is called "parking cash out." We'd have -- what we know is that people frequently are driving around, particularly in our congested areas, with street parking as distinct from parking lots and parking structures, looking for a street parking place, because they're so cheap. And sometimes, they're driving around for 20 minutes looking for a space, waiting for a space, for a free or low-cost meter. And if you started making those street meters, everything really expensive for cars to park, then we would maybe eliminate all that driving around looking for a cheap or free parking space. We need to charge for parking, and we need to use that parking not for more car amenities, but for more transit amenities. And so things like that. We are -- if the price of the metro goes up, we are going to increase people driving; we are going to have worse air; it is going to be a terrible, terrible thing, and it's going to be on the backs of lower-income people, both in terms of our lungs and in terms of our pocketbook.So yeah, so we've put up a lot of signs about being sure to get to the MTA meeting tomorrow, and although I did read yesterday that they are going to actually have to vote tomorrow, so they're not really even going to have time to consider all the input that they're going to get tomorrow, which frequently happens. Now, this also is something that happened yesterday with the war. Was it yesterday? I don't know; I can't -- you know that the Democrats voted to fund the war?
COLLINGS
I know, they caved.
ARKIN
It's like, oh, my God. I couldn't even believe it. And so I think that things are going to get much more serious on the streets, and that we are going to see much more civil unrest, and if we haven't completely lost our democracy by the end of the Bush Administration, and, you know -- it's just terrifying what's going on right now. And I -- you know, it's like people are kind of throwing up their arms in disbelief that we put so much energy into electing this Democratic Congress, so many of us who are not even Democratics, we're Greens, or refuses to state, or Independents, or -- and we put all of our energy into that, and now look what's going on. Let's recoup and see where we're going from here, and I predict that if things continue as they are, there is going to be, sadly, maybe our demonstrations are not necessarily going to be as peaceful as they have been. And that saddens me to no end. And of course then we've had this extraordinary conference of mayors that met in New York City for two days just last week. Did you see anything about it in the papers?
COLLINGS
No, you have to get that coverage from the radio almost exclusively.
ARKIN
It was amazing to me; I think it was a worldwide convergence of mayors of large cities, and our mayor was there, and there's nothing in the local papers about it. And it was just astounding me, and they were there specifically to talk about issues of climate change and what they were doing.
COLLINGS
Right, and the impact of large cities on -- yeah.
ARKIN
Yeah. And so being that the -- Mayor Villaraigosa is one of the top dogs in the MTA, I think it's going to be very interesting to see where he goes with this tomorrow. And is he, too, going to cave, to people that are still so attached to their cars, and so brushing the hands with money of the elected officials. It's going to be very interesting to see how that goes tomorrow.
COLLINGS
Yeah, it's a very significant vote. So I think we've come to the end of our interview. Would you like to offer a prediction for the future of eco-village?
ARKIN
Well, I'll offer a prediction for the future of eco-villages. I think that I am quite pessimistic of the future of the ecosystems on the planet. I think we're hearing over and over again from the science community that even if we do everything that we're supposed to, in terms of cutting greenhouse gases and radically reducing our carbon footprints that it's going to take 50 to 100 years to undo the damage that we've already put in process. And so there are certain cities that are -- you know, for the rich, I'm going to Sao Paulo this week, and I'm reading up on Sao Paolo; I understand they have the largest helicopter fleet in the world, because that's how the rich people get around now, to avoid the --
COLLINGS
Crime, right.
ARKIN
No, to avoid the traffic and the pollution. And so -- well, maybe crime too, but. So there you have increasingly the division between the rich and the poor. At any rate, so I'm not optimistic about our future, but I am hopeful. And hope springs from things like the breakup of the Soviet Union, and how quickly that happened, or how seemingly quickly that happened. Hope springs from things like the destruction of the Wall in Germany, and how quickly that seemed to have happened. So that's where my hope comes, that there can be very deep and very rapid change, even if those major changes I just mentioned were long-term in the making. Well, our changes are also a long-term in the making, going back to Rachel Carson's work of 1970, and all of the environmental stuff that has followed behind that. And yet it seems that we've been going forward in our knowledge, but it seems like we've been going backwards.But also, what we have today going on the planet are hundreds of thousands of grassroots organizations doing things like we're doing here in a major variety of areas of social justice and environmental change. And many of those hundreds of thousands of organizations are not connected. But now, they are beginning, through the incredible information technology that we have access to, and particularly a new website that I just discovered last week called wiserearth.org, developed by Paul Hawken, and the organization that he's working with, where we have an easy way of connecting. And so this grassroots activity is now -- has such lives of its own, and are doing so much extraordinary work, that we are finding out and connecting with one another increasingly, and that as Paul Hawken said, for the first time in history, in our known history, changes are coming from the grassroots rather from the hierarchies of power, of conventional power. And so I have every hope that we will continue, and that I do believe that there are going to be major catastrophes, from both social unrest and ecological disaster.And I believe that the social unrest will be a direct outgrowth of the ecological disaster such as Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami, and that we can expect much worse, that those are only previews of things to come. And so how will we live, in terms of who's left and what's left? And to me, the hope of eco-villages is what gives me hope, and that we are a global movement, and in terms of the work I'm doing this week to prepare for the meeting in Brazil, which I haven't done much work on in the past few years, I am finding that when I google "eco-village" on Google, almost a half a million items come up. On Yahoo, 350,000 items. YouTube, lots. MySpace, lots more. If I -- because I'm responsible for eco-village networking in the western US, and so when I started googling each state with the word eco-village, every state of the 24 states that I'm working with -- and just thousands, no state less than 25,000 items came up. And so I am absolutely overwhelmed with what's going on in the eco-village movement.And what we know from the global eco-village movement is that there's something like 20,000 eco-villages worldwide, but I'm going to tell you, I'd say that may be what's on the ground and operating, but there's probably 50 times that number that are in process, or groups of people starting to come together that want to make eco-villages, and/or retrofit their neighborhoods, or move -- or essentially move into community and create more cooperative ecological living patterns. And I think the mainstream evidence of that is in the co-housing movement, which is rapidly accelerating now; people want to live more cooperative lives, and they want to live more ecological lives. They don't necessarily know what all that entails, but I think the interest is out there. There is an increasing convergence of the environment movement with the voluntary simplicity movement and the cooperative living movement. And it's that convergence that gives me a lot of hope, and that convergence, I think, grows out of a lot of these hundreds of thousands of grassroots organizations that -- "Oh, wow." A lot of the groups might say, "Oh, it's so hard for us to get together, because you're on that end of town and you're on that end of town and gas prices are going up," and so they're starting to maybe move together and be these extraordinary groups that are giving us all hope.
COLLINGS
Sounds wonderful.


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