A Community Built on a Shared Need

Last Tuesday, she was listening to Rush Limbaugh on WMAL and maneuvering her wheelchair between the counter and her stove, her kitchen filling with the steamy aromas of a stewed beef roast and an apple pie.

Her husband, Leighton, who died in 1990 at 65, purchased the land in a bankruptcy sale for $1,500, and there was plenty more open land around it.

"You just knew everybody around here," Davis said, leaning her cheek on her hand. "They're not rude now. I mean, everybody's got something to do. I guess we're just living life too fast. Anymore it's hard to find anybody at home."

Her two grown daughters live in the area, and she has some good friends who are often up for a drive in her Lincoln Town Car to shop or see autumn leaves, but it's not like it used to be. She fights depression, something that got easier with medication. It bothered her that she couldn't do what she used to do, such as working in the garden.

All the same, she said, this is her house, and she wants to live in it as long as she can. A relative put it this way: "She said she's not leaving her house till they take her out in a box."

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When Fairfax officials held a conference in April titled "Reinventing Your Neighborhood," more than 350 people registered -- so many that some were turned away.

The interest in village communities has grown since Beacon Hill Village opened Feb. 1, 2002.

Mike Cheek, director of NCB Capital Impact, a nonprofit organization that promotes giving loans to low-income communities and cooperative ventures, said 13 village organizations now exist. Twenty-four are preparing to launch in 10 states, and he thinks current economic conditions will make them more popular.

Older adults often count on the equity in their homes to provide for retirement. They might sell their homes and move to a more inexpensive region or to a retirement community, or they might take out a reverse mortgage. With the collapse in housing prices, more older Americans find themselves unable to sell their homes.

"It is a lot less expensive to stay in your home than to move to a nursing home," said Beacon Hill Village's executive director, Judy Willett. She said state governments, foundations and such programs as Medicare and Medicaid are studying the movement as a way to hold down costs associated with aging.

Unlike Beacon Hill Village, which serves about three square miles, Clifton-Fairfax Station would cover 47.5 square miles in an area where land is zoned for homes on five acres or more.