The Living Village, a new student housing complex at Yale School of Divinity, was built and operates fully sustainably.
The Village has floor-to-ceiling windows, allowing plenty of warm sunshine inside and the floors are almost entirely made of 6-and-a-half inch thick wooden beams.
The furniture provided for the 49 apartments is also made of ethically sourced wood.
For the school’s dean, Gregory Sterling, the development was more than a decade in the making, but was important to his idea of ecotheology; a form of theology which focuses on the interrelationships of religion and the environment.
“We have to be stewards, and to realize that in the same way that I'm accountable morally for the way that I treat other human beings, I'm also accountable morally for the way that I treat animals or the world in which I live,” Sterling said.
Construction began about two years ago, after the school fundraised for the $87 million project. Students moved into the Living Village in August.
The apartments are made without the use of almost 2,000 materials known to be potentially dangerous to humans or the environment. The utilities inside of the apartments run off of electricity and also generate enough energy to power themselves and nearby buildings, Sterling said.
“Living Village must generate a minimum of 105% of the energy used,” Sterling said. “This will generate between 110% and 115% so the extra will help offset some of the electricity of the existing quad.”
Students who live in the development have asked how they can continue living sustainably beyond school, according to Sterling.
“The kinds of questions they're asking are the exact questions we hope they'd ask,” Sterling said. “How will I live sustainably when I leave here? How can they help other people live lives that reflect the sense that we are part of the larger creation and we are responsible for how we treat it?”
The Living Village plans to earn full living-building certification from the Living Building Challenge, the most rigorous sustainable building certification program in the world.
The Challenge has seven key principles: place, water, energy, health and happiness, materials, equity, and beauty.
Yale Divinity School, a graduate program, had 84 existing apartments alongside the 49 new units, all available to students for a low cost.
“We realized that the biggest impediment for our students now is the cost of housing. So these units, both sets, are subsidized,” Sterling said. “In 14 years, I never raised the rents on those apartments. In fact, we lowered them this last year so that we could keep them lower than what we were charging here [at the Living Village].”
Hayden Shaw, a first-year student in the school’s Master of Divinity program, said not only the sustainability but the community aspect of the apartments were a draw.
“Ecotheology is just recognizing that the planet, all the beings around us, are equally important in our considerations of what it means to live an ethical life,” Shaw said. “Actually we are really essential to that consideration, that our lives depend on our environment and our environmental well-being.”
The cost to live at the Living Village is a big sell, along with the knowledge of the building’s environmental impact, even the strategic placement of communal spaces is influential, according to Shaw.
“The different community spaces that are strategically placed and designed are helping us facilitate great conversations, and just the intention of the building itself has stimulated that,” Shaw said.
