Looking for Converts in Orange County : Company Seeks Heaven on Earth in Real Estate
Feeling a little cramped in that new subdivision where the houses are shoehorned in so tight you can almost touch your neighbor’s wall from your window? A little frazzled from the choked traffic on your way to the computer plant?
Take heart, because the New Age has finally hit the real estate industry.
The same folks who brought you Transcendental Meditation now have a solution to urban blight: Leave it behind.
And about 30 well-dressed listeners who filled a small meeting room at the Irvine Hilton on Friday afternoon seemed to respond well to the suggestion.
The Maharishi Heaven on Earth Development Corp., based in Malibu, wants to help build 50 “Cities of Immortals” around North America that incorporate the spiritual principles of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru.
Those principles include small suburban planned communities of no more than 200 houses, each on its own acre of land and built without the toxic materials the company says are contained in most houses these days.
The community would include a school where children would practice Transcendental Meditation, or TM for short, and a health center where doctors practice herbal medicine and, at the end of the day, a tired commuter can get his forehead doused with warm oil as part of the treatment.
The price of happiness, however, isn’t cheap. In areas where land costs are high, such as Orange County, each house may sell for as much as $800,000.
If all this sounds like the traditional middle-class flight from the city dressed up in Eastern mysticism and New Age razzle-dazzle, you’d better keep reading, because some of these ideas make sense, at least to some developers.
“What we’re talking about here is how the average developer can make more profits,” said Peter Bayard Cartmell, a Los Angeles mortgage banker and a board member of Heaven on Earth.
Not coincidentally, the profits will go toward the Maharishi’s goal of “the physical restructuring of the entire world,” Cartmell told the group at the Irvine Hilton.
“He’s not a man who thinks in small terms.”
While a community based on TM might seem like a tough sell, particularly in a conservative market like Orange County, Heaven on Earth claims its TM schools turn even middling scholars into top students; its health program adds years of life to stressed-out urban residents; and its sylvan new communities will appeal to people looking to avoid, in the words of a brochure, “crowded conditions, pollution and crime.”
In other words, it meets all the requirements of a harried upper and middle class: good schools, health and quality of life.
“When you look at it that way, it’s actually a pretty easy sell,” said Cartmell, 37, who looks every bit the mortgage banker in a natty suit of muted pinstripe. “I’m sure people laughed at the first guy who built a subdivision around a golf course too.”
Heaven on Earth says that it has signed up four developers around the country and that one community--in Austin, Tex.--is already under way.
In return for advice on how to build without toxic materials, starting the school and the health center and marketing the houses, Heaven on Earth takes 2.5% of what it costs the developer to build the community. The company also wants to sell some of the houses itself, earning the standard broker’s commission.
Heaven on Earth says 50% of the profits from that income will go to building low-income housing, 25% will go to the corporation--which is set up as a profit-making entity--and 25% will go to people the company calls “pioneers,” locals who will help market the communities.
“Packing people together leads to more stress and strain,” Curtis McDonald, a vice president of Heaven on Earth, told the group.
“They get out of balance with natural laws. Our solution to the urban crunch is to spread it out,” said McDonald, 36, an earnest man wearing one of the few sport coats in the button-down group at the meeting.
Once in charge of the TM organization’s construction program, McDonald answers almost every question with a long speech on the benefits of TM, which practitioners say helps them relax and focus their energy and concentration.
McDonald and Cartmell are a little vague about why their widespread communities aren’t just another case of urban sprawl, or how sparser development is going to help mass transit or improve Southern California’s traffic catastrophe.
But just so a long commute back into the city every day won’t wreck a TM practitioner’s blissful state, the houses in these new communities will be equipped with high-tech computer gear so the occupants can “telecommute” electronically to their jobs.
McDonald and Cartmell are also a little defensive about the upscale implications inherent in such communities, which will be ringed with offices and stores so residents need never leave their own enclave. In response, they say that is where the 50% of profits for low-income housing comes in.
The company has been holding these meetings around the United States and Canada since spring, trying to interest developers in the program.
Two bona fide developers showed up for Friday’s meeting, McDonald said, but he wouldn’t name them. The rest of the group--well-dressed men and women in their 30s and 40s--appeared to be TM practitioners. Many of them asked about becoming “pioneers” after the meeting, McDonald said.
It’s an open question as to how many Orange County residents would be interested in living in something called a “Maharishi City of Immortals.”
On the other hand, McDonald said, as many as 30,000 county residents may practice TM, which claims 3 million adherents worldwide.
Robert H. Muenzer is an Irvine commodities broker and a TM instructor. In a sober, double-breasted blue pinstripe suit and highly polished shoes, he listened to Friday’s hourlong presentation with a small smile.
At the end, he said he came because he was interested in moving into one of the communities. And he seemed to speak for other professionals who sense that some indefinable quality is missing from their lives.
“We’re so myopic, it takes a lot to shake us from our old ideas,” he said. “And we’ve made a lot of mistakes. I bought a house in (the Irvine neighborhood of) Woodbridge and there was a lot of room between each one. Now, with the new sections they’re building, the houses are getting closer and closer together.”
He said he isn’t concerned about the elitist implications of the TM communities.
“There’s an old saying that if you’re trying to climb up the mountain, you don’t put the weakest person at the top of the rope. You put the strongest, and they’ll help the weak,” he said.
“If it takes the wealthy to do something, that’s all right, so be it, because they can succeed in it and show the way for everyone else.”
Ultimately, people like McDonald envision a whole complex of such communities around metropolises like Los Angeles.
“If we can ring L.A. with communities, we can eventually empty much of it. And instead of repeating the old mistakes, fill it with grasslands and fountains,” he said.
