Disciples Look at County for ‘Ideal Village’ : Housing: A guru’s development firm wants to build nontoxic residences aligned to the sun, the winds and the moon.
The Maharishi Heaven on Earth Development Corp. wants to build one of its “ideal villages”--touted as an answer to urban blight and the anxieties of Western civilization--in Ventura County.
The Malibu-based corporation is run by disciples of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru who popularized Transcendental Meditation and advised the Beatles. The firm plans to pitch its ideas to a few prospective developers and home buyers in Ojai on Friday.
Although they have not yet scouted a site for the promised land in Ventura County, company officials said that, based on expected land prices, the residences might cost anywhere from $350,000 to $800,000.
“That’s an expensive piece of heaven,” said Don Cutler, president-elect of the Ojai Valley Board of Realtors.
“I’d say it’s a long shot in this area,” said Dean Lapadakis, a Ventura property-management executive who noted that the company would be all but banned from the Ojai Valley, its natural market for the residences, by a moratorium on subdivisions.
The company’s model cities are built according to the principles of Sthapatya-Veda, a branch of the Hindu science of natural law. The houses would be built exclusively of nontoxic materials and aligned to the positive influences of the sun, the winds, the moon and the Earth’s poles.
“Every cell in your body is aware of those things, even if you’re not,” said Henry Clark, a company vice president. “Your entire physiology is affected by them. You naturally would want your bedroom in a place more supportive of rest and rejuvenation, while a library would go best somewhere where you’d have a tendency to be awake and alert.”
Under the guidelines, the communities would contain a minimum of 100 houses on at least 200 acres. They would include a Maharishi elementary school, an Ayur-Veda holistic health center and a Festival Hall, all of which could also be used as community buildings for non-TM practitioners.
Heaven on Earth is not above compromise. Developers could let cars in the development, rather than provide parking on the perimeter as recommended. They can also forgo setting aside land for a communal organic farm and dairy barn and wiring houses for computers to promote “tele-commuting” to work--which wouldn’t require stepping out the door.
The company does not undertake construction itself but rather charges developers a consulting fee equal to 2.5% of construction costs. It hopes to build 50 of its Maharishi Ideal Villages, also called Cities of Immortals, across North America. To date, however, it has started only a single project, now under way outside Montreal.
Scores of other locations--including Marin County, Sacramento, San Diego and San Jose--have not gotten past the discussion stage, Clark said. The purchase of two other parcels of land are being negotiated--one in suburban Washington, D.C., the other in Fairfield, Iowa, home of the Maharishi International University.
The meeting Friday will be at 11 a.m. at a new TM center at 530 W. Ojai Ave. in Ojai.
Peter Bayard Cartmell, a company board member and Los Angeles mortgage broker, acknowledged that the houses would be far too expensive for middle-class buyers.
“We’re drawing off the accumulated knowledge of people who specialized in studying the effects of housing thousands of years ago on the level of human consciousness and the level of human happiness,” said Cartmell, who expected the benefits to trickle down.
“The wealthy generally take up ideas first and are the innovators,” he said. “You don’t see design ideas from $89,000 tract houses working their way up to custom-built homes.”
