For some, it takes an ecovillage

Kristen Simmons is standing in the dark, gazing out onto the site of her future home, currently a parking lot.

A stained -brick building, abandoned for nearly 20 years, stands in its center, broken and bedraggled trees splaying from the building's edges like gray hairs. The ground is paved, but the earth beneath may be toxic.

She looks back. "Isn't it great?" she says, turning to Patti Lautner , one of the developers who will build her home. Lautner grins back.

It's hard to find beauty in a cracked expanse of black, frozen asphalt, but when the two women view the Amory Street site, they see only an idea whose time has come: Boston's first mixed-use, community-based condominium development that combines green living with affordable housing. In Lautner's words, an ecovillage.

Ecovillages are common in West Coast cities, including San Francisco and Seattle, but have been slow to grow in Boston. What Jamaica Plain has seen is cohousing, in which a group of a dozen or more residents jointly designed and paid for a community-style development, with private units but shared resources such as a central kitchen, laundry, and mailroom, called "JP Cohousing."

Five years ago, Lautner and her family bought a condo in JP Cohousing , just blocks down the street from the future ecovillage. Not many people would enjoy designing a home according to the ideas of dozens of prospective residents, but Lautner relished it. Last year, she and two other JP Cohousing residents, architect Chris ScottHanson and real estate expert Rick Avery, incorporated Eco Developments LLC to develop more green and sustainable communities around Boston.

EcoDevelopments advertised the project last fall and held meetings in JP Cohousing's common room to find potential residents.

So far seven families have paid to help with the "visioning" work by an architect; actual downpayments come later. Local art galleries, a trade association, and a preschool have expressed interest in becoming the business part of the village, according to Lautner. The interested parties put up the risk money for the building; EcoDevelopments then takes a cut after getting financing from investors.

EcoDevelopments partners anticipated some obstacles to the project; many plagued them in the past. It took months to successfully appeal zoning laws they call archaic that governed the former manufacturing district where JP Cohousing now stands. And a co housing project in Berlin , for which ScottHanson is a consultant , has been stymied by environmental limitations and neighborhood residents, who are leery of the concept.

Boston seems more amenable so far. John Dalzell , a senior architect at the Boston Redevelopment Authority , said Boston has been slower to grasp green building initiatives than the West Coast, but Mayor Tom Menino's office has put increasing pressure on the BRA and developers citywide to make new projects sustainable.

Even the starriest-eyed advocates will say that ecovillages are not for everyone.

"In the same way that some people like to live in the city and others in rural areas, people are going to self-select. Not everyone wants to live in a deliberate community," said Pat Canavan , Menino's housing aide and an enthusiastic supporter of the project.

Jim Batchelor , president of Arrowstreet , an architectural firm whose portfolio includes both traditional and sustainable projects, agrees.

Privacy and comfort still prevail over community for most clients, Batchelor said, an attitude he described as "my home is my castle, whatever I do in my house is my business."

In an ecovillage, residents must compete with other residents to convince them -- by unanimous consensus -- to pay for the amenities important to them, they must learn to share communal space, and they must invest in advance, without being able to see the final product.

For now, Simmons said, she and her fellow future homeowners are enjoying the process of planning together.

They haven't decided whether to buy photovoltaic roofs, she said, but they agree on who should live underneath: a wide range of people who represent the past, present , and future of Jamaica Plain.

"There's a real richness to it," she said.

"It's talking about how we want to live our lives, what is important to us, what we want for our families and the families we hope to have."