Melbourne Village: Florida's Experiment in Intentional Living

Most Florida towns were built to sell real estate. Melbourne Village was built to prove a point about how people ought to live. Founded in nineteen forty-six by three idealistic women from Ohio through a nonprofit called the American Homesteading Foundation, Melbourne Village was conceived as a cooperative intentional community.

Residents were required to build their own homes, keep substantial gardens, and participate actively in community governance. The founding vision drew people who wanted to opt out of postwar suburban conformity and build something more deliberate. The women were Virginia Wood, Elizabeth Nutting, and Margaret Hutchinson, who came from Dayton, Ohio.

Ralph Borsodi, whose ideas influenced the founders, lived in the village from nineteen fifty to nineteen sixty. The town incorporated partly to avoid being annexed by neighboring Melbourne, and two surplus military barracks from nearby bases still stand, one of them the original Village Hall. The community incorporated as a town in nineteen fifty-seven and has maintained its unusual character ever since.

Today Melbourne Village has a population of around seven hundred people and remains one of the few functioning intentional communities in Florida that has survived into the twenty-first century without dissolving or reinventing itself beyond recognition. The foundation still owns about forty five acres of parks and paths, and nearby Erna Nixon Park, opened in nineteen seventy six, protects fifty four acres where gopher tortoises, indigo snakes, and bobcats live.