One Year After Opening, YDS Living Village Already Making a Broad Impact

There were moments over the past decade when Dean Gregory E. Sterling wondered whether the Divinity School’s groundbreaking Living Village would ever actually come into being. Now, nearly one year since the first students moved into the regenerative residential complex, Sterling says he takes “great satisfaction” in seeing the wide-ranging impact the facility is already making, not only on the Yale community, but well beyond.

“This is one of the major legacies that I will leave the Divinity School,” says Sterling, who has announced that he will retire at the end of the 2027 academic year. “And while I’m pleased by the recognition the Living Village has already achieved, I hope—and I expect—that it will be exceeded by others in the future.”

A living, learning community

The Living Village was designed to meet the rigorous standards of the Living Building Challenge (LBC), an international certification system for sustainable design and construction. The goal of the challenge is to go beyond net-zero carbon designs to create buildings that give back to the environment more than they take. To accomplish this, the LBC has developed a framework with seven designated performance categories, or “petals,” including net-positive energy generation, sustainable water practices, and safe, non-toxic building materials. Once the Living Village is fully certified over the next year or so, it will be the largest living-building housing complex on any university campus.

The Living Village includes one and two-bedroom apartments to house about 50 students, as well as a variety of common spaces such as kitchens, lounges, terraces, and a garden. The first students moved into the complex in late August 2025. It was intentionally built close to the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, where it could be a central part of campus life.

“It’s not just housing,” says Joel Lohr, YDS Sustainability Specialist and Living Village Building Manager. “One of the main goals the dean had was to recover the idea of living, learning communities.”

Some of the first residents called themselves “Villagers,” and the name has stuck. Sterling says the sense of community he hoped the Living Village would inspire has been evident from the start. “It has had a direct impact on the esprit de corps of students here,” he says. 

In addition, YDS has seen record numbers of applications for the last three years, a fact Sterling attributes to the Living Village. “There’s a sense of excitement around it,” he says.

“We were already the premier place to study theology, religion and ecology. [The Living Village] has only strengthened that reputation,” adds Lohr.

Villager Hayden Shaw ’28 M.Div. says he was attracted to YDS because of the Living Village and other ecotheological initiatives. Before coming to YDS last year, Shaw and his wife Alia Stewart-Silver ’28 M.A.R. had been living on a regenerative farm in Colorado and working on agricultural design. He now coordinates the YDS Div Farm. Immediately upon moving into the Living Village, Shaw says he and his fellow Villagers met together frequently to discuss the implications of being there.

“It just helped to stimulate the larger ecotheological questions of what does this mean for us as a community to have this building here, to have these intentions to change patterns of behavior, and to live ethically in this way,” Shaw recalls. “There was a level of intentionality and a commitment to trying to be good neighbors to each other, trying to cultivate community.”

The Villagers decided to cook more of their own food, eat more healthy meals together, and compost their food scraps. Shaw and others then worked to improve and expand a compost system for the entire campus.

“Students can have the actual experience of taking their food scraps down to the farm, having it turned into compost, being able to apply that compost to the garden beds here, and then grow food. The Living Village provided the momentum to do that,” he says. “Integrating students into thinking about how they could grow food and what could this look like at their local church or within their community could have a tremendous impact in building more local food sovereignty and health for our communities.”

Impact beyond YDS

Lohr says the Living Village standards are inspiring the greater Yale community on many levels. For example, officials are reexamining the types of cleaning products and building material used in other campus buildings. Where it is possible, Yale University seeks to use cross-laminated timber construction instead of steel and concrete. Rather than generating excess carbon, the timber stores it. 

Other Yale projects are also learning from and replicating healthy material selections made in the Living Village. Although Yale does not yet share the LBC’s extensive “red list” of products and materials known to pose a threat to the environment, Lohr says what Yale is doing is a promising start. “This is about spurring others on,” he says. “This project is teaching us that it’s possible not just to dream and to get the Living Village built, but to live it out.” 

In addition, the Living Village has prompted the state of Connecticut to create new policies on how mid-sized wastewater treatment systems should work. The Living Village recycles water, using rainwater for laundry and black water for outdoor irrigation and toilets. While Connecticut had policies regulating private septic systems and large scale municipal water treatment facilities, there was no governance in place for an intermediate system like the Living Village’s. 

“We are helping the state write new law,” says Lohr. “It’s quite an accomplishment because now, this is saying to a retreat center or a small residential complex or maybe even a senior care center that this way of treating water and building a new facility in a remote location is possible.”