Lois Love: Pride in a Greener, Cleaner Neighborhood

Meet Lois Love. Ms. Love has lived on 27th and Capitol for 22 years.

“We’ve had flooding. We’ve had issues with water. At one point our basement was flooded. Our whole area has flooded. One of the things that we’re trying to do to combat that is I have a rain garden,” says Ms. Love, who also has a rain barrel. “That’s over a thousand gallons of water that may not be coming into my basement. Now, we also have two small gardens in the backyard. That also collects a lot of water.”

Ms. Love gains a sense of accomplishment from harvesting her own rainwater. It is water she does not have to pay the City for on her utility bill. It also helps keep her basement dry.

Thinking beyond her own property, Ms. Love wonders if the neighborhood could maintain its own filtration system, harvesting and filtering rainwater to provide water for local distribution. “That idea came along because we have such an abundance of water in our area,” she says, referring to excess stormwater.

“You have an abundance of this and you don’t have an abundance of that,” Ms. Love philosophizes. “Well, what do you do with what you have? You think less about what you don’t have and do more with what you do have. So, you use that water to help somebody else who don’t have as much water as you do.”

In part inspired by the innovation at nearby Green Tech Station, Ms. Love has floated the idea of a local filtration station and neighborhood water truck as a vision to build up local pride and resilience. “Maybe we can somehow have a little truck that collects that water and water people’s gardens, water people’s yards.”

She also looks forward to the improvements proposed for Melvina Park. Ms. Love credits neighbors and everyone involved for coming together to clean up the space for the next generation of use by young and old. “We have a lot of partners that we’re working with to make our little rainbow dream come to life,” she says.