Andrea Bell’s 1938 frame house is a sun-fueled, eco-friendly zone

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

It’s hard to believe, but up until about 10 years ago, Andrea Bell’s little yellow sun-powered house overlooked the Pacific Electric train tracks slicing Long Beach northwest to southeast. Now, Bell’s quiet dead-end street borders the Long Beach Greenbelt, which is what became of the so-called Red Car right-of-way in 1999.

You can’t actually see her house. It hides behind a six-foot fence, lush native plants in the front yard, and native grasses around the outside. Neighbors know it as the address no one can find—but on my first visit, a long-eared bunny hops away to Greenbelt safety. It’s a good sign.

“I came home late one night,” says Bell, a licensed psychotherapist, “and I saw this kind of furry ball right in the middle of the street. It was two raccoons fighting, or play-fighting.” Must be nice.

“Yeah,” she says, “and you know, I would give up all that solitude if they would bring the train back.” Really? Yes. As Bell explains, a decent public train system would really help the environment. But that’s a county-sized goal, so she takes smaller, more numerous steps to reduce her own footprint.

Walls in this three-bedroom, two-bathroom house wear fresh coats of non-toxic paint, some from New Mexico-based Bioshield, others from Green Nest in Irvine. Spills get non-toxic cleaners. Her electric meter, as we’ve said, runs backwards. She walks to work—and until a recent car accident, drove an electric Toyota RAV-4: a far cry from her former hobby, restoring old Volkswagens.

For lattes, she pulls a carton of hemp milk from the refrigerator. “I can only imagine the spin you’re going to put on this,” she says with a smile, wrinkling her nose at the hemp milk and exchanging it for almond milk.

And here’s the spin: “I would love to serve as an eco-resource. People have so much anxiety about the environment,” says Bell, who describes her house as “a native habitat, but within an urban environment.”

“What we do is pretty easy. It just requires a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of effort.”

So, her life’s in order—but how? It started in 1999, when the amateur speed-skater and then-vegetarian fell and broke her leg badly. She became a vegan to help her leg heal, and started nurturing an environmental consciousness.

Four years later, the Long Beach Greenbelt was going through a rough patch. Neighbors say it was becoming a screen for drug use, and someone was setting fires—reportedly in areas where homeless people were sleeping. That didn’t stop Bell from buying this 1,400-square-foot house from a couple she’d known for years. The solar panels had been their idea.

“They sold it to me because they knew I would keep it as an eco-friendly house,” she says. She has: her two housemates are vegans also. They joined neighbors in trimming and cleaning up the Greenbelt, and replaced a panel of their fence the arsonist burned. They keep two compost piles—one dry, one with worms. They filter run-off from the shower, and use it to water the vegetable garden out back.

And out front, behind that fence, is their reward: an authentic California xeriscape of native oranges, yellows, reds, purples and blues. There’s California and Mexican poppies, several kinds of fragrant sage, coyote bush, blue flax, lilacs, and native roses with tiny flowers. Some she planted, others volunteered and reseeded themselves.

You could landscape all this as precisely as an English garden, but no one has. It’s magnificently unkempt, the way our state was once. And on the other side of the fence is a butterfly bush.

“I read an article about the [endangered] Palos Verdes blue butterfly,” Bell says, “and how it needed a deerweed.” Now there’s a deerweed, in case the butterfly stops by.

Tags: conservation, eco-friendly, greenbelt, Long Beach, Shelter