Lifestyle
Seeking a simpler life, he built an urban homestead. Now his family keeps it growing
In 1984, a determined back-to-earther named Jules Dervaes Jr. brought his wife and children from a 10-acre farm in rural Florida to study theology in Pasadena but ultimately decided on a different ministry: creating a self-sufficient urban farm on a rundown residential property less than a block from the 210 freeway.
Jules Dervaes Jr. didn’t have a long-range plan when he started an organic farm in the front and back yards of his Pasadena home, but he did have a vision of creating a simpler life that his children continue today, nearly eight years after his death.
His wife left not long after — homesteading was not the life she signed up for — but his four children, now in their 40s, remained and today three of the four still work the farm known as the Urban Homestead, providing produce and flowers to more than 100 subscribing families every week, along with multiple restaurants and caterers.
“At first we were just gardening to grow food for our family, but then Dad took on organic gardening as a business,” said Anäis Dervaes, the eldest daughter. “In 1989, we took out our front yard — even the concrete — to grow more food, and our neighbors thought we were crazy, but the business took off, so you can make a living by removing your lawn.”
And, as all farmers know, working very hard.
Dervaes died in 2016 from a pulmonary embolism, but his children Anäis, 49, Justin, 46, and Jordanne, 41, keep building on his vision. Through the nonprofit Urban Homestead Institute established in 2001, they provide food boxes for needy families, offer internship positions to volunteers who want to help at the farm and welcome scores of schoolchildren to see how real food is grown — a program that started after Dervaes encouraged Anäis to try a new thing called blogging in 2000.
It was a time of big protests against genetically modified food, and Anäis wanted to join the demonstrators, “but Dad said, ‘What if we just write about what we’re doing here on a daily basis, living a simple life?’ And I think I said something like, ‘So I’ll write, ‘Today I harvested corn?’ Nobody is going to care about that.’”
But as it turned out, people did. The family got a following, and teachers from Compton High School wrote, asking if they could bring some students to tour their urban farm, “and we’ve been doing outreach with students ever since,” Anäis said.
Not as much as they’d like to, because space is at such a premium they can only accommodate small groups. The garage is now a small store and distribution center for food boxes. The covered patio is a place for classes, demonstrations and their homemade pizza oven. The driveway is lined with trays of plant and flower seedlings. Chickens and ducks live in a rustic L-shaped structure in the back and fruit trees line the property’s perimeter. The rest of the yard is filled with raised beds planted thickly with vegetables, herbs and flowers, accessible by narrow walking paths.
Volunteer and customer Tristan Lahoz, left, and Jordanne Dervaes tend to the densely planted beds at Urban Homestead.
Chef Onil Chibas, left, picks up his order of edible flowers and salad greens from farmer Justin Dervaes.
But you don’t have to do much walking to see plenty at the Urban Homestead. Almost every bed has dense plantings of something — lettuces, spinach, arugula and red-stemmed dandelions (a zesty salad green) — embellished with sunflowers. There’s a big bin of compost-enriched soil where a handheld seed block contraption gets regular use, pressing out four uniform cubes of soil in one squeeze that can easily fill a tray and just as easily be planted once the seeds sprout and grow — a critical tool when you’re constantly harvesting and replanting.
The garden is busy with butterflies, bees and other beneficial insects, especially out front, where flowers are the predominant crop, a jungle of red Flanders poppies and fragrant sweet peas (for bouquets) and sunny nasturtiums, calendulas and roses (for eating).
Dervaes’ children aren’t getting rich, but they’re making a living, thanks to long hours, few expenses and the courage to experiment. The family installed solar panels back in 2003 and a greywater system that keeps their water bill under $1,000 a year. For a time they even recycled cooking oil from local restaurants to make their own biodiesel for their diesel truck, and in 2009, they made a short film called “Homegrown Revolution” that won awards at multiple film festivals.
A few years ago, they used a rent-to-buy plan to acquire a neighbor’s home two doors down and expanded their farm to its front yard. Jordanne, and Anäis live there now, while Justin lives in the main house, oversees the main farm operation and rents out a couple of the bedrooms.
Anäis calls herself the “cook and educator,” making products like jams and teaching workshops in knitting and other home skills. Jordanne, the youngest, oversees their bee hives (kept at another location) and their flock of chickens and ducks, a job she’s had since she was a child. All three do outside consulting on various aspects of gardening, homesteading and raising chickens, which led to Occidental College recruiting Jordanne to teach a popular class in regenerative gardening and sustainable animal care, with occasional input from her siblings. And just recently, Jordanne got her real estate license to pursue her interest in preserving old homes.
The Urban Homestead’s poultry eat much of the farm’s garden waste and provide plenty of nutrient-rich poop to feed the soil. Their eggs are an added bonus for the family.
Anäis Dervaes tidies up the kitchen at her family’s house, built in 1917.
But the family farm is still their main focus, and it keeps them so busy that it interferes with their dating lives, said Anäis. All three are single and would like long-term relationships someday, but it’s hard to find people who share their priorities.
“The dating life is just something we haven’t mastered yet,” said Jordanne, laughing. “I can take on any challenge, but this one baffles me.”
Partly it’s time and partly it’s priorities, Anäis said, like when she gets frost warnings on her phone and has to cut a date short so she can run home to cover crops to protect them from damage.
“We live a farming lifestyle in the city, so we look at things different than most city dwellers, and they don’t always understand,” Anäis said. “But this is our livelihood; this is our life.”
It wasn’t always wonderful, she said. They became a vegetarian household when they were all very young, and as teenagers they all had moments of rebellion. They were homeschooled, but neighborhood kids taunted them about what they were missing — Nikes and hamburgers and sodas in a can.
“We were just granola kids, running around barefoot on the street, and I was feeling like I didn’t fit in,” said Anäis. “I’d say, ‘Dad, why do we have to shop at thrift stores? Why do we only eat out of the garden? Why don’t we eat normal stuff instead of Swiss chard?’”
A plaque memorializes Jules Dervaes Jr.
Handmade jams are available at Urban Homestead.
But once she read the book that inspired her father’s vegetarianism, John Robbins’ ”Diet for a New America,” “It was like a light bulb went off,” she said, “and this lifestyle became mine.”
It wasn’t like their father forced them to do what they didn’t want to do, Jordanne said. “We had a lot of pushback, but he always encouraged us to question everything in our lives,” she said. “And we had responsibilities. There was a sense of pride in growing all these plants, and the business was ours. Dad would always say, ‘If you want to do it, read about it and go do it.’ He challenged us to learn and do our own problem solving.”
There were some limits — Jordanne’s desire to have a horse and a cow just wasn’t possible — but ultimately, it was the freedom to experiment that drew them back whenever they strayed, Anäis said. “There was a sense of identity here, and family survival. It gave us purpose and a passion. I would plant on the moon if I had to.”
The farm is open to visitors the second Sunday of every month, during two-hour “Learning Tours” (tickets are $75). But Justin has a few tips for people who want to remove their lawn and become urban microfarmers — or just landscape with food.
Salad mix seeds planted at Urban Homestead.
Millie Bobby Brown in the final season of Stranger Things.
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Netflix
After five seasons and almost ten years, the saga of Netflix’s Stranger Things has reached its end. In a two-hour finale, we found out what happened to our heroes (including Millie Bobby Brown and Finn Wolfhard) when they set out to battle the forces of evil. The final season had new faces and new revelations, along with moments of friendship and conflict among the folks we’ve known and loved since the night Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) first disappeared. But did it stick the landing?
To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy.
JasonMartin
Adin Ross Disrespecting Doechii …
Will Not Be Tolerated!!!
Published
TMZ.com
JasonMartin is putting his foot down after hearing Adin Ross call Doechii a “bitch” one too many times … the culture’s not going for it in 2026!!!
TMZ Hip Hop caught up with JM in L.A. this week, and he says Adin being aggressively addressed is vital to preventing outsiders of Black culture from toeing the line in the future.
Adin Ross is lying about Doechii and one of the biggest Twitter Accounts is behind it… pic.twitter.com/VoAwGJefyV
— Mike Tee (@ItsMikeTee) January 5, 2026
@ItsMikeTee
Adin maintains Doechii targeted him on her new track, “Girl, Get Up,” when she blasted people labeling her “an industry plant” … and blamed Complex magazine for helping fuel the fire.
Joe Budden, Glasses Malone, Wack 100, and Top Dawg Entertainment execs have all chimed in on Adin’s comments, and Jason says it’s bigger than internet tough talk … and won’t allow Adin to hide behind religion or freedom of speech to drag Black women.
Adin went on to collaborate with Tekashi 6ix9ine and Cuff Em on an anti-Lil Tjay and Doechii song, but has since said he’ll stay out of the beef; his chat doesn’t matter to him, and it’s not that deep to him.
TMZ.com
War mongering isn’t Jason’s only goal this year. He released 5 albums — “A Hit Dog Gon Holla,“ “I Told You So,“ “Mafia Cafe,“ “O.T.,“ and “A Lonely Winter” — to close out the 4th quarter and just may be in the “Snowfall” reboot with his buddy, Buddy!!!
A firefighter works as homes burn during the Eaton fire in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County, Calif., on Jan. 7, 2025.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
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Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
On New Year’s Eve 2024, journalist Jacob Soboroff was sitting around a campfire with a friend when he made an offhand comment that would come back to haunt him: The last thing he wanted to do in the new year, Soboroff said, was cover a story that would require donning a fire-safe yellow suit.
Just one week later, Soboroff was dressed in the yellow suit, reporting live from a street corner in Los Angeles as fire tore through the Pacific Palisades, the community where he was raised.
“This was a place that I could navigate with my eyes closed,” Soboroff says of the neighborhood. “Every hallmark of my childhood I was watching carbonize in front of me. … There were firefighters there and first responders and other journalists there, but it was an extremely lonely, isolating experience to be standing there as everything I knew burned down around me in real time.”
In his new book, Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster, Soboroff offers a minute-by-minute account of the catastrophe, told through the voices of firefighters, evacuees, scientists and political leaders. He says covering the wildfires was the most important assignment he’s ever undertaken.
“The experience of doing this is something that I don’t wish on anybody, but in a way I wish everybody could experience,” he says. “It’s given me insane reverence for our colleagues in the local news community here, who, I think, definitionally were exercising a public service in the street-level journalism that they were doing and are still doing. … It was actually beautiful to watch because they are as much a first responder on a frontline as anybody else.”
Interview highlights
On the experience of reporting from the fires
You’re choking with the smoke. And I almost feel guilty describing it from my vantage point because the firefighters would say things to me like: “My eyeballs were burning. We were laying flat on our stomach in the middle of the concrete street because it was so hot, it was the only way that we could open the hoses full bore and try to save anything that we could.” …
I could feel the heat on the back of my neck as we stood in front of these houses that I remember as the houses that cars and people would line up in front of for the annual Fourth of July parade or the road race that we would run through town. Trees were on fire behind us — we were at risk of structures falling at any given minute. It was pretty surreal because this is a place I had spent so much time as a child and going back to as an adult. … I had no choice but to just open my mouth and say what I saw to the millions of people that were watching us around the country.
On undocumented immigrants being central to rebuilding the city
These types of massive both humanitarian and natural disasters give us X-ray vision for a time into sort of the fissures that are underneath the surface in our society. And Los Angeles, in addition to being one of the most unequal cities between the rich and the poor, has more undocumented people than virtually any other city in the United States of America. Governor Newsom knew that with the policies of the incoming administration, some of the very people that would be responsible for the cleanup and the rebuilding of Los Angeles may end up in the crosshairs of national immigration policy. And I think that that was an understatement. …
Pablo Alvarado in the National Day Laborer Organizing Network said to me that often the first people into a disaster — the second responders after the first — are the day laborers. They went to Florida after Hurricane Andrew, to New Orleans after Katrina, and they’d be ready to go in Los Angeles. And I went out and I cleaned up Altadena and Pasadena with some of them in real time.
And only months later did this wide-scale immigration enforcement campaign begin … on the streets of LA as sort of the Petri dish, the guinea pig for expanding this across the country. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that the parking lots of Home Depots, where workers [were] looking to get involved in the rebuilding of Los Angeles, has been ground zero for that enforcement campaign.
On efforts to rebuild
The pace is slow and it’s sort of a hopscotch of development. And I think for people who do come back, for people who can afford to come back, it’s going to be a long road ahead. You’re going to have half the houses on your street under construction for years to come. And for people that do inhabit those homes, it’s going to an isolating experience. But there’s an effort underway to rebuild. …
There’s also a lot of for-sale signs. And that’s the sad reality of this, is that there are people who, whether it’s that they can’t afford to come back … or that they just can’t stomach it, I think, sadly, a lot people are not going to be returning to their homes.
On what the Palisades and Altadena look like today
They both look like very big construction sites in a way. There are still some facades, some ruins of the more historic buildings in the Palisades. … But mostly it’s just empty lots. And in Altadena, the same thing. If you drive by the hardware store, the outside is still there. But it’s a patchwork of empty lots. Homes now under construction. And lots and lots of workers. … There are still a handful of people who are living in both the Palisades and in Altadena, but for the most part, these are communities where you’ve got workers going in during the day and coming out at night. …
We have designed this community to be one that’s in the crosshairs of a fire just like the one we experienced and that we will certainly, certainly experience again, because nobody’s packing it up and leaving Los Angeles. People may not return to their communities after they’ve lost their homes, but the ship has sailed on living in the wildland urban interface in the second largest city in the country.
On seeing this story, personally, as his “most important assignment”
Jacob Soboroff is a correspondent for MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.
Jason Frank Rothenberg/HarperCollins
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Jason Frank Rothenberg/HarperCollins
I don’t think I realized at the time how badly I needed the connections that I made in the wake of the fire, both with the people who have lost homes and the firefighters, first responders who were out there, but also honestly with my own family, my immediate family, my wife and my kids, my mom and my dad and my siblings and myself. I think that this was a really hard year in LA, and I think in the wake of the fire, I was experiencing some level of despair as well. Then the ICE raids happened here and sort of turned our city upside down. And this book for me was just this amazing cathartic blessing of an opportunity to find community with people I don’t think I ever would have otherwise spent time with, and to reconnect with people who I hadn’t seen or heard from in forever.
Anna Bauman and Nico Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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