In this episode of the REIT Report special series, “Building Resilience,” Joanna Frank, Founder, CEO, and President of Center for Active Design, shares how focusing on health and wellness in the built environment builds resilience by focusing on the human impact of extreme weather events.
In this special episode of the REIT Report, part of an ongoing series, “Building Resilience,” covering issues facing the REIT industry as it remains focused on investing for the long term, Joanna Frank, Founder, CEO, and President of Center for Active Design (CfAD), operator of Fitwel and Active Design Advisors, Inc (Adai) to discuss how public health strategies are helping to transform the built environment and support communities to be more resilient.
“How do we use our built environment to create an environment that is resilient and can foster that quality of life and safety for the residents? This was first, I think, brought to the public stage at COP 28, where there was an entire day about health because the true cost of climate change can really only be calculated when you consider the health impacts, not just in this country, but globally, and they are massive.”
Frank shares, “More extreme heat for longer periods of time is changing the living conditions. And what does that mean? It doesn’t mean a huge amount for a building, bricks don’t really care if it’s 90 degrees or 100 degrees, but humans do not thrive at a hundred degrees, especially if it’s very humid, it has major impacts on health. It affects the overall life expectancy, hospitalization rates, and mental health, affecting your quality of life. And the built environment is there to protect humans, right? We are not building buildings for fun, we’re building them for people. And so, how we use our buildings to maintain people’s quality of life will be the challenge of the next 30 years”.
She shares how they have worked to translate the economic evidence around some of the Fitwel strategies to substantiate the financial impact. For example, “When looking at wildfire, you have that moment of the wildfire, which obviously has a great impact on the immediately affected properties and people. But the longer-term air quality is often as large a financial risk.” She shares that “over 10 years, wildfire pollution has accounted for about $600 billion in costs because of the need for higher levels of filtration. It costs more money to pull the air through because of the particulate matter. So, beyond that immediate trauma of the fire, the increase in particulate matter specific to wildfire has a long-term impact on respiration rate and pollution risks.”
She shares how building trust in communities builds social resilience and how, “because people are seeking community, people will pay more for a location that has a neighborhood feel or feels like a community” and how, when “we look back at history, we see that the value of real estate is always a reflection of society’s needs and society’s priorities.”
Other episodes in this series:
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