Housing

Where you live can have multiple influences on one’s health. The location of a home or apartment can determine the transportation modes one uses, the ease of access to healthy food and to green spaces that inspire outdoor activity. The designs of homes, apartments and the surrounding properties or developments can facilitate social activity, offer opportunities for physical activity and even create environments that are conducive to sleeping. For this industry, we reviewed the offerings of leading apartment managers and developers and single family home builders.

Overall Ratings

Highlights and Opportunities

Culdesac is an unusual real estate developer because they chose to create a car-free community as their first development. We selected them for the Building H Index because this health-positive approach stood out from more traditional practices within the industry and thus it’s no surprise that they scored highly, garnering the top spot within the housing industry and tying for the overall first place in the Building H Index. Other apartment managers and developers scored highly, often featuring locations in walkable, bikeable neighborhoods that provide access to fresh food. Equity Residential explicitly considers these characteristics when it chooses locations for its properties. They and other high scorers, such as Greystar, also supplemented their healthy locations with amenities such as fitness centers, swimming pools and spaces for social gatherings at many of their properties.

Most builders of single-family homes scored in net-positive territory. To a large degree, the ratings resulted from the provision of amenities, such as playgrounds, swimming pools, and other common spaces, which compensated for less healthy locations. All the single-family home builders built in largely car-dependent communities. The higher scoring builders, such as Taylor Morrison and Toll Brothers, rarely build in what the USDA considers “low food access” communities, whereas lower scoring builders (D.R. Horton, KB Home, PulteGroup) built in such communities 44-56% of the time. Ratings for the single-family home builders also largely tracked the affordability of their homes. The higher end builders, Toll Brothers and Taylor Morrison, generally offered both healthier locations and, to a lesser degree, more healthy amenities than the more affordable builders, which underscores the health equity concerns in housing.

The key opportunities for both apartment managers and developers and single-family home builders are to be more intentional about locations – explicitly factoring in considerations of walkability, bikeability, and access to fresh food and to parks and nature when selecting sites – and to provide amenities that support physical activity, social interaction and outdoor time at more of their properties and developments. Other opportunities include use of air quality monitors and circadian lighting to promote better sleep and to develop more special programming for residents.

Methodology

For both apartment managers and developers and single-family home builders, we focused on location, design features and amenities. We assessed samples of property/development locations in similar, overlapping markets from each housing provider in terms of:

• the food environment, using USDA’s low access to food designation(1)

• walkability and bikeability, using Walkscore(2) and, where available, Bikescore(3)

• proximity to public parks, using the Parkserve tool from the Trust for Public Land(4)

• accessibility of nature, using NatureScore, developed by NatureQuant(5)

We examined apartment and home listings within the study samples for a variety of amenities, including fitness centers, walking paths, playgrounds, swimming pools, sports courts, bike storage, dog parks, and common, special spaces such as outdoor grills and clubhouses. We also reviewed design features such as front porches (for social purposes) and smart thermostats and use of low-VOC paints, that can have positive influences on sleeping environments. 

Product Profiles

AvalonBay, Common, Culdesac, D.R. Horton, Equity Residential, Greystar, Highmark Residential, KB Home, Lennar, MAA, PulteGroup, Taylor Morrison, Toll Brothers