It doesn’t take goat yoga to create a place of wellness, but that’s one of the features at Serenbe. Located outside Atlanta and zoned to have more nature than development, the visionary community creates a place like nowhere else, and proves that improving wellness can come from our built environment.
Steve Nygren created Serenbe after spinning his wheels in the corporate world of hospitality and it has paid off big. The community, now grown to 600 housing units with 1,200 residents on 4,000 acres, is sought after by those looking for a different lifestyle that provides more than just a roof over their heads.
To start, he had to change the zoning. Nygren gathered 500 landowners to change it, and it passed in 2002 to officially break ground in 2004. Since then, he has been able to develop 20% more housing with 70% less land.
It’s not just that ratio that is making a difference in the community, but Serenbe’s approach to wellness also looks at interactions, specifically between generations. The community is about to add an aging-in-place development across from the school.
“It will look like the rest of the community and be disconnected form the ‘cruise ships to death,’ luxury, 55-plus gated communities all around the country,” Nygren said. “To keep the mind active at the end of life is the same as at the beginning – you use primary colors and stay active. There is a huge disconnect in this country on how we think seniors should live. We think it’s for their own protection.”
At the same time, Serenbe is building a community to support aging in place, it’s also promoting what Nygren calls “free range kids,” and mixing the two by having the school across from this new development.
From a physical wellness perspective, Nygren tells me that there is conclusive evidence that the environment is boosting health. There are about 240 children living in Serenbe and he reports that there is not one sign of asthma. This is statistically impossible in the U.S. where numbers from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that there would be about 16 children out of that 240 diagnosed with asthma.
Nygren also met a woman who told him that for 20 years she had been on a series of diets that controlled her life. After 9 months of living in Serenbe, she had unconsciously lost 14 pounds. She attributed it to the walkable lifestyle, along with not being exposed to the convenience of fast food.
Serenbe also doesn’t have lawns, which seems counterintuitive for a place creating exposure to nature. He looks at lawns as the unnatural version of nature, and detrimental to the environment in a variety of ways–large quantities of water are used for the turf and the ornamentals, most lawn maintenance equipment uses fossil fuels, and harmful chemicals are applied to lawns.
“We can’t have chemicals that are so bad that you have signs that a dog or cat cannot walk across it,” Nygren said. “Not using those chemicals has a huge positive impact to reduce asthma, and it impacts cancer rates.”
There is additional evidence that golf course residents have higher rates of cancer from the exposure to the chemicals used on the greens.
There is no air conditioning at Serenbe, it’s all geothermal heating and cooling. This creates a number of benefits, but one is noise reduction. Eliminating noise from that equipment, along with lawn maintenance equipment, reduces stress and anxiety, and improves sleep.
In many communities, where there is noise pollution, residents are prescribed sleeping pills or other costly remedies that are covered by health insurance. Nygren sees health insurance as extortion, but a necessary evil.
“We have a huge possibility to change our health and our health system,” he said. “We tried forming our own health insurance.”
Wellness At Any Price Point
Across the country, Braden is under development. This new community sprawls across 2,667 acres in California, and will offer 8,000 new homes when complete. It was imagined with a focus on wellness for anyone at any age and any income level.
“We are creating a community for anyone from a janitor to a CEO,” Rachel Bardis, the COO at Braden’s development company, Somers West, said. “From teenagers who are 17 and parents who are in their 80s, there is a need to allow for people to walk comfortably, live with nature, feel like it’s a community for all.”
Braden’s unique concept was rooted in a challenge to Bardis from Somers West’s owner, Charles Somers. A worldwide business traveler, Somers was inspired by developments that he had seen in other places and challenged her to do something different to intentionally change the way people can live.
Somers had seen plenty developments that are a detriment to the environment and wanted to reimagine communities in a new way. With a career in building facilities maintenance, he has been exposed to people at all income levels and wanted to offer a community that was accessible to everyone. Homes in the community span from cottages to condos to apartments to hit every price point and to welcome anyone at any socioeconomic level.
From the sustainability to the wellness elements, the community design intends to make it affordable for anyone to live there and benefit from its features. For instance, transportation costs are reduced with an EV shuttle, a bike share program, and paths for walkability, so residents can save the cost of owning a car.
These features also promote wellness on several levels – physical and emotional wellbeing.
“Having a community built like this changes the negative loneliness factor by encouraging people to walk, bike, scooter, to flow through, as opposed to sidewalks with driveways cutting through,” Bardis said. “We are working intensely on creating a new environment because of the health benefit—85% of our environment determines our health, 15% is genetic. This is our future. These are our children.”
She also sees disrupting health insurance as an opportunity. Somers West engaged with local hospitals to create a case study that could inform the industry, but hasn’t brought insurance companies into the conversation yet.
“Ultimately that is the opportunity,” she said. “It’s a good place to partner. This is the brain trust to get everyone involved in understanding how this could impact our lives.”
Communities Designed For Wellness
When most of us think of architecture, we think of blueprints, construction, or frilly features. We don’t think about how that building may affect us—how it has the potential to shape our thoughts, memories, emotions, biology and physiology.
“I believe we must see architecture as a noninvasive therapeutic treatment — one that stimulates learning, memory, empathy, and social interaction,” said Tye Farrow, who has the first neuroscience masters applied to design and is founding principal Farrow Partners. “We need to discover a new path forward where placemaking is intrinsically tied to the idea of a health-generating system. The spaces we create must serve as accelerants for our biological, physiological, and psychological health and well-being.”
He believes that there is no such thing as neutral space, and proves it through his new book, “Constructing Health: How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind’s Health.”
“Architecture is like food—we consume it, and it either nourishes or depletes us,” he said. “Think of fast food. It’s functional, but ultimately unsatisfying, and even harmful. Many of our buildings are the same ultra-processed, like a hamburger, and can actually damage you. Instead, we should aim to design spaces packed with architectural ‘super-vitamins’ that enrich our health on every level.”
We process about 11 million bits of information per second, but only about 50 of those reach conscious awareness, informing our body to stay or go, and having an immediate impact on our cortisol levels, heart rate, blood pressure, and even our neural structure.
This then translates into place attachment—the idea that we form relationships with places the same way we form relationships with people.
“Feeling emotionally safe, understood, and accepted in a space contributes to a sense of coherence — comprising comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness,” Farrow said.
More design professionals are committing to this approach and pushing the industry to do the same.
“Wellness would improve 100% with the right design,” said Monika Acosta Melo, the co-founder at Hausense Design. “There is no other way of designing than designing for wellbeing. It should be the new normal. People are looking for wellbeing and personalization, like interior design and architecture being done for you specifically and not a copy and paste like it has been done before.”
In Canada, the BC Parks Foundation’s PaRx program has 17,500 Canadian healthcare providers now registered to prescribe nature to patients. Since its launch in 2020, PaRx has issued an estimated 1.2 million nature prescriptions, 75% of nature prescriptions for mental health reasons, and 25% for physical health reasons.
Elsewhere in Canada, the Vancouver Green Prescription Neighborhood tree canopy increased the tree cover by 10%, which resulted in an 18% reduction in obesity.
“We cannot be out of synch with the environment,” said Dr. Aruni Bhatnagar, who serves as the director of the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute at the University of Louisville. “All forms of lives trained in nature’s cycle, and nearly 13% of our genes are under diurnal control.“
He reports that while low socio-economic communities have a higher risk of mortality, in some instances the exposure to green can remove the socio-economic risk.
After a cancer diagnosis, a patient’s recovery also can be aided by environments that are greener.
“Green outdoor spaces promote social interactions and cohesion,” Bhatnagar said. “It supports mental health and social cognition. Paying attention in a social environment takes active involvement, as opposed to being in nature, which doesn’t require that.”
Finally, the immune system is educated by the environment, and in the case of the immune system it may not be exposure to greenery, but the value of the green spaces lowering VOCs.
“The Green Heart Louisville project neighborhood goal was to increase greenery, so they transplanted 8,000 mature trees and shrubs,” Bhatnagar reported. “The decrease in CRP levels in residents with access to the new greenery is equal to a seven year decrease in age.”
Future Development Challenges
Are these communities possible on a broader scale? In the development of Serenbe, Nygren said his most daunting challenge were the regulations. More than half of the regulations had to be changed to support his objectives in zoning and variance.
The other mighty challenge were the feasibility studies that were required to obtain financing because feasibility studies depend on historical validation.
“You look in the rearview mirror for feasibility studies, so it’s very difficult for innovative people to do progressive things and get them financed,” Nygren said. “This process is in a rut and we cannot figure out how to get out of it.”
With the Braden development, Bardis said the challenges were constant, with a 15-year timeline between initial proposals and the groundbreaking, slowed down by red tape, rules, and a division stakeholders’ opinions.
Braden’s masterplan, developed with Peter Calthorpe of HDR/Calthorpe and Lake Flato Architects, and zoned with 35% open space. They were able to control costs through a unique alley loaded design.
Industry Shifts To Better Wellness
Implementing this change across the industry will take a holistic approach with supportive research from leading projects like Serenbe and Braden.
“In order to design for nature, we must design with nature,” said Anna Dyson, founding director, Hines professor, Yale Center for Ecosystems and Architecture. “We spend more than 90% indoors. We have separated non-human living systems from our buildings and compromised our immunity and wellbeing in the process.”
She’s part of the Building Innovation Alliance, a group putting the data together for scaling adoption.
“It has to make sense economically first,” she said. “Change has to be included in building codes otherwise won’t have an impact.”
More of these communities may be able to be approved by leaning into the positive local economic impacts they deliver. With the reality of better health and wellness, the perception of safety and reduced crime, real estate values increase, which also tie to tax rates. Farrow points out that Serenbe has increased tax revenues, which also reduces taxes for farmers in that community.
“These value equations are very important,” he said. “Plus there are benefits of people staying healthier longer. Over the past 10 years, people over 50 years old, account for the economic growth in wealthier countries. If they remain healthier, educated and productive, the economic benefits are significant.”
Wellness In Future Communities
“It was sort of a surrender – I realized that one person cannot affect anything, but I can affect my children’s lives,” Nygren told me.
Nygren’s book, “Start in Your Own Backyard,” comes out this fall, to provide a blueprint for developing sustainable communities where all generations can thrive, and awe is found in everyday moments, which hinges on reimagining and investing in this new way of community development.
And, that’s where it’s headed. Bardis said the same thing. She’s committed to creating a community that can deliver to her children and her parents.
“It’s a field of dreams—if you build it, they will come,” Bardis said about the future of Braden. “Truly, developers don’t want to do something that reports suggest buyers don’t want, but buyers only buy what is available. That’s the issue and why it hasn’t been done.”
Now, she wants to use Braden as an opportunity to prove to the region, the state, and the industry, how it can be done not only because of the design itself, it’s the opportunity to validate wellness in design.
Read the full article here
