CHAPTER TWO

The Global Mega-changes Shaping Our World, Our Buildings, and Us

We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

THE WORLD IS CHANGING around us, and buildings are at the epicenter of that change. So much so that the decisions we make today regarding our buildings will determine our collective health for generations to come. Winston Churchill’s famous quote has never been more apt.

You may know that quote; many in the building world do. But you may not know that Churchill wasn’t making some grand statement about the societal impacts of our urban fabric when he uttered this now famous phrase. After all, he lived at a time of abundant natural resources and natural capacity to deal with pollution (or so they thought). Population growth and urbanization were not occurring at the scale they are today.

What Churchill had in mind was something very specific and relevant to him: how the parliamentary chamber had shaped Britain’s government, and therefore its people (the “us” in “our buildings shape us”). This story, even though it’s about the UK Parliament, is very interesting—and we promise it will be useful to you. Stick with us for a few more paragraphs here.

The British Parliament is split into two houses—the House of Lords and the House of Commons—and each has a chamber on opposite ends of the Palace of Westminster. In 1943, the Commons Chamber was destroyed after a German Luftwaffe sortie dropped incendiary bombs on it during the Blitz. If you’re not familiar with the British Commons Chamber pre-1943 (why would you be?), it was a fiercely intimate setting. Lawmakers sat shoulder to shoulder on benches, within feet of their political adversaries. The Prime Minister stood in the center. It was so small and intimate that the chamber didn’t even have enough seats for all of its members.

FIGURE 2.1    Historical image of the British Parliament chambers. i.Stock.com/whitemay.

The intimacy was in fact its key feature. In this room, there was nowhere to run or hide. You made your argument face-to-face with your colleagues. Friend and foe alike could see fear or conviction in your eye. They could smell your breath. The convenings were, by design, a raucous affair (and often filled with colorful vitriol).

The fire from the Luftwaffe’s incendiary bombs tore through the chamber, turning it to rubble. There was immediate discussion of replacing it with a bigger, more expansive chamber hall. (One with enough seats for all, for starters!) The idea of a vast chamber with semicircular seating was floated.

That’s when Churchill made his famous declaration, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Churchill recognized that the building had shaped their debate, their society, them. The intimate quarters of the Commons had shaped Britain. He was vehemently opposed to the semicircle idea.

Now compare this with the US House Chamber.

Expansive, regal even, and lacking in intimacy: the semicircle that Churchill disdained. The room is not a boxing ring like the British Parliament. The US chambers inspire civil, comfortable, but wholly detached debates. The people in the back are a hundred feet from the person speaking. They definitely can’t see the speaker’s conviction, fear, or passion. The building shapes the debate.

We all know it’s easier to say something bad about someone when you’re not toe-to-toe with that person. That’s why as kids we used to say, “I dare you to say that to my face.” It takes real conviction and chutzpah to stand face-to-face with someone and spout vitriol. It’s easy to do it when you’re across the room (or online). Speaking in the US House Chamber is more akin to talking behind someone’s back.

Back in Britain, Churchill won the day. The British Commons Chamber was rebuilt to its original form and is essentially a rectangular boxing ring—still without enough seats for everyone. Eighty years later, the building continues to shape the country.

We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape … our health, our businesses, and our planet. So much so that of the ten mega-changes shaping the world right now, buildings are at the center of them all.

The First Four Mega-changes: Changing Populations, Changing Cities, Changing Resources, and a Changing Climate

Think about this: we are living on a planet of over 7 billion people, a number that is rapidly moving to 9 billion. And as a group, we are getting older. Much older. Driven by advances in global health that have significantly extended the average life expectancy, the shape of the age distribution of the human population is changing dramatically. In 1900, 4 percent of the US population was over the age of 65. Today we are at 16 percent, headed toward 20 percent in 2050. Many countries in Europe, such as Italy, France, and Germany, already have 20 percent of their population over the age of 65, and in Japan they are at 28 percent. More striking is what’s happening at the upper end of human longevity. On a global scale, 100 years ago very few reached the age of 80 (0.2 percent), but today it’s an order of magnitude greater (2 percent), and we are on pace to hit over 4 percent by 2050.1

The global population is also on the move. For the first time in history, more of us live in cities than do not. To put this in perspective, consider India, where it is projected that over 400 million people will move into Indian cities by 2050.² Four hundred million! That’s roughly the equivalent of adding a city the size of Paris every two months from today through 2050. That’s a lot of new buildings. In fact, 70–80 percent of the infrastructure needed in India to meet this demand is not yet built.³

The capacity to meet this demand in India and around the world is strained by limits on our natural capital. Simply put, we have overshot the capacity of Earth’s systems. Gone are the days of “Dilution is the solution to pollution,” when we thought we could forever dump pollutants into our air and water and watch as they dispersed, thinking that the problem was solved. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, written in 1962, was our first wake-up call about the perils of this approach.⁴

Nearly 60 years later we have had another wake-up call, and this time it has to do with our consumption of natural resources and the changing capacity of Earth to sustain life. You have likely heard that we currently consume 1.5 Earths. For those of us in the United States, it’s more like four Earths. Famed Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson warns in his book Half-Earth that the loss of biodiversity from overconsumption and overdevelopment is such a monumental catastrophe that we need to reserve half of Earth right now.⁵ For anyone about to argue that this is some tree-hugging notion of leaving nature pristine for nature’s sake, you’re wrong. Wilson argues that nothing less than the survival of the human species is at stake. Taken together, the constant release of pollutants and overuse of natural stocks and space mean that our current overconsumption of resources is not sustainable.

But you didn’t buy this book for a lecture on natural capital. You bought this book because of your interest in buildings. Guess what? Likely no surprises here—buildings play a dominant role in depleting these resources, and Healthy Buildings can play a role in counteracting this depletion. Buildings represent the largest consumer of materials of all industries on Earth.⁶ And after the building dies, where does all of that converted natural capital go? Most of it becomes landfill waste, used once and then buried forever. Demolition debris from buildings in the United States generates more waste than the total amount of garbage (municipal solid waste) that goes into landfills each year.⁷

The impact of the collision of these first three mega-changes—population growth, urbanization, and resource consumption—is compounded by a fourth mega-change: global climate change. Buildings play a key role here, too. Approximately 80 percent of global energy comes from fossil fuel combustion, and as consumers of 40 percent of that energy, buildings influence our health indirectly by contributing to (or in the case of energy-efficient buildings, by reducing) the amount of air pollutants and greenhouse gases produced by our energy generation.⁸

Climate change will alter social dynamics, population migration, ecosystems, and agriculture and ultimately cause a cascade of adverse health impacts. John Holdren, the scientific adviser to US President Barack Obama for eight years, summed it up best at a recent Harvard University Center for the Environment event,⁹ paraphrased here:

• The climate is changing.
• The cause is human activity.
• Impacts are already emerging.
• Adverse impacts are baked into the system.
• The extent of future impacts depends on what we do now.

Taken together, these first four mega-changes—changing populations, changing cities, changing resources, and a changing climate—are the consequence of this era of human-dominated influence on the environment—dubbed “the Anthropocene.” The profound impact of human activity on Earth’s life-support systems is fundamentally shifting how we must think about how our decisions concerning our built environment affect our natural environment and, ultimately, our health.

The Fifth Mega-change: Changing Role of the Private Sector

An observer might assume that it’s a core function of government to recognize the threat posed by these first four mega-changes and to plan ahead, presumably using logic, science, cost-benefit analysis, taxing power, bond-issuing capabilities, and consensus to create the infrastructure we all need—roads, bridges, power, water, sanitation, parks—to get to outcomes we all want: jobs, homes, schools, hospitals, arts, and more for a healthy citizenry.

Yet there is no escaping the glaring inability of government, in particular federal government, to do any of this. Political stalemates from Brazil to Nigeria to Malaysia to Italy underscore the gap. Right here in the United States, our political gridlock prevents us from making a long-overdue investment in infrastructure, despite widespread agreement from both political parties that this is necessary and a sound economic investment. The same infrastructure investment is needed from Bolivia to Ethiopia to Myanmar, but financial shortfalls prevent action. The popular press is full of accounts of how bad air in Delhi or Shanghai sickens people every day. If we are not going to have a planet of dirty slums, what can the private sector do to invest in and improve these situations? It turns out the answer is “quite a lot.” And we’ll show how in this book.

The Sixth Mega-change: Changing Definition of Health

The old definition of health as “the absence of disease” is rightfully being replaced with something more like this from the World Health Organization: “state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”¹⁰ Businesses are getting into the mix. Companies are recognizing that there is value in not just a disease avoidance strategy for their employees but also a health promotion strategy. In academic and medical jargon, this is articulated as moving from studying pathogenesis, or the origins of disease, to studying salutogenesis, or the creation and promotion of health. (The term “salutogenesis” was coined by medical sociology professor Aaron Antonovsky.)¹¹ It’s great PR and HR strategy, and to many companies this is central to their core values, but the main driving incentive is economic.

Consider this: in an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, consistently ranked as one of the top medical and scientific journals in the world, our Harvard colleague Ashish Jha and others report that the United States spent a staggering 17.8 percent of its gross domestic product on health-care costs. This is twice as high a percentage as those of 10 of the other highest-income countries around the world, despite American utilization rates being similar (and many health outcomes being demonstrably worse).¹² In the United States, where most people’s health care is tied to their employment and the employer contributes to the costs of that care (often upwards of $14,000–$20,000 per employee per year), companies should have a strong economic incentive to keep their employees healthy.¹³

It shouldn’t be shocking to learn, then, that companies spend millions on some form of health or wellness programs. But when you look at all of these efforts to promote the health and productivity of employees, you will be shocked (shocked!) to learn that, for many companies, there is no mention of buildings in their wellness strategy. But we see signs of change in the air. Two prime examples: Harvard and Google.

In 2016, Harvard Business School and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health held a joint colloquium. This was unusual for Harvard: to convene a significant number of alumni, faculty members, researchers, and industry experts from two separate professional schools. (Most people might think this type of thing happens every day, but it is not routine and took special effort.) The topic? The possible contributions of both disciplines to the concept of “a Culture of Health,” which was billed as a “Business Leadership Imperative.” The colloquium was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, drawing together CEOs and academics alike to consider how businesses could take intentional action to drive health results across four domains: consumer health, employee health, community health, and environmental health.¹⁴ Both of us participated, and executives from many of the companies we work with every day were there, too.

The event was a resounding success. One key deliverable: a massive online open course called Improving Your Business through a Culture of Health. The goal was to offer free lectures to anyone in business around the world interested in learning how to build a culture of health.

That course went off in the spring of 2018, and it was a success: nine weeks of content with some of Harvard’s most renowned experts delivered to thousands of online students. The course covered many aspects of how health can drive the bottom line of your business. Buildings were mentioned, but they weren’t a focal point.

Now that is changing. The Building a Culture of Health program is adding Healthy Buildings as a key focus area, and we have created a new executive education program at Harvard specifically focused on Healthy Buildings, in addition to incorporating this topic into other programs, such as the Advanced Leadership Initiative. Most importantly from our perspective, this knowledge will now reach the next generation of leaders—our students. Harvard has established a new joint degree program between the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Further, we have been teaching “home and away” lectures on each other’s campuses—with John teaching real estate finance to Joe’s public health students, and Joe teaching Healthy Building science to John’s business students. The key point here is this: hundreds of future executives and design and health leaders are being trained to understand the power of Healthy Buildings and learning both rigorous science and comprehensive finance tools.

This change is not just happening within the confines of academia. Change is in the air at major global companies, too.

No organization is more adept than Google at creating a brilliant workplace culture that continues to attract talent and produce outstanding innovations year after year. So when Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, wrote a book with Jonathan Rosenberg called How Google Works, we read it with intense interest.¹⁵ Along with everyone in the world, we hoped to pick up insights from the person who worked with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the cofounders of Google, to create this technology juggernaut.

It turns out the “secret sauce” at Google is a focus on … people. And it’s a focus on a particular set of people—the “smart creatives,” as they call them.

Imagine our delight when we read this sentence in the opening chapter of the book, which tells you how to get the most out of these smart creatives: “The only way to succeed in business in the 21st century is to continually create great products, and the only way to do that is to attract smart creatives and put them in an environment where they can succeed at scale” (p. xv). The book doesn’t explicitly mention buildings (we wish it did), but Google has sent a clear message through its actions that the environment in which people work matters.

In other outlets it has made it crystal clear that the building, and the people in them, is at the heart of a healthy, thriving, and innovative business. Take this story. During a project meeting with students and technologists from the University of California, Berkeley, Page pulled out his particle counter to show them something. (You read that right—“his” particle counter. In other words, Page owns an air-quality sensor and apparently carries it around with him!) As Google recounts, Page then began to pound a piece of carpet in front of this group to show everyone how the airborne particle numbers dramatically spiked. The message: we are all walking around in these potentially toxic little dust clouds—in other words, our environment matters.¹⁶

The high levels of particles in the demonstration were shocking, and the implications were immediately clear to everyone watching. That included the Google Real Estate and Workplace Services team. When the founder brings up air quality in a public presentation, it sends an important signal that this is a priority. No wonder, then, that this is how the team views their work: “For Google real estate teams, buildings are the product and the people in them are our users,” as Kate Brandt, Google chief sustainability officer, told us. “Our goal is to build sustainability in from start to finish, prioritizing our planet and the health and wellbeing of future occupants.”¹⁷

When your CEO carries around a particle counter, it tends to sharpen your focus. Change is quite literally in the air at Google.

The Seventh Mega-change: Changing Buildings

Have you seen a car ad on television that shows the noisy chaos of the world outside the car before it pans to the driver inside the quiet, luxurious interior of said car, protected from the elements outside? The message you’re supposed to take from this juxtaposition is that this car is “tight”—sealed off from the world outside and all its perils.

This sealing up is done for a few reasons: it provides a quiet interior, for sure, and it makes your air-conditioning and heating more efficient because the car is less “leaky.” But it also comes with an unexpected side effect: the pollutants inside the car have nowhere to go, leading to a buildup of potentially toxic pollutants emitted from materials inside the car, and a buildup of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted from the car’s occupants. We regularly see levels of CO₂ inside cars that are as much as four to five times higher than what we allow in buildings.¹⁸ Ever get sleepy while on a long drive with the family or friends? The high carbon dioxide levels in your car are contributing to that—it’s one of the reasons why you’ve likely heard the recommendation to roll down your windows if you feel sleepy while driving.

Buildings are the same. Like humans, they need to breathe. But, as with cars, we’ve done one hell of a job over the past 40 years of cutting off their air supply.

For over a hundred years there have been efforts to figure out the proper amount of fresh air that needs to be brought into a building. Beginning around the time of the energy crisis in the late 1970s, we did our best to tighten our building envelopes and reduce ventilation rates in an effort to conserve energy. The goal for our homes and offices and schools was to make them less leaky. (We’ll talk about this in detail in Chapter 4.)

We were very successful in these efforts. Kudos to the energy engineer pioneers in the 1970s for helping to alleviate the energy crisis in buildings. But maybe they should’ve consulted some health scientists along the way. The result of sealing up our buildings, as you likely guessed from the car story: a buildup of pollutants indoors. And with it, the birth of a phenomenon known as Sick Building Syndrome. So there you have it—if you don’t feel well in a building, you can thank a set of energy engineers who decided that the best way to tackle the energy crisis was to choke off your air supply.

Sick Building Syndrome first started appearing in the literature and news in the early 1980s. What is it? We’ll use the Merriam-Webster definition here because it is pretty good: “a set of symptoms (such as headache, fatigue, and eye irritation) typically affecting workers in modern airtight office buildings that is believed to be caused by indoor pollutants (such as formaldehyde fumes or microorganisms).”¹⁹

The few edits we would make are these:

• Sick Building Syndrome doesn’t just affect workers in a building; it can affect visitors, too.
• Sick Building Syndrome doesn’t just occur in “modern” buildings; it can occur in any building.
• Airtight buildings are often the culprit, but other factors can create a sick building, such as a water leak that leads to mold or Legionella, and others that we’ll explore in the 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building in Chapter 6.
• While formaldehyde fumes and microorganisms are two examples of indoor pollutants, there are many causes of a sick building beyond these. (Also, sorry for the nerdiness, but “fumes” are technically solid particles suspended in air, like fumes from metalworking or even smoke; formaldehyde is a vapor or gas.)
• Sick Building Syndrome can be attributed to time spent in underperforming environments where the symptoms often resolve after leaving that underperforming environment.

The Eighth Mega-change: Changing Work

Greg O’Brien, CEO of the Americas at JLL, a leading commercial real estate services firm, succinctly captured the essence of our eighth mega-change when he told us this: “Driven primarily by the Digital Revolution, the nature of how, when and where employees work is undergoing a seismic shift.”²⁰ The gig economy is expanding, more companies are offering flex time and work-from-home options, and some companies have gone to “hoteling,” where employees don’t get a fixed desk but rather get assigned on upon arrival each day.

In their Harvard Business Review article “Thriving in the Gig Economy,” Gianpiero Petriglieri, Susan Ashford, and Amy Wrzesniewski report that there are approximately 150,000 employees engaged in this type of part-time or independent contractor work in North America and Western Europe alone.²¹ Guess which type of worker this is affecting most? The authors of that article cite a McKinsey report that found that knowledge workers and creative workers are the fastest-growing segment of the freelance economy—in other words, the smart creatives that Google and others are in a global competition for.²² They also happen to be the exact type of expensive workers for whom the building has the biggest impact on the bottom line. Enhance their performance and you will enhance your business performance.

So how can you protect these workers? In a presentation at Harvard in 2017, the head of the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, John Howard, lamented the difficulties involved in studying this group of workers. How can we study and help workers if we don’t even know where they are? The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration has weighed in too, indicating its concern that employers may not be meeting all of the Occupational Safety and Health Act requirements with temporary workers.²³ Essentially, some companies may be “off-shoring” some risk by not having workers do certain work on-site, or by only employing them temporarily. Who, then, is responsible for their work environment? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration says the temp agency and the company have joint responsibility. That’s fair, but what about the many people working in the gig economy, who aren’t operating through a temp agency? These questions are unresolved.

And what about relatively new approaches to work that are gaining traction, such as hoteling and open floor plans? Both can save companies massive amounts of money, as they allow them to maximize space use. It is certainly cheaper to allocate 100 square feet of office space per person than the more typical 250 square feet. There are also savings from only having to build and maintain one large area instead of paying for interior corridors and countless walls, doors, and air supply and air return components. And for many jobs, work can be done remotely from home or a coffee shop with only occasional and temporary space in the office needed.

But it comes with risks. If not done right, the experience can drive away talent or hamper productivity. A recent publication by our Harvard Business School colleague Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban has attracted much interest.²⁴ In their study of workers in a corporate headquarters transitioning to an open floor plan, they found a decrease in social interaction and an increase in email use, the opposite of what was predicted.

Research shows that one of the keys to making open floor plans successful is to provide a variety of work environments to match the variety of work styles of different individuals, and to account for the changing nature of their day-to-day work. Put more simply, some people prefer a quiet library space and some like the loud coffee shop environment, and some days you need time to concentrate alone and some days you need to collaborate. The building is your best friend in helping to create these environments—and these needs go well beyond aesthetics.

Businesses are not just sitting around watching these “seismic shifts” occurring. As one would expect, they are adapting in a strategic way. O’Brien at JLL has seen this firsthand, telling us, “This changing world of work is impacting real estate decisions. Businesses are responding with workplaces centered on the human experience, with employee health and well-being as a core component.”²⁵

The Ninth Mega-change: Changing Technology

To date much of the industry’s description of its buildings relies on anecdotes and subjective surveys. Architects and developers can be the most visible, offering beautiful descriptions of their designs and personal stories about how the building makes people feel better. Here’s one colorful quote from a developer that is featured in a Harvard Business School case study that John and his colleague wrote: “Fortune-Creating Vedic Architecture is the world’s most ancient system of architecture. It is the knowledge of how to construct and design buildings in accord with Natural Law, in perfect harmony with all the laws of nature. Laws of nature are the universal principles of intelligence with nature that administer, with perfect order, everything from our human physiology to the whole galactic universe.”²⁶

Sounds good as a marketing pitch, and at some level it’s hard to argue with—who wouldn’t want to design a building “in perfect harmony with all the laws of nature”? But is it backed up by hard data? Is any of this quantifiable or verifiable?

The answer is yes. With the proliferation of low-cost environmental sensors and wearable technologies, both of which can objectively measure the performance of humans and the environment to a high degree of specificity, we can get to a point where we move from qualitative to quantitative. Buildings are now entering the “big data” era. Much like the field of genetics, which has rapidly transformed with the advent of new metagenomics tools that let us understand that our DNA is much more interesting than our discrete genes, the field of building science is changing thanks to new technological tools. New sensor technologies are making the invisible visible, allowing us to see, in real time, how buildings and the indoor environment fluctuate from minute to minute. It used to be the case that evaluations were done annually (if at all), at which time a course correction could be made. Now, this can be instantaneous, with environmental sensors communicating directly with the building management system to provide an autonomous reaction to changing conditions indoors.

The outstanding question is whether these new “smart” buildings will be smart and healthy. Big companies are betting that they will be both: “In a world where self-driving cars are becoming reality, people expect to be able to interact with buildings beyond basic heat and air conditioning,” per Rebecca Boll, Chief Technology Officer for Digital Buildings at Schneider Electric. “The Internet of Things and artificial intelligence are making it possible for buildings to sense and self-adjust to improve the occupant experience and create a healthier environment.”²⁷ A Chief Technology Officer talking about health is a market signal not to be ignored.

The Tenth Mega-change: Changing Values

The tenth mega-change is the uptick of focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) in the investing world. If you haven’t heard this phrase before, the idea behind it is this: the investment decisions we make are not only economic decisions; they are also ultimately decisions about our values. If we invest in companies that do bad things (for example, tobacco companies or big industrial polluters), then we are contributing to the harm they cause. If we invest in companies that do good, then we are contributing to the benefits they bring. It’s that simple.

Investors are demanding that their investments be put toward companies that do good. And we’re not talking about individual investors with relatively modest savings and investments. As individual investors, we have chosen to account for ESG in our investment strategies, and maybe you have, too. And we’d all like to think that, collectively, our modest investment decisions are having an impact. That may or may not be true, but what is definitely true is that when the big investment players start talking ESG, companies sit up straight and start listening. We’re talking about the big pension funds and state-run sovereign wealth funds—like Norway’s sovereign wealth fund and the Japanese Government Pension Investment Fund—that control trillions of dollars of investment decisions globally. In an article in Harvard Business Review, Robert Eccles and Svetlana Klimenko reported that, as of 2018, 1,715 investment companies, representing $81.7 trillion in assets under management, have signaled a commitment to incorporate ESG into their investment decisions.²⁸

That’s why BlackRock, another gargantuan player in the investment world, with more than $6 trillion of assets under management, sent shockwaves through the investment community in 2018 when it sent a letter to all of the CEOs in its portfolio that basically said this: we want to know what your social purpose is.²⁹ Shortly thereafter, in 2019, nearly 200 CEOs who are part of the Business Roundtable, representing some of the biggest companies in the world—Apple, JPMorgan Chase, Walmart—got together to redefine the purpose of a corporation. The goal? The end of the era of shareholder primacy. The group wrote a statement that said that in addition to creating shareholder value, a corporation “must also invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers.”³⁰

Wow. Imagine that. Rather than focus on the usual quarterly performance metrics, 200 of the leading business executives in the world decided it was time to focus on long-term ESG, too.

The movement is picking up momentum. Consider the follow-up op-ed in 2019 by Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce (Saleforce’s mission is “doing well by doing good”): “Every C.E.O. and every company must recognize that their responsibilities do not stop at the edge of the corporate campus. When we finally start focusing on stakeholder value as well as shareholder value, our companies will be more successful, our communities will be more equal, our societies will be more just and our planet will be healthier.”³¹

What does this mean for buildings? We can learn a lot about what this means by first reflecting on the green building movement of the past 20 years. Building a “green” building used to be a leading edge and progressive approach; these days it is simply business as usual in many markets. (We discuss the green building movement in detail in Chapter 8.) The invisible hand demanded green buildings because they are a good investment. And the market responded. Well, now the invisible hand is signaling that it is time to invest in healthy people and healthy businesses. This has left the real estate market wondering, “What is the social performance of real estate assets?” It turns out that the positive social performance can be a line-item in your financial statement already. Better buildings come with a health co-benefit that can be quantified back to a financial value. We explore this in depth in Chapter 10, but the takeaway for now is this: being able to quantify the social performance means that this can be added as a line-item in the financial statement, tying real estate decisions into impact-weighted investing. Buildings will undoubtedly be front and center in this era of changing values for business. Are you ready?

The Solution: Healthy Buildings

We opened this chapter by saying that the decisions we make today regarding our buildings will determine our collective health for generations to come. In the face of these 10 mega-changes, in which buildings are at the epicenter, this is undeniable. What is also undeniable is that Healthy Building strategies represent a solution to many of the challenges brought on by these mega-changes. And this gets us to the central premise and promise of this book: Healthy Buildings represent, without exaggeration, one of the greatest health—and business—opportunities ever.