It seems like another lifetime but it was just 15 years ago.

In my role as CMO of Newland Communities in 2007, we announced the launch of the Green Home Guide. It was a partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and it had a stated goal of detailing “the ways green homes can benefit your health and your pocketbook, as well as reduce negative impacts on your community and the world.”

At the time, we were proudly the first community developer with national scale to dip our toe into the waters of what folks today would refer to as environmental well-being. It got its start back then as “green” and “sustainability”.

We even developed 10 guiding principles for sustainable community design that evolved into a bedrock for every new community planning workshop – including things like construction waste recycling, wetland reclamation, gray water use and smart water control in landscaping, and requiring builder partners to adopt Energy Star or the equivalent in their market area. Much of this is like a seatbelt in a car today. And in 2007, we learned through a resident survey that four out of five (80%) of residents felt issues surrounding the environment were more important to them than they were five years earlier, which was an increase from the 61% who said the same thing a year prior, in 2006.

In those early days our builder partners struggled with how to make the value proposition of green and sustainability features in the home matter to customers. In one of our North Carolina communities, builders told us it added up to $8,000 to the cost of the home and made it difficult for them to sell to consumers. A year later we weathered the Great Recession and to some extent all bets were off, as “green” and “sustainable” features were still dismissed by many as fringe ideas.

Consumers value positive environmental impact

Fast forward to life after the global health pandemic, when Wave Three of the

Image courtesy of Tangible Materials

Ask. Demonstrate. Ask again.

The diffusion-of-innovation theory says adoption starts with innovators, early adopters, late adopters and eventually spreads through the whole population. If the pandemic served to speed up our consumers’ desire to live in homes and communities that actively work to improve their health and well-being, the speed of that adoption cycle is accelerating. The impact the housing and community development industry can have on environmental well-being is clear. It’s our job now to stay close with our customers, and to collaborate across industry partners to understand the barriers against adopting an innovation, to ask about the value of that innovation to our customers and the cost – or value – to our businesses, and to create places that are good for people, and the planet.