AIA focusing on a new trend: Healthier spaces
This year a new trend will be launched in the design of homes, other buildings and communities. The objective will be to design and build better and healthier structures.
On average, we spend around 90 percent of our time indoors, and now the nation’s leading group of architects has found inspiration in this realization. The professionals who design our working and living quarters are starting to see all these confined hours as a major opportunity for them to make a meaningful impact on public health.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced its latest effort along these lines: a three-year partnership among 11 architectural schools whose research programs will further explore the notion that building design, city planning and health should go hand in hand, according to an AIA report.
Participating institutions will examine topics ranging from the microbiome of buildings to “tele-health” for rural communities to reducing stress via design. “We are all familiar with the adage ‘healthy mind, healthy body,’” said Sulan Kolatan, professor of architecture at Pratt Institute, the report noted.
“We need to add a phrase that goes, ‘Healthy city, healthy mind and healthy body,’ because we’re understanding that those things are integrally connected.” Designing for health soon will be as fundamental a responsibility in the minds of architecture students as designing for energy, said Daniel Friedman, chair of AIA’s Design and Health Leadership Group.
Leading thinkers in architecture as far back as the Roman architect Vitruvius during the first century B.C. have considered how one’s surroundings might influence health and well-being.
Lately, sensors and software have advanced such efforts by allowing architects to better track and measure the physiological, social and psychological effects of building use on occupants. “It’s not just ‘walk more, weigh less.’ This is about the health impacts of design and construction at the scale of room to region with much greater attention to evidence, health data and criteria for well-being,” Friedman said in the AIA report. How are REITs faring in the current turbulent market?
They are doing exceptionally well. In fact, the Financial Times Stock Exchange Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) Index reported a total return of 27.15 percent in 2014, outpacing that of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Standard and Poor 500 and NASDAQ, according to a report from Trepp.
In an 11-month period from the end of 2013 to November 2014, the REIT market cap expanded from $670 billion to $890 billion.
What is “speculative construction”? : This refers to a home or other type of building that is being constructed and subsequently marketed and sold.
Real estate speculative construction of super-hyper luxury homes are slated to generate investment returns and profits not seen since the dark days prior to the Great Recession of 2008.
One real estate brokerage firm and general contractor is seeing an influx of home developers interested in building estates starting at sales prices of $15 million. Demand from high net worth cash buyers, overseas Chinese investors and rising land values are fueling the speculation from local housing developers.
Conversely, speculators are concerned about rising wage risk as projects break ground and employ more labor, it was noted in a news release.
Are inventories of available homes keeping pace with demand?
Inventories are surprisingly low. Despite recent increases, newhome inventories remain near all-time lows and are unlikely to return to their highs any time soon, according to a new analysis.
“The rise in single-family inventory levels over the past few months brings them back only to 2012 levels. What’s more, the supply of condos continues to be at record lows, with fewer new high-rise developments and condo conversions occurring now than in the mid-2000s,” it was reported by John Burns Consulting.
From 1984 to 2014, an average of 9,900 units were on the market. The current inventory is 72 percent below the average of the past 30 years and 79 percent below the average since 1971, Pete Reeb, senior vice president at John Burns Consulting, noted in a recent article for the firm.