“This is not simply an unserved market niche – it is a major market opportunity.” “The interest is as real as it can be – at least in the US,” says Warrick. Warrick commissioned a survey last year on the appeal of wellness communities, randomly selecting 1,000 Americans with household earnings over US$75,000, and found that an impressive 25 per cent of them said they’d like to live in a wellness community (see article, page 72-74). “As the world gets a little bit crazier – especially in the US lately – the idea of the sanctuary home and the sanctuary community becomes more important.” “The golf course no longer constitutes a lifestyle,” says Brooke Warrick, president of market research firm American Lives. And that is becoming more appealing to developers. In many ways, wellness communities are giving people a chance to find themselves again.”įinding those connections – whether it’s through community activities, spending time in nature or intergenerational living – is something wellness communities aim to nourish. These people understand that we’ve lost our connections to nature, to each other, and to our understanding of what drives a true sense of community. “There’s also a growing base of, what I like to call, the ‘Enlightened Few’, who have realised the cost of today’s digital age and now have a desire to reverse its effects. “Americans are increasingly aware of the relationship between how and where they live and their wellbeing and the wellbeing of their families,” says Mia Kyricos, chair of the Global Wellness Institute’s Initiative on wellness communities and founder of strategic advisory firm Kyricos & Associates. Couple this with an ageing and financially flush baby boomer population, and it’s no wonder that the demand for wellness communities is growing dramatically.
There is also a growing awareness about the benefits of intergenerational living, while the American senior living communities leave much to be desired. If you look at the amount of money we spend on healthcare in the US, and the amount of disease we have – most of which is preventable – you’ll understand why a lot of folks are starting to look for alternatives.”
“And we’re more stressed out than the rest of the world. “We’re pretty sick in America,” says Steve Nygren, founder of Serenbe, a wellness community just outside Atlanta, Georgia. A struggling and expensive healthcare system adds to the problem a recently released study from the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation, finds the US healthcare system ranks last among 11 wealthy nations, despite being the most expensive. With more than two in three adults in the US considered to be overweight or obese (and about one-third of children ages 6 to 19), finding new ways to be healthy is a top priority for many Americans.
“As people in America have started to recognise how terrible and unhealthy this kind of development is for both people and planet, there’s a growing impetus to try to build things that are better, and to experiment with new types of building.” “This includes poorly designed, unwalkable suburbs and exurbs insanely long commutes on congested highways big-box stores and strip malls cheap, low-quality, or cookie-cutter housing construction and poor zoning policies. “It’s important to remember that the US has been the epicentre of terrible car-dependent suburban sprawl for the past 75-plus years, and especially in the past 20 to 30 years,” says Katherine Johnston, senior research fellow at the Global Wellness Institute. Many of the first American wellness communities – including Serenbe (see facing page) and Prairie Crossing (see p 66) – initially sprang from a need to protect cherished land from the encroaching suburbs. As populations have migrated to cities, a race for housing development has meant that countryside and farmland is fast disappearing.
The US is a massive country, with a network of roads and parking lots rather than rails and trails. Wellness communities are on the rise worldwide, but perhaps nowhere are there quite as many in development – and in existence – as in the US.Ī combination of entrepreneurial spirit, an abundance of land, an unhealthy population, and a failing healthcare system have all contributed to this burgeoning industry.
0 kommentar(er)
