The hottest buzzword in wellness is seeping into real estate
As director of online sales for builder CC Homes, Lorraine Sanchez encourages potential buyers to check out the company's homes in Ave Maria, a city in southwest Florida.
Since last year she has a new marketing tool: Ave Maria “certified” as a blue zonea place focused on helping people live healthy, active lives.
“It's a great selling point,” Ms. Sanchez said.
The term “blue zone” was coined 20 years ago when Dan Buettner, an explorer for National Geographic, surveyed places around the world where people regularly lived to a hundred years and older. He concluded that the residents of these often small, remote areas had such long and healthy lives, partly because they stayed active, ate plant-based meals and built lasting social bonds.
The concept has becoming the latest buzzword in wellness: Blue Zones, the company born from Mr. Buettner's research, has trademarked books, beans in a can, bottled tea, frozen burrito bowls and even a series on Netflix.
Now the real estate industry has jumped into the game. Blue Zones runs initiatives that certify towns and cities that meet healthy lifestyle criteria, and they help others reshape themselves to promote longevity. The initiatives – often funded by healthcare systems and insurance companies with vested interests in a healthy and healthy population – promote solutions such as smoking bans, bike paths and group activities that promote a sense of belonging.
Eighty places across the United States – from Bakersfield, California, to Corrie, Pa. – have adopted these initiatives, called Blue Zone Projects. Some developers are inspired by Blue Zones, even if they don't pursue official certification.
But in some cases it seems more like a marketing strategy than anything else, part of a series of real estate certification programs and little to do with the modest way of life that Blue Zones is intended to reflect.
A luxury hotel and condominium project in Miami is using the name Blue Zones for an on-site medical facility that will offer plastic surgery. And there is opposition in some quarters, including a part of Phoenix with a large minority population. Some non-profit groups there wrote a letter criticizes an attempt to organize a Blue Zones initiative, saying this would compete with plans already underway, depleting resources and funding.
“This is like Lifestyle Medicine 101,” says Janelle Applequist, associate professor at the University of South Florida's Zimmerman School of Advertising & Mass Communications. “This is something we have known for centuries. They're just repackaging it.”
Mr Buettner defended his company's approach, saying it was based on extensive research and that rather than trying to convince individuals to change their behavior, as other wellness programs do, it focuses on changing the environment to promote healthy make choices easier.
“On the surface, it may seem similar to what has been done before,” he said. “But every part of what we do is backed by evidence.”
The Blue Zones phenomenon began when Mr. Buettner discovered that the Japanese island of Okinawa was producing the world's oldest people, and in 1999 he set out to find out why.
Within a decade, he and other researchers had identified four more blue zones: small communities in Italy, Costa Rica and Greece, as well as Loma Linda, California, where a large number of Seventh-day Adventists lived, many of whom were vegetarians. (The “blue” in the blue areas came from the ink blots on maps that indicated places where centenarians were concentrated.)
Mr. Buettner distilled what the residents of the blue zones had in common and began spreading the gospel in books, articles and talk. To manage all these activities, he founded Blue Zones and is now chairman.
“It was never my intention to become a longevity guru,” Mr. Buettner says at the start of his Netflix series.
Some asked his claims And facts. And since his initial research, some of the original blue zones have lost their sustainability advantage as processed foods have displaced home-grown meals and the sedentary lifestyle of modern life has taken hold.
But Mr. Buettner recently anointed a sixth blue zone: Singapore. The Southeast Asian island differed from the previous five, which had grown organically as government policies pushed people to make healthier choices.
Mr. Buettner had tested the idea of modifying people's environments to encourage healthy living with a project in a small town in Minnesota, Albert Lea, in 2009. Changes Spurred by the project — which included building sidewalks so people could walk to stores — it resulted in an increase in life expectancy and a more vibrant downtown, Blue Zone advocates say. Real estate values also rose.
Today Adventist health, a faith-based health care system, owns Blue Zones. And Shared care, a digital healthcare company, has led many of the Blue Zone projects and paid licensing and royalty fees to use its name and principles. Local municipalities, in turn, pay from 3 to more than 40 million dollars for the initiatives.
The NCH healthcare system launched a Blue Zone project in southwest Florida in 2015, starting in Naples, a city on the Gulf of Mexico. The project now covers 3,000 square kilometers and includes smaller inland towns such as Ave Maria.
Ave Maria was founded in 2005 by Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza and supporter of Roman Catholic causes. He worked with the Barron Collier Companies, a developer that long owned the land on which Ave Maria sits.
Being Catholic is not a requirement for a residence permit, but the name of the city and the large church are certainly attractive to Catholic home buyers.
Blue Zones certification for the community is “a bit like getting the Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” said Victor Acquista, a retired general practitioner and Ave Maria resident. He volunteers with a Blue Zones committee that has organized activities such as a 30-day walking challenge and a 30-day gratitude challenge.
It is perhaps less obvious what the principles of the Blue Zones – some of which are drawn from the daily lives of herders and people who grew their own food – have to do with a 50-storey, 600 million luxury tower dollar being developed in Miami by Royal Palm Companies. glass elevators and a rooftop terrace with an infinity pool.
The development, called Legacy Hotel & Residences and expected to open in 2026, will also have a Blue Zones Centersaid Royal Palm CEO Dan Kodsi, who described it as “a shopping center of the best sustainability and wellness groups in the world.” A joint venture was formed with Adventist Health to operate the center.
Mr Kodsi said his project would cater to the boom in medical tourism. “We envision you coming in and learning about the Blue Zone lifestyle” before seeing a doctor for treatment or surgery, he said.
It's a far cry from the original blue zone concept, but Mr Kodsi may have found a winning formula for his project: he said all 310 apartments in the building had been sold and so many practitioners had expressed interest in being part of the project. from the Royal Palm medical center bought a nearby property to make room for everyone.
Despite the growing popularity of blue zones, some organizers encounter resistance.
Equality Health Foundation, a nonprofit spinoff of the Equality Health primary care platform, has worked to organize a Blue Zones Project in South Phoenix, an area with a predominantly Black and Hispanic population that has lower incomes and lower life expectancy then has predominantly white areas nearby. .
Tomás León, president of the foundation, said he wanted to raise $10.5 million for the initiative.
But some local groups have raised concerns that Blue Zones will duplicate the efforts they've already made and that the fundraising will siphon away money that would otherwise go to their projects.
For example, the Cihuapactli Collective, an advocacy group for indigenous families, has plans for one wellness center that would require raising about $25 million, said Enjolie Lafaurie, co-executive director of operations and development. “It feels like you're robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she added.
The groups also pointed out in a letter that similar projects had no roots in the community and that efforts to organize a Blue Zones initiative had “a white redemption complex.”
Mr. León said he was sensitive to the concerns of the groups that signed the protest letter and that he stepped up his fundraising so the funds could be sent to them.
Mr. Buettner said Blue Zone projects can be challenging to implement because they require a coordinated effort from people in all corners of the community.
“It takes a lot of discipline, headaches and corrective action to make things work,” he added.