ArchEPI

Climate change and chronic disease are the most significant planetary and public health challenges of our generation. While their reach is global, their impact varies from one building to the next as the unique combination of environmental exposures (e.g., urban heat islands, food deserts) and social determinants of health (e.g., demographics, socioeconomic status) shift from place to place. 

In spite of the fact that location is fundamental to real estate valuation, the tools designed to protect society from climate change and chronic disease (i.e., building codes, zoning, green/healthy building toolkits, and real estate ESG (environment, social, and governance) financing mechanisms) ignore neighborhood characteristics. The result is a fragmented built environment that is responsible for 20% of premature deaths from chronic disease (SDG 3.4), 40% of greenhouse gas emissions (SDG 13), and a legacy of social harm caused by redlining and urban renewal.

ArchEPI envisions a world where the building sector is no longer a major contributor to climate change and chronic disease. Instead, it is a primary driver of community and planetary health.  We target the real estate public approvals process as the most effective leverage point for transforming the currently fragmented and uncoordinated development process into a mechanism for advancing climate, health, and equity. Three stakeholder groups converge at that leverage point: (1) real estate developers who propose a new or adaptive reuse development; (2) community groups who will be impacted by the project; and, (3) the local government who regulate construction. ArchEPI brings these groups together into a mutually beneficial conversation using a common set of neighborhood-scale environmental, health, and demographic datasets. The tool helps stakeholders align around a common vision improving community and planetary health – and generating new value for all.

The tool is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service platform that uses open-source, neighborhood-level (i.e., census tract) data from U.S. federal agencies to identify neighborhood conditions that could be improved through building design and renovation. It ranks each indicator according to the census tract’s risk level and uses that information to generate a short list of neighborhood-specific environmental health priorities and associated building, campus, and community design strategies. 

 Said another way, in a few clicks, ArchEPI tells users:

1.     How a new building or renovation could contribute to the overall environmental health of the neighborhood where it is located.

2.     Which design strategies will be most effective at providing tangible community benefit related to climate change, community health, and social equity.

3.     Which metrics link those design strategies to community priorities, such as the local climate action plan, community health needs assessment, air quality plan, etc.

A demo walking through how the tool works is available at the following website: https://www.alignmentprocess.org

We have three user groups: (1) real estate developers/design teams; (2) community members who will be impacted by the project; and, (3) the local government who will issue the construction permit.

ArchEPI brings these three groups together into a mutually beneficial conversation using a common set of neighborhood-specific datasets from federal agencies like EPA, CDC, and FEMA. 

The tool’s output is designed to improve community engagement around the proposed building design, streamline the public approvals process, attract ESG impact investors, and support local governments in tracking climate, health, and equity goals.

The following use cases illustrate how the tool output could be used to benefit each stakeholder group: 

Community Groups: 

o   Neighborhood Planning: Create a baseline for neighborhood planning, including annotating the metrics and adding external datasets and commentary to raise the visibility and external validity of community-generated data and lived experience.

o   Advocacy for Individual Real Estate Projects: Use to advocate on behalf of community concerns during the community engagement process for specific real estate projects.

Real Estate Development Team/Building Owner: 

o   Site Selection: Select a site that aligns well with the development team’s goals for a real estate project. For example, a school district might use the tool to select sites with lower risk of pedestrian/cyclist injuries, lower air pollution, and lower flooding risk. 

o   Building Program (i.e., activities supported by the building design): Most real estate projects finalize the allocation of spaces for certain activities during early stages of the design. The tool output could be used to influence this decision, because it brings together novel information and ranks its importance within the neighborhood. For example, an outpatient health clinic might decide to set aside part of the property for outdoor recreation or a community farm if the tool’s output shows a combination of high neighborhood obesity rates and low access to parks and/or grocery stores. 

o   Bridge Funding Gaps: The tool quantifies both the neighborhood environmental health rankings and the evidence-based design strategies that are recommended based on those rankings. As a result, developers can demonstrate to impact investors and other funders the extent to which their project will bring tangible environmental and social benefits to the neighborhood. 

o   Community Engagement: Run a structured and meaningful community engagement process that leads to tangible environmental, social, and governance benefits for all three user groups.    

Local Government: 

o   Planning/Zoning: The local planning board could use the census tract metrics as a guide, so that planning and zoning decisions are more transparent, systematic, and equitable community-wide.

o   Entitlements/Concessions: Inform the conversation about how a large scale project will benefit the surrounding neighborhood in return for receiving their construction permit.

o   Open Data Tracking: Uploading the tool's output to a community open data portal would expand tracking of many climate change and public health topics related to the built environment to include private property for the first time. 

ArchEPI's founder uniquely combines expertise in green/healthy building, the health effects of climate change, links between building design and community health, and implementing metrics to benefit decision making. She is a member of the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows, previous director of a green/healthy building rating system, and holds a Doctorate of Public Health from Harvard University, where she also teaches. For the past 17 years, she has advised the real estate sector on how to prioritize green and healthy buildings to maximize neighborhood co-benefits to planetary and community health.

We have completed a proof-of-concept, piloting ArchEPI in three communities in the U.S. We also created a playbook and demos of six use cases, all of which can be viewed at https://www.alignmentprocess.org.

The proof-of-concept and demo have changed the tenor of our interaction with potential clients from aspirational to practical conversations about next steps. 

We have signed contracts with an architecture firm to run the ArchEPI process on two ongoing projects in Massachusetts. And, we have completed a project for a healthcare institution in California that used ArchEPI to tailor their sustainability guidelines to the specific community health needs of two different campuses. We also used ArchEPI to help a university in Texas prioritize future upgrades to the campus and to refine conversations with the local jurisdiction around opportunities to enhance bicycle and pedestrian safety in and around the campus. Finally, we are in late stage negotiations with several local and national built environment associations to adopt ArchEPI as a requirement for their awards and certification programs.

We are in search of technical expertise to help us use Generative AI to automate the ArchEPI tool, so that it can generate output for every census tract in the US at the click of a mouse. We have access to all of the data we need and a decision tree based on our founder’s extensive review of the scientific literature linking social and environmental metrics with each other and with evidence-based design strategies. However, we are in need of expertise and peer-review to help us develop and beta test the automation. And, we need funding to pay web developers and user interface designers to build a minimum viable product that is powered by the automation. Finally, we have received some legal advice through the Harvard iLab. But, we would benefit from more hands-on coaching as we refine our business plan and intellectual property plan. We are attempting to find the right balance between financial sustainability and maximizing the social and environmental impact of the ArchEPI process – which would completely transform the role of real estate in the climate and chronic disease crises if it is implemented at scale. 

ArchEPI does not simply combine datasets in a new way and at a more granular scale than is currently available to conversations about real estate development. Its primary innovation is in reorienting building design so that real estate developments that catalyze neighborhood-scale action on climate change, community health, and social equity create more value for stakeholders (community members, real estate developers, and local government) than developments that ignore their surroundings (the status quo). We target our messaging and the tool's output to addressing the key pain points motivating each of the three stakeholder groups who are central to the real estate public approvals process. We encourage them to annotate the tool’s initial output and add community-generated data and stories of lived experience. In this way, a single, automated output for a neighborhood can be tailored an unlimited number of times to reflect the specific needs of individual real estate projects. We also reach out to all three user groups, because our proof-of-concept research has shown that ArchEPI's output is most impactful when it is used during the public approvals process to help all three stakeholder groups co-create a shared vision for the project that explicitly generates value for each group.

Problem: The primary motivation behind ArchEPI is to create both a reason and a mechanism for individual real estate projects to coordinate with surrounding properties to address climate hazards that are larger than a single property (such as heat risk, flooding risk, wildfire risk, and air pollution). The current disconnect between community climate action plans (which stay at a high level) and the fragmented nature of the real estate development process (which focuses exclusively inside the property lines) has stood in the way of communities meeting their climate goals.

Solution: Use neighborhood data on social determinants of health, community health status, and vulnerability to climate change to prioritize evidence-based building, landscape, and infrastructure designs that will bring the greatest co-benefits to the surrounding community. The tool’s output guides users to implement participatory community engagement methods to refine the development’s environmental health priorities and seek community and government support for the project.

Impact of ArchEPI on the Problem: The proof-of-concept pilot study concluded that it is more effective to build community support for design measures that mitigate and/or adapt to climate change if they are framed from the perspective of community health and social equity topics that matter to community members. The good news is that all of the evidence-based design strategies included in ARchEPI’s output result in multiple co-benefits. So, one of the major social impact outcomes of the tool is that it builds community support for design strategies that would be considered too expensive or low priority if they are presented as solely beneficial to the climate.

Outputs: The tool’s output is designed to demonstrate how an individual real estate development contributes to the key performance indicators in neighborhood and community climate change and public health action plans. In that sense, it makes it possible to link parcel scale metrics all the way up to global efforts to track SDG 13 (climate change) and SDG 3.4 (non-communicable disease). The array of climate areas that are addressed through architectural design include: reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing renewable energy production, and protecting communities from the infrastructural and human health risks of climatic events (i.e., heat, flooding, wildfire, hurricanes, vector-borne disease, air pollution, etc.). 

Short term results: From the real estate development industry’s perspective, the short-term result of using ArchEPI across their portfolio would be cost savings and risk reduction. The tool’s output guides project teams to use capital more efficiently by responding to neighborhood needs. It can reduce investment risk by helping proposed developments enter the construction permitting process with support from both the community and local officials. It also would generate tangible benefits for all three stakeholder groups (i.e., developer, community, and local government) by reframing the community benefit/ mitigation conversation so that all investments made by the developer bring co-benefits to both the development and the community.

Long term results: Applied across many parcels in the neighborhood, ArchEPI increases the probability that development (both new construction and renovations) will lead to improvements in high priority community health and climate change metrics without displacing existing residents and businesses. The local health department can track how the high priority neighborhood-level environmental health indicators included in the ArchEPI output change over time in neighborhoods that use ArchEPI for all (or most) new construction and renovation construction projects. If ArchEPI is scaled for use across the U.S. (such as through building codes and/or green/healthy building rating systems like LEED), the tool outputs could be directly fed into the U.S. Nationally Determined Contribution report for greenhouse gas reduction, climate change adaptation, and health effects of climate change. This would be the first time context-driven data would be included in global climate reporting – particularly related to the health and social equity effects of climate change. 

ArchEPI is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service tool with wrap on consulting services. The tool uses open-source data sets that have been made available at the census tract (e.g., neighborhood) level by federal agencies like the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Indicators that are 30% more severe than a reference spatial scale (such as city, county, state, or national) or 0.7 or greater on an absolute value index are designated as “high priority.” The founder relies on an extensive, multi-disciplinary literature review that she performed for her upcoming book, Architectural Epidemiology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) to map out the relationships across high priority indicators. She uses a decision tree to identify the top 3-5 environmental health topics in that neighborhood that could be influenced through changes to building, landscape, and/or infrastructure design. We plan on using the MIT Solve funding and expert advisors to move from the current technology (which uses Excel spreadsheets and individual review of each use case neighborhood) to an online, cloud-based relational database powered by a generative AI decision tree. We are also seeking digital platforms that would allow for annotations of the tool output. And, we are developing educational materials, worksheets, and a community of practice to support users as they apply the tool’s output in the field using participatory community engagement practices. 

1 full-time staff (founder)

2 contractors

16 years

We followed community-based participatory research principles in the creation of the ArchEPI process -- both within the development team and with the pilot users. 

As we listened to stakeholders and early users, we continually modified the tool, so that it now creates structural safeguards centering equity -- particularly for community voices, which are often not heard or discounted in the real estate development process. The first section in the playbook we released explaining the process (available here: https://www.alignmentprocess.org) guides users step by step through the approach to centering equity that we co-created with pilot participants and subject matter experts. The approach is designed to ensure that all voices receive equal attention from all participants at all stages of the process.

One of the most important aspects of structural equity in the ArchEPI approach is the idea that the data is meant as a framework for conversation -- not the end of the conversation. That is why the user interface we are developing needs to allow for users to annotate its output and add new data sets/stories of lived experience to the platform. 

ArchEPI's business case also emphasizes the need to offer a community-focused version of the tool free of charge or heavily discounted. We have received preliminary interest from two community groups in the Greater Boston area and a community planning best practice guide focused on racial equity to co-create a community-specific playbook to complement the current playbook, which is written more for professional audiences than neighborhood associations. 

Value Proposition/Marketing

Our proof-of-concept pilot underscored the importance of developing a compelling value proposition for each of the three stakeholder groups who must work together to successfully develop a real estate project that maximizes climate, health, and equity co-benefits. ArchEPI helps real estate development teams lower risk, reduce out-of-pocket community benefit contributions, and accelerate the process of obtaining a construction permit and starting construction. The tool helps community groups advocate more effectively on behalf of their desires for proposed real estate projects. And, for local government, it reduces litigation around proposed real estate projects, assists in streamlining the public approvals process, and makes it possible to include private real estate projects in community metrics around climate change, public health, economic development, and social equity. 

Potential Market/Addressable Size

We work with 3 markets. Our beachhead market are real estate development teams (i.e., developers, institutional owners, architects, and sustainability consultants). They are frustrated by the way green/healthy building tools are underutilized (and sometimes lead to wasted investments and ineffectual environmental and social outcomes). Commercial real estate represents 18% of the U.S. economy ($1 trillion/year). Our goal is to integrate ArchEPI into two major industry tools by the end of 2025, so that it will instantaneously access the majority of the commercial building market in the U.S. Our secondary market are local governments – planning, zoning, building code enforcement, and climate/sustainability – which has a high barrier to entry but the potential to rapidly scale ArchEPI's environmental and social impact. The third market are community-based organizations, whose participation we plan to fund through grants. 

Sales and Distribution Channels

Real estate development teams and community-based organizations are most easily accessed by word of mouth. We are capitalizing on our founder's strong relationship within the building, climate change, and public health communities to market ArchEPI. We are also responding to RFQs and RFPs put out by local governments who are interested in changing their green building standards and/or the project approval process, so that it is more responsive to neighborhood needs and so that it more effectively leads to climate mitigation, community resilience, improved community health, and social equity.

Key Drivers of Business Economics

Primary costs for the first year: 1) Create a database of environmental health priorities for every census block in the U.S.; 2) Graphic design to develop output templates for each user group. 

Revenue: We will offer a mix of per project and subscription-based options for real estate users. Local government users will be charged a flat fee to implement ArchEPI either using a stepped-up approach (e.g., pilot, then expansion) or full implementation for every census tract in their jurisdiction. We will seek grant funding to support community users and research the possibility of folding a neighborhood association training program into contracts with local government. We already offer add on consulting services to all three user groups to facilitate a civic engagement process using ArchEPI data to generate value for all three stakeholder groups.

We have completed a proof-of-concept pilot and created a demo of ArchEPI, which has been well received by all three stakeholder groups. We have interviewed more than 100 individuals from all three user groups (real estate, community, and government). There is great interest amongst all three groups in learning the ArchEPI method and fitting it into existing workflows. However, the feedback we have received is that automating the tool will dramatically increase its uptake, because it will shorten the data analysis step from a matter of hours to a matter of minutes. We are already working with national building groups to provide professional development courses to train the first set of super users. Given the revenue that would be generated through a combination of training workshops and software subscriptions, we anticipate reaching financial sustainability within a year of automating the tool to every census tract in the U.S. – particularly if it is integrated into 1-2 national best practice guides/frameworks. We also plan to replicate our consulting work with large organizations who see value in tailoring their institutional sustainability requirements to generate tangible climate, health, and equity benefits in the surrounding neighborhood. And, we have begun marketing ArchEPI as a powerful, place-based ESG screening tool for impact investors.