John D. Macomber

For too long we’ve designed buildings that haven’t focused on the people inside—their health, their ability to work effectively, and what that means for the bottom line. An authoritative introduction to a movement whose vital importance is now all too clear, Healthy Buildings breaks down the science and makes a compelling business case for creating healthier offices, schools, and homes.

As the COVID-19 crisis brought into sharp focus, indoor spaces can make you sick—or keep you healthy. Fortunately, we now have the know-how and technology to keep people safe indoors. But there is more to securing your office, school, or home than wiping down surfaces. Levels of carbon dioxide, particulates, humidity, pollution, and a toxic soup of volatile organic compounds from everyday products can influence our health in ways people aren’t always aware of.

This landmark book, revised and updated with the latest research since the COVID-19 pandemic, lays out a compelling case for more environmentally friendly and less toxic offices, schools, and homes. It features a concise explanation of disease transmission indoors, and provides tips for making buildings the first line of defense.  At the center of the great convergence of green, smart, and safe buildings, healthy buildings are vital to the push for more sustainable urbanization that will shape our future.

By 2050 the number of people living in cities will have nearly doubled, to 6 billion, and the problems created by this rampant urbanization are among the most important challenges of our time. Of all resource-management issues, the author argues, water, electricity, and transit deserve the greatest focus. Every other service a competitive city provides—functional housing, schools, hospitals, stores, police and fire departments, heating, cooling, waste management—depends on a reliable infrastructure for those three resources.

Many corporations and investors assume that fixing cities is the purview of government. But governments around the world are stuck—financially, politically, or both. Implementing solutions to the problems of urbanization requires large amounts of capital, exceptional managerial skill, and significant alignment of interests. All these abound in the private sector.

Thus major opportunities exist for businesses that can create and claim value by improving resource efficiency. The products and services that new (or legacy) cities will require, and that provide the return investors and entrepreneurs need, optimize both technological sophistication and financial sophistication—approaches designed to attract capital by offering different levels of risk and return, different cash-flow priorities, and opportunities for both short-term and long-term investment.

The author cites a number of companies that have moved toward or into what he calls “the efficiency frontier.” These include Sarvajal, in India, which saves money and eliminates waste by selling direct to customers through its “water ATMs”; the Boston-based EnerNOC, which manages electricity production and consumption to reduce spikes in demand; and EMBARQ, based in Washington, DC, which coordinates the interests of business and government to organize city transit services.

As fires, floods, and droughts increasingly threaten homes, businesses, and other institutions, climate risk has become financial risk. Mortgages written on homes in exposed locations are being shed by banks and absorbed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-backed mortgage guarantors. This implies that homeowners and investors have been making location decisions without properly pricing the cost of potential peril, and that the government has been enabling the oversight. Some are even warning that this market failure could lead to a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis, which was also triggered by bad mortgages.

It’s not just homeowners investing recklessly — many businesses have been equally short-sighted in where they place new assets, and what to do with existing assets in once-safe areas now threatened by these perils. We can’t just keep piling sandbags, pumping basements, dousing flames, and expecting government bailouts forever; a methodology is needed for homeowners, businesses, mortgage holders, governments — all of society — to figure out which assets to reinforce and what other courses of action are available.

The February 2021 freeze in Texas carries enormous long-term cleanup and health costs. Such climate-related disasters will be increasingly common in the coming years. As businesses shift to work-from-home, the line of responsibility for the workplace also changes — and goes outside “the office” or “the factory.” Investments should extend beyond traditional workplaces right into people’s houses and apartments. Long-term, investing in employee-housing resilience will pay off in the form of healthier and more productive employees and customers.

As we start to think about returning to work, shopping, and recreation, there is much talk about transformed workplaces and innovative social distancing designs. But how will companies, workers, and customers have confidence that these new measures will actually be effective at protecting them?

Many claims will be made over the next few weeks and months that stores, restaurants, offices, and processing plants are now at a level of reasonable safety to open up. Much media attention has been paid to easing restrictions—basically increasing the available supply of offices, restaurants, colleges, stores, and factories.  The demand side should be of equal or greater concern: Will shoppers, diners, students, and workers feel safe returning? How can they be comfortable that the space is safe beyond just taking someone’s word for it?

Cautious and shell-shocked employees and customers—as well as skittish lenders and insurance companies—can be expected to look for some objective standard of reasonable care before they will concur that indoor environments are reasonably safe. There are likely to be do-it-yourselfers, top shelf evaluators—and charlatans. You will need to be able to tell them apart.

What to Ask For: What Gets Measured Gets Done.  Here are key requirements to ask of any service provider offering to certify your work setting as a healthy building. These best practices apply for employers, employees, and customers alike.

The MBTA faces the same problems that confront every transit system in the world: Riders want to pay less in fares and taxpayers want to contribute less in subsidies. In exchange, everyone wants to receive more safety, more reliability, more frequency, longer routes, and later hours.

These opposing financial forces never add up. But new technologies and modern business models, many invented in Massachusetts, could vastly improve the balance of this age-old equation

Research interests include:

• Real estate development, design, and construction, notably how design creates value; 
• Sustainable cities, in particular entrepreneurship and project finance in light of global trends in urbanization and resource scarcity.
• Cleantech, in particular innovations in business and technology that stretch the productivity of resources like energy, clean water, or leverage the effectiveness of capital expenditures on transit.

This course is intended for any student serious about a career in managing, developing, or investing in real estate. Due to its rigor, it will be more than sufficient for those thinking about real estate as a hobby or for those considering real estate for limited personal investing.

The class goals are to show how real estate works, how to assess the risks, how to be a better deal maker, how to manage a project and how to be a leader in the industry.

This course is about building sustainable and resilient cities, future proofing real estate and infrastructure assets, and examining how businesses and investors find opportunities in climate adaptation.

The world faces substantial challenges in the face of pressures including rapid urbanization as well as existing and worsening scarcity of resources like energy, water, land and power. Many of these situations are exacerbated by the onset of more frequent and more intense natural perils related to climate change such as wildfire, river flooding, sea level rise, extreme heat, and drought. These events will have wildly variable impacts by geography, peril, wealth, vulnerability, and time frame.

How will individuals, businesses, investors, governments, and global society make choices around what assets – and people – to support, to protect, or to relocate in the response to these phenomena?

There are substantial opportunities to create and share value using a variety of analytical tools, materials and methods, risk transfer mechanisms, and finance and contractual structures.

This is a Short Intensive Program or SIP at Harvard Business School.  It’s an optional student offering prior to the formal start of the Spring semester the following week.  SIPs tend to cover new material on current topics, to be less formal than the HBS Case Study classroom, and in particular to draw on HBS alumni and other practitioners to bring real life current expertise to the room.

Focus

This SIP looks at adaption opportunities in public health and the built environment.  It’s clear that perils like wildfire, flooding, extreme heat, air and water contamination, storm surge, and even grid freezes are taking a large and increasing toll on lives and property.  Limiting global warming, decarbonizing the economy, and investing in new technologies like wind, solar, and batteries are necessary but not sufficient:  Society (and business, and citizens, and governments) will need to make decisions about where to invest and to disinvest; and what people and assets to protect – or not to protect.  What are the decision tools?  Where is there business and investing opportunity (or obligation) in this massive worldwide exposure?

Objectives

The primary objective is to help students understand the many possible roles of business and investing in adaptation in response to present and future weather events that are related to climate change.   A major second objective is to define and refine teaching material that will go beyond this event, into the Harvard MBA classroom and other channels.  A third is to bring HBS learning and networks into trade and industry associations starting to address these perils.

This course introduces frameworks and models for smart and focused investing and operations across sectors, nations, industries, and time frames in Africa.   Students will learn tools and skills to help navigate the business landscape of Africa in terms of selection of investments and markets, as well as in locally relevant (nation by nation and district by district) components of effective operating businesses.  

Africa is unlike any other emerging region in several regards:  It’s massive (land area greater than India plus China plus USA plus Western Europe); there are about 54 countries and almost as many visas; 40 or so currencies; and hundreds of languages.  There is little connectivity between nations and cities; institutions (governments, law, and banking) are weak; and the nations are poor.  Yet there are over a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa today, with the population expected to grow faster than in any other region on the planet. The continent is rapidly urbanizing. There is resource scarcity but also resource abundance.  

The course is organized around three themes that cut across all business sectors in Africa in ways that are different than in other emerging markets:   1) Market segmentation and selection including country, region, sector, and place in the supply chain; 2) Access to growth capital; and 3)  Technology to overcome barriers or to “leapfrog” in business expansion. 

The cases focus on five business sectors which have particular potential impact in Africa and particular appeal for HBS students:  1) Investing and Capital Markets; 2) Infrastructure Finance and Delivery (including PPPs as well as urbanization); 3) Food and Agribusiness; 4) Manufacturing & Processing; and 5) Retail & Personal Services.    These are all areas which involve a) large amounts of capital b) managerial skill and c) job creation.