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I recorded this episode the day before one of the best site visits I’ve done in years.
I was in New York City with the Van Leer Foundation, visiting early childhood development and green initiatives across the city. Through that trip, I got to meet Jonathan Rose — founder of Jonathan Rose Companies, one of the most respected names in green affordable housing in the US — and his team, including Lauren Zullo, the company’s Managing Director of Impact, who leads their real estate sustainability, decarbonization, and ESG investment strategy.
We sat down in Jonathan Rose Companies’ Midtown headquarters. No field recording this time — just an office, sirens outside, and a conversation that kept pulling me into territory I don’t usually cover on this podcast. Housing policy. Tenant retention. Healthy materials. Low-income housing tax credits. Financial stress as a health outcome.
And then, underneath all of it: nature.
The next morning, we visited Sendero Verde in East Harlem — a full city block transformed into 700+ units of affordable housing, community space, and one of the largest Passive House structures in the world. And what I saw there changed the way I think about where nature fits in the housing conversation.
But I’ll get to that.
Social determinants of health, starting at home
Lauren’s career has had three chapters — commercial real estate in DC, energy policy at an environmental nonprofit, and now nearly a decade at Jonathan Rose Companies — and each one layered something onto how she thinks about the intersection of buildings, health, and environment.
The frame she keeps coming back to is the social determinants of health. Only a portion of our health outcomes are driven by genetics. The rest is shaped by external factors: air quality, access to food, social connection, education, economic well-being, stress. And housing, Lauren argues, touches every single one of them.
“Housing is setting the environment in which people live.”
That sentence has stayed with me. Because when you hear it, you realize the question isn’t whether housing affects health. It’s how much of health is already being determined by housing — and whether anyone is designing for that intentionally.
Jonathan Rose Companies is. They think about where their properties are located — near transit, near schools, not in food deserts. They think about healthy materials — paints, flooring, cabinets that aren’t off-gassing chemicals into someone’s home. They think about indoor air quality and ventilation. They think about energy efficiency, because if a resident is paying the electricity bill, financial stress is a health outcome too.
And they think about what happens outside the apartment door. Fitness centers, computer labs, after-school programs, financial coaching, health and wellness support. Social programming designed to build connection between neighbors — because we know isolated people live shorter lives.
Lauren put it simply: just because someone lives in an apartment, whether by choice or because that’s what they can afford, doesn’t mean they don’t want to go outside and be in nature.
Nature as infrastructure (not decoration)
This is where the conversation landed somewhere I didn’t fully expect.
Lauren described how Jonathan Rose Companies has been bringing nature into their properties — not as an amenity, but as infrastructure. Trees for shade in the Bronx, where the urban heat island effect can make temperatures 15 degrees hotter than the nearby Upper West Side, anchored by Central Park. Community gardens for food access and nutrition education. Green roofs for stormwater management and insulation.
And then one detail that I loved: at a recent project in Washington, DC, they installed solar panels ballasted by a green roof. Not solar or green roof — both. On the hottest, sunniest days, when solar panels generate the most power but also lose efficiency from overheating, the plants underneath cool the air through evapotranspiration, making the solar panels more effective. The green roof makes the solar work better. The solar makes the green roof pencil financially. Symbiosis.
But when I asked Lauren how she makes the case for green space to investors who want every square foot generating revenue, her answer wasn’t about ecosystem services or co-benefits. It was more direct than that.
We’re building people’s homes. Think about where you want to live.
That’s it. Would you want to live somewhere with no outdoor space, no greenery, no place to just walk around? You can build one more unit, or you can build a place people actually want to stay. And in affordable housing, tenant satisfaction and tenure aren’t just nice-to-haves — they directly affect turnover costs, eviction rates, and operating budgets.
She’s doing the data work to prove it, too. Jonathan Rose Companies has been tracking repair and maintenance costs, utility expenses, and is now partnering with academics to study whether their social programming correlates with housing stability. It’s early, but the threads are there.
Sendero Verde
The next morning, the Van Leer Foundation team and I visited Sendero Verde in East Harlem. I knew the basics going in. 700+ units of affordable housing. Three buildings arranged around a central courtyard. The largest affordable Passive House building in the world. Over 85,000 square feet of community facility space. Partners including Harlem Children Zone’s Promise Academy II and Union Settlement.
What I didn’t know — and what Lauren told me during our recording — was the story of the courtyard.
The design team used a book called Mannahatta, in which researchers mapped the indigenous vegetation that existed on Manhattan long before development. They identified the native species that once grew on the site, and they traced the walking trails of the Lenape people who traveled through it.
So the winding path through Sendero Verde’s courtyard follows a Lenape walking trail. And the plants surrounding it were selected based on what used to grow there, centuries ago.
Lauren described it as reconnecting a property to its roots — literally, through its roots. It’s not a museum. It’s not a plaque. It’s a design decision that says: this land had a life before us, and we can honor that while building something new.
She also raised the honest tension: climate is changing, and the species that were appropriate centuries ago may not be the right species now. The certification schemes encourage native or adapted plants. It’s an evolving question, and I appreciated that she didn’t pretend it was resolved.
Walking through that courtyard the next day — kids playing, community space activated — I kept thinking about something Lauren said during our conversation: that when she sits in a design charrette looking at walls and windows and roofs, it’s only when the renderings arrive that you see the people. She’s trying to flip that. People first. Then the building around them.
Where my kids collect leaves
I asked Lauren what the Internet of Nature means to her, and she gave an answer I wasn’t expecting. She talked about her own kids.
About her kids asking where pigeons sleep. About pulling little hands along the sidewalk while running late to school, because they’re trying to collect every different kind of fallen leaf. About how the curiosity that lights up in her children around nature is different from anything she sees when they’re on a screen.
And she made the point that nature isn’t something that exists only outside the city. Pigeons will survive on popcorn and French fries whether we plant trees or not. But the bond between humans and nature — the curiosity, the drive, the peace — that’s fundamental to the human experience. And it shows up in a two-year-old collecting leaves on the sidewalk just as much as it does in a national park.
That, she said, gives her the drive to create more opportunity for people to interact with nature, even — especially — in the most urban settings.
Season 7 keeps asking the same question from different angles: what does urban nature mean for families, for caregivers, for the youngest lives?
Lauren Zullo’s answer is that it starts at home. Not the idea of home. The actual building. The actual courtyard. The actual tree you see from your window. And that if you’re building 19,000 units of affordable housing across the US, every single one of those is a chance to get it right.
Sendero Verde is proof that you can build at the intersection of affordability, sustainability, and nature — and that the result doesn’t look like a compromise. It looks like a community.
Find Lauren Zullo and Jonathan Rose Companies on their website.
Happy trails,
Nadina
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