Culture of Health Blog

Gary Wellman is living the dream. Every morning, he is treated to the nearly cloudless sky that frames Arizona’s nearby Santa Rita Mountains. A retired basketball coach, 72-year-old Wellman happily shares that he “lives on a golf course in Green Valley,” and likes to keep busy. “You can’t sit around when you have arthritis and diabetes like I do.”

About a year ago, Wellman hopped out of his golf cart, stood up to reach for his clubs and found himself on the ground. He suffered from numbness in his feet, a common symptom of diabetes. After that day, Wellman says, “I began to fall a lot on the course. My doctors did all kinds of tests and came up with nothing.”

That is until Wellman’s physician suggested he participate in an experimental treatment for loss of balance conducted in the lab of Bijan Najafi, PhD, a surgeon and director of the Interdisciplinary Consortium on Advanced Motion Performance at the University of Arizona.

Each winter, Raquel Lizardi and her heartiest garden club members brave the New York City cold to tend their community’s apple trees. “They are very delicate,” Lizardi says, sharing her training at GrowNYC, a nonprofit that seeks to create a healthier environment in the city, block by block. Their efforts ensure that the small orchard yields barrels of sweet Red Delicious, Gala, and slightly tart McIntosh apples for Lizardi and her neighbors in the fall.

Come spring, the group turns its attention to planting enough organic spinach, collards, kale, berries, tomatoes, other vegetables, and herbs to keep all of their tables filled with free, fresh produce.

The orchard, gardens, and grove of evergreens where Lizardi and her neighbors come together are a center of community activity at Via Verde/The Green Way, an award-winning, affordable housing development that rises above a quiet street just off bustling Third Avenue in the South Bronx. Built on a former garbage-strewn lot and Brownfield in 2012, Via Verde is now an international symbol of healthy design achievement.

“The fact that a project like Via Verde can be created as affordable housing means that we can and should do this for everyone,” says Dr. Karen Lee, MD MHSc, of Dr. Karen Lee Health + Built Environment Consulting, and co-author of Active Design: Affordable Designs for Affordable Housing, a report based on Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded research. Her active design guidelines helped shape the project, and those in more than 40 other cities worldwide.