Rachel Hodgdon, President & CEO of the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) and former U.S. Green Building Council Knowledge SVP and Center for Green Schools Director, shared with Multi-Housing News that the institute is currently in development of a single-family residential certification and will soon debut its new WELL Equity Rating, which Hodgdon says is “designed to empower organizations to create places where everyone can feel welcome, seen, and heard.”

She also commented on the rise in green building certifications across all building types that has been recorded since the pandemic, providing statistics that support the organizational tide change that the updated rating systems are meant to engender. 

“Not only has the WELL Health-Safety Rating been hugely popular, with 2.8 billion square feet enrolled since its launch just two years ago, but we are also finding that most of the companies that adopted the WELL Health-Safety Rating are treating it as the steppingstone that it was intended to be and upsizing their commitments to WELL at scale,” she said, adding that the adoption of WELL ratings in the senior care sector grew by more than 30 million square feet within the past year alone.