Apartment Life is Greener | AMLI Residential

Apartments are the answer for how to have a greener, healthier and more responsible life.

Better Choice for Your Home—Why?

Apartment living allows you to have a healthier lifestyle and a smaller carbon footprint than living in a single-family house or townhome. Consider these reasons:

• In single-family homes empty rooms and unused spaces waste energy and money on heating and cooling space you don’t even use. Apartments are a better size for your needs.
• You can drive fewer miles and be more active because apartments are typically within walking distance to employment, entertainment and public transit.
• Apartment communities use significantly less water per person both inside the unit and out on the grounds.
• Healthy building materials and green friendly policies (such as low or no VOC paints and smoke-free building rules) are more likely to be present at an apartment community.
• Unlike single-family homes, most apartment communities assist your healthy lifestyle by providing fitness equipment.

Better Choice for Your City—Why?

By building up instead of out horizontally, apartments create a healthier community and save taxpayer money. Consider these reasons:

• When more people live in your neighborhood the density supports the local businesses, shops and restaurants that make urban neighborhoods so unique and walkable. Low density neighborhoods can only support generic chains.
• Apartments are near existing infrastructure, which greatly decreases taxpayer cost of building and maintaining roads, sewers, utilities and schools to service new homes.
• The density of apartments allows the city to grow without reducing green space (e.g. apartment communities often replace obsolete buildings and parking lots instead of irreplaceable natural habitats).
• The smaller carbon footprint of an apartment resident benefits your city by saving energy and water.

Energy

Apartments are built to be efficient. You won’t lose as much energy due to shared walls and ceilings. Appliances and cooling systems also operate better because they receive more regular maintenance.

Transit

Not only do apartments make it easier for you to enjoy an active, car-free lifestyle, but they also help make a strong public transit system possible. Density allows transit to run more frequently, provide a safer experience for passengers, and over time increase access to more places.

Health

Maintaining a home can be a full time job. As a homeowner it is easy to fall behind on maintenance to the detriment of your family’s health. Apartments have a full time staff to provide regular maintenance and safety checks on systems that affect your health, such as HVAC equipment.

Infrastructure

Sprawl is a burden on infrastructure, the environment and you. In a single-family subdivision you might not be able to access any services on foot. By building vertically apartments place you in the thick of the action and make it far easier and greener to access the services you need.

Economy

Single-family homes encourage overconsumption. The oversized spaces create a powerful urge to buy more stuff to fill it. Meanwhile apartments are smaller and locate people near local restaurants and neighborhood events, making it easier for people to spend money on experiences and discouraging unnecessary (and environmentally detrimental) consumption.

Water/Greenspace

Shared outside areas like greenspaces and pools not only benefit residents and neighborhoods by providing a social space, but also require far less water use per person than individual lawns or pools at single-family houses.

Recycling

Apartments make it simpler for you to recycle by providing accessible and convenient options. If you want to recycle in a single-family home you must establish your own mini-recycling service or drive your recycling to a local center.

Green regulation

Most apartments located in larger cities are required to obtain a green building certification or to comply with other sustainability requirements, such as covered bike storage, EV stations and green or white roofs. For-sale housing is not held to the same standards.