As director of online sales for builder CC Homes, Lorraine Sanchez encourages prospective buyers to go see the company’s houses in Ave Maria, a town in southwest Florida.

Since last year, she has had a new marketing tool: Ave Maria is “certified” as a blue zone, a place geared to helping people live healthy, active lives.

“It’s a great selling point,” Sanchez said.

The term “blue zone” was coined two decades ago when Dan Buettner, an explorer for National Geographic, was investigating places around the world where people regularly lived to 100 and beyond. He deduced that residents of these mostly small, remote locales had such long, healthy lives because they stayed active, ate plant-based meals and formed lasting social ties, among other practices.

The concept has become the latest wellness buzzword: Blue Zones, the company that sprang from Buettner’s research, has put its trademark on books, canned beans, bottled tea, frozen burrito bowls and even a series on Netflix.

Now, the real estate industry has jumped into the game. Blue Zones runs initiatives that certify towns and cities that meet healthy lifestyle criteria, and they help others remake themselves to promote longevity. The initiatives – often funded by health care systems and insurance companies with a vested interest in a hale and hearty population – promote solutions such as smoking bans, biking paths and group activities that foster a sense of belonging.

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Eighty places in the United States – from Bakersfield, California, to Corry, Pennsylvania – have adopted these initiatives, called Blue Zone Projects. Some developers take inspiration from Blue Zones even if they are not seeking official certification.

But in some cases, it appears to be more a marketing strategy than anything else, joining a flurry of real estate certification programmes and having little to do with the modest way of life that Blue Zones is meant to reflect.

A luxury hotel and condominium project in Miami is using the Blue Zones moniker for a medical facility on the premises that will offer plastic surgery. And there has been pushback in some quarters, including a part of Phoenix with a large minority population. Some non-profit groups there wrote a letter criticising an effort to organise a Blue Zones initiative, saying it would compete with plans already in progress, draining resources and funding.

“This is like Lifestyle Medicine 101,” said Janelle Applequist, an associate professor in the Zimmerman School of Advertising & Mass Communications at the University of South Florida. “This is stuff we’ve known forever. They’re just repackaging it.”

Buettner defended his company’s approach, saying it was based on exhaustive research and that instead of trying to persuade individuals to change their behaviour, as other wellness programmes do, it focuses on changing the environment to make healthy choices easier.

“On the surface, it might look like what’s been done before,” he said. “But every single component of what we do is underpinned with evidence.”

The Blue Zones phenomenon started when Buettner learned that the Japanese island of Okinawa produced the oldest people in the world, and in 1999, he set out to learn why.

Within a decade, he and other researchers had identified four more blue zones: small communities in Italy, Costa Rica and Greece as well as Loma Linda, California, which had a high proportion of Seventh-day Adventists, many of them vegetarians. (The “blue” in blue zones came from the ink marks made on maps pinpointing places where centenarians were concentrated.)

Buettner distilled what residents of the blue zones had in common and set out to spread the gospel in books, articles and talks. He founded Blue Zones to manage all these activities and is now chair.

“I never set out to be a longevity guru,” Buettner says at the outset of his Netflix series.

Some questioned his claims and data. And since his initial investigations, some of the original blue zones have lost their longevity edge as processed foods supplanted meals made with homegrown ingredients and the sedentary ways of modern life took hold.

But Buettner recently anointed a sixth blue zone: Singapore. The South-east Asian island was different from the earlier five, which had grown organically, because its governmental policies nudged people to make healthier choices.

Despite the growing popularity of blue zones, some organisers are finding resistance.

Equality Health Foundation, a non-profit spinoff of the Equality Health primary care platform, has been working to organise a Blue Zones Project in South Phoenix, an area with a mostly Black and Hispanic population that has lower incomes and lower life expectancy than predominantly white areas nearby.

Tomás León, president of the foundation, said he was seeking to raise US$10.5 million for the initiative.

But some local groups have expressed concern that Blue Zones will duplicate efforts they have underway and that the fundraising drive will siphon off money that otherwise might go to their projects.

For example, the Cihuapactli Collective, an advocacy group for Indigenous families, has plans for a wellness centre that would require raising about US$25 million, said Enjolie Lafaurie, co-executive director of operations and development. “It feels like robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she added.

The groups also pointed out in a letter that similar projects lacked roots in the community and that efforts to organise a Blue Zones initiative had “a white saviour complex.”

León said he was sensitive to the concerns of the groups that signed the protest letter and was increasing his fundraising so that funds could be directed to them.

Buettner said Blue Zone Projects could be challenging to execute, requiring a coordinated effort by people in all corners of a community.

“There are a lot of discipline and headaches and correcting course to make things work,” he said. NYTIMES