To improve the quality of the building construction environment, developed countries have designed methodologies to assess sustainability both of building constructions and urban areas. In developing countries the situation is somewhat more complex, considering that the fast and disordered urban growth has generated several environmental and mainly social problems. Among other problems, São Paulo, with almost 11 million inhabitants, has a significant housing deficit, both owing to the insufficiency of housing units to meet the existing demand and the low quality of existing units. In the context presented by the authors, the purpose of this article is to analyze some sustainable assessment methods existing internationally, applying them to a housing agglomerate project that was designed in light of sustainable urban planning principles such as differentiated design, use of solar energy for water heating, and participation of the community in the project development, among others. With such analysis, the authors intend to review the situation of housing agglomerates in regard to sustainability and, at the same time, analyze the applicability of international methods to the Brazilian reality, identifying the main difficulties and contributing to build an overview of the situation of housing agglomerates with a view to implementing a national method to assess building construction and urban area sustainability.