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This study aims to contribute a regional experience of establishing a credible estimation of the house price premium associated with solar photovoltaics (PV) and to reveal the change of the premium in response to the changing feed-in tariffs (FiTs). This paper used Python to crawl records of sold residential properties in Southport, Queensland from 2008 to 2018. An experimental group of 316 solar PV houses and a control group of 228 non-solar PV houses were extracted for analysis. Using the hedonic approach, the study found that the gross premium was 4.3% of the average house price; the average net premium (exclusive of the PV installation cost) was 21,403 AUD when the FiT was at 44 cents/kWh; when the FiT dropped to 8 cents/kWh, the gross premium fell to 2.4%, and the average net premium dropped to 5600 AUD. The study shows that a solar PV house does enjoy a premium in terms of property value and indicates that a higher solar rebate and subsidy leads to a higher premium. It is commendable to provide some financial incentives to keep the premium within a reasonable range to encourage solar PV adoption.

The presence of Superfund sites can have substantial impacts on surrounding property values. A shortcoming of studies utilizing the traditional hedonic price model is that they fail to account for the presence of spatial dependence or autocorrelation in residential housing. Jefferson County, Kentucky is home to Louisville, the largest city in the state. Seven different Superfund sites are located within or just outside the county border. Community planners, appraisal professionals, or policy makers considering the use of a traditional hedonic pricing model will find inefficient estimates compared to a spatial error hedonic model. This study also considers two different phases of the cleanup process, suggesting that median housing value is lower for houses in close proximity to deleted Superfund sites, but is not significantly affected by sites classified as final. Another consideration is the implications of multiple Superfund sites located within five miles of the block group centroid. Findings indicate that multiple Superfund sites do not significantly impact housing values.

This paper studies the impact of urban public transport systems on real estate values, focusing on equality issues. It is known that, in addition to direct benefits, the construction of metro lines also produces indirect benefits, including changes in the value of buildings located near stations; these impacts are usually neglected in transport planning. In this paper, we propose a methodology to assess equality from this point of view and examine the case study of the city of Naples, highlighting how the current configuration of the railway network produces inequalities concerning impacts on property values. The proposed methodology, based on the Gini index, is then applied to two possible scenarios, related to the extension and improvement of the network.

This paper presents an investigation of the open-system Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) network on property values. An open-system BRT is one where bus feeder lines can enter and leave the BRT system, depending on their origin or destination so the BRT system infrastructure is shared by multiple routes. Brisbane, Australia is the empirical setting where smartcard (GoCard) data shows that 43% of bus passengers accessed the BRT system from feeder line stops. The paper investigates whether feeder line stops are important for increasing network accessibility in Brisbane’s open-system BRT. The hypothesis underpinning the study is that the improved accessibility resulting from an open-system BRT network results in higher property values within feeder line corridors in addition to simply around the BRT system. A Geographically Weighted Generalized Linear Model (GWGLM) is used to investigate property value premiums and their spatial distribution. GWGLM makes an improvement over Geographically Weighted Regression Model (GWR) by providing flexible local and global variable settings that decrease the risk of multi-collinearity in local models. The results identify property value uplift of up to 1.64% for every 100 m closer to feeder bus stops with frequent services in western and eastern Brisbane suburbs. Future studies should pay attention to the type of BRT operation (whether open- or closed-) in investigating the value of accessibility from BRT implementation. The results are policy relevant for the debate between whether BRT systems should be open or closed.

Community support for public transit could come more easily if transit systems demonstrate positive fiscal impacts beyond those achieved through fare box returns. Transit systems have the potential to generate additional public revenues through catalyzing development around transit stations, yielding increased property values and property taxes. This paper provides an assessment of the property value changes and development impacts that have occurred around the SunRail commuter rail system since the locations of the stations were announced in 2007. We estimate tax revenue impacts resulting from property value changes around each station. The findings show that tax revenue impacts have been highly variable across the system, with some stations having experienced modest to substantial value increases, while others have remained stagnant. However, SunRail stations generally outperformed their control areas that were identified as part of this study. SunRail investments appear to have catalyzed new development around stations and yielded measurable (re)development benefits in the form of property tax increases from new transit-oriented developments.

Bushfires are a common occurrence and are an inevitable natural event in many regions of Australia in most years. Despite the dangers of such bushfires to nearby properties and human life, humans continue to live in close proximity to bushfire prone areas. The pertinent questions asked in this study are whether residents are aware of the dangers of living in such areas- and if so, is it reflected in lower property values? Such residents have the choice of either discounting the risks of bushfires in their neighbourhoods or deciding to pay more to live in bushfire areas for the positive amenity values afforded by forested bushland settings. Buyers paying a premium price to live in close proximity to green space are well documented in hedonic property (HP) values studies. We examine this phenomenon using data available for forested bushfire prone areas in the immediate environs of the city of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia using an HP values approach. For this study sales data of 1028 houses in four suburbs are used. The regression results clearly show that residents in fact are paying more to be close to green space (forested areas) which is also clearly identified as bushfire prone areas. The threat of bushfires may have an effect on property prices but it is dominated by the desire to live close to green spaces.

Corporate leverage responds differently to employees’ rights in bankruptcy depending on whether it is driven by strategic concerns in wage bargaining or by credit constraints. Using novel data on employees’ rights in bankruptcy, we estimate their impact on leverage, exploiting time-series, cross-country, and firm-level variation in the data. For financially unconstrained firms, results accord with the strategic debt model: leverage increases more in response to rises in corporate property values or profitability if employees have strong seniority in liquidation and weak rights in restructuring. Instead, in financially constrained firms leverage responds less to these shocks if employees have stronger seniority.

This paper assesses the extent to which property taxes are capitalized into property values, exploiting the 2012 Italian tax reform. Municipal-level variation in the level of the property tax rates is instrumented using the exogenous staggered timing of local elections. We show that the incumbent local governments with upcoming elections in 2013 shifted the composition of fiscal revenues towards lower property tax. Our 2SLS estimate shows that a one standard deviation increase in municipal-level property tax intensity leads to a 2.7% reduction of municipal property values in the year of the reform. We elicit information on the characteristics of the compliers and show that these municipalities feature inefficient public spending and low social capital.

This research examines the housing market before and after abandoned railways are converted into greenways. Two different hedonic pricing models are employed to analyze changes in the impact and trend of the change—spatial regressions for before and after the conversion and the Adjusted Interrupted Time Series-Difference in Differences (AITS-DID) model. Analyzing 2005–2012 single-family home sale transactions in the City of Whittier, California the results show that converting the abandoned railway into a greenway increases property values. Upon the completion of the greenway, the positive association with the greenway proximity increased in both models. The premium also exists in the pre-conversion period. The sellers’ and buyers’ expectation of the greenway being an amenity factored into the housing market even during the construction of the greenway. After the conversion, properties near the greenway experienced a negative trend in their value.

German municipalities have substantial autonomy in setting taxes on two distinct tax bases: business profits and property values. We use this setting and a two-step approach to explore whether implemented tax policy is consistent with the seminal inverse-elasticity rule. First, we estimate the tax elasticity of the two tax bases using event-study and generalized differences-in-differences methods based on the universe of municipalities in 1995-2010. Second, we compare the ratio of the observed tax rates for the two tax bases to the ratio of their estimated elasticities. We find that property is not very responsive to variation in tax rates, whereas business profits respond significantly. While this would suggest that property should be taxed at a higher rate, the data show that this not the case: most municipalities impose relatively higher rates on business profits. This suggests that municipality-level taxation in Germany is inconsistent with the inverse-elasticity rule. We provide suggestive evidence that this finding is explained by politician's imprecise expectations about revenue elasticities as well as re-election concerns.

The effective conductivity and Young's modulus of metamaterials based on Gibson-Ashby cells have been calculated numerically. It is shown that the porosity dependences of these properties do not follow the Gibson-Ashby relations for open-cell foams, although the latter have been derived on the basis of this model. For low-porosity metamaterials with porosity 0.016 the relative conductivity and Young's modulus are still as low as 0.80 and 0.65, respectively. It is shown that these low relative property values are caused by the strongly oblate shape of the pores, which become microcrack-like voids as zero porosity is approached.

The thawing characteristics, initial thawing mechanism and post-thawing quality of lightly salted, frozen pork tenderloin following the use of high-voltage electrostatic fields (HVEFs) were investigated in this study. The thawing rate increased with increasing salt concentrations for pork thawed by a −10 kV or −15 kV HVEF. Thermal property values of pork changed with increasing salt concentration (0–6%). HVEFs could enhance salt diffusion during the thawing process. The pork tenderloin thawed using HVEFs had significantly less drip loss (P

Increasingly, stormwater management systems such as urban lakes and wetlands are being implemented in developing urban areas. They are designed to serve multiple purposes. Urban stormwater management systems have environmental, economic, and social impacts. The main aim of this study was to explore the community values and social and economic benefits of urban lakes in the Western Sydney region of New South Wales, Australia. The study involved two case study sites and community surveys using the tailored design method. For this study, a combination of three methods of data collection was used; online, onsite and letterbox drop off surveys. The survey explored several aspects such as community wellbeing, environment and property value benefits. Responses from the community show that there is an overall positive perception of the lake and associated parkland. When asked, over 70% of the respondents stated that there is a positive impact of the lake on the property prices. Additionally, 50% of residents found that there was moderate to significant impact of the lake on both mental and physical wellbeing of people. Approximately 20% of respondents stated that they would not exercise if the local lake system did not exist. Also, 60% of the respondents stated that the lake improved their quality of life. Furthermore, a hedonic property price analysis was done to quantify the impact of the lake on the surrounding properties. A positive correlation was found between the lake and property prices of surrounding homes. The findings from this study provide evidence to policymakers and municipal councils to encourage investments to improve performance of existing lakes as well as develop new ones in the urban areas.

This paper examines potential property value impacts when a nuclear power plant closes and spent fuel remains on site. We confirm earlier research that fails to find an impact on property values of proximity to a nuclear power site. Another contribution of this paper is our finding that a one percentage point increase in property taxes is associated with a 4.31% decrease in the sale price of a home. These results provide evidence for a positive impact of operating nuclear facilities on surrounding communities in the form of reduced residential property taxes for a given level of public expenditures.

In the State of New York, atmospheric deposition of mercury ranks among the 10 most prevalent causes of adverse impacts on water quality. This paper examines the impacts of mercury pollution by exploring the relationship between property values and fish consumption advisory (FCA) designation on New York lakes. We find that New York State property values within one mile of an FCA-designated lake decrease by 6–7 percent on average. This negative impact decreases as the distance between properties and lakes increases. Regressions using samples derived with Mahalanobis metric matching find an even larger FCA effect, ranging from 7 to 10 percent. Our results can serve as a partial indication of the benefits of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which includes the first mercury emission standard in the United States.

The occurrence of in-house unnatural death could negatively affect the value of housing property. This study evaluates the geographic and temporal scope of the impact of unnatural death on property values in Hong Kong. By exploiting the spatial and intertemporal variation of the shock in a difference-in-differences approach, we find significant negative externalities of unnatural death incidence on neighborhood housing values. On average, units in which an unnatural death occurred experience a 25% drop in value following the death. Nearby units on the same floor also show a significant price drop of 4.5%. Prices of units on other floors of the same building decline about 2.6%. Units in other buildings of the same estate observe a price decline of about 1% on average. However, the price for nearby estates within 300 m shows a positive impact of 0.5%, suggesting a very localized sorting mechanism. Temporally, price evolution after death incidence follows a U shape. Housing prices continue to decline up to 4–5 years after deaths and recover gradually afterwards. We also document the heterogeneity of the impact by the type of death incidence (murder, suicide, or accident) and the type of homebuyers (local buyer, investment firm, and other buyers). We find that the negative externalities of death incidence are largely due to a severe stigma effect, rather than channels through the revealed crime risk or the price contagion effect.

Single-family zoning is often defended as necessary to preserve neighbourhood amenities, but it is also blamed for making housing less affordable by constraining supply. In 2009, the City of Vancouver rezoned 95% of single-family areas to allow small accessory dwelling units (ADUs) or “laneway homes” behind residential structures. The goal was to increase rental housing supply with minimal disruption to rezoned neighbourhoods. We exploit this regulatory change to estimate the magnitude of externalities onto nearby units from increases in density. We find that even this “gentle” densification negatively affects neighbouring properties. This negative spillover is strongest for higher-valued properties and non-existent for median and lower-valued homes. Our findings illustrate that the costs and benefits of added density depend importantly on neighbourhood type.

To investigate the effects of ATF cladding properties on the plant responses to severe accidents, short-term station blackout simulations and sensitivity analyses on hypothetical cladding materials were performed using MAAP code. For sensitivity analyses, 7 hypothetical cladding materials were used. Hypo-0 was the reference cladding whose properties are anticipated to show the poorest fuel performance during an STSBO. The input property values for Hypo-1 through Hypo-6 were selected by changing each variable independently while keeping the others at their reference values. The onset times for core uncovery and cladding oxidation were similar for all the simulation cases, implying that single property cannot affect the event times. A main conclusion is that a large enthalpy of cladding can delay the increase in temperatures of fuel and cladding by playing a role as a heat sink after the core uncovery occurs, resulting in the delayed hot leg rupture.

When the Fish and Wildlife Service designated land in four counties of Arizona as “critical habitat” necessary for the protection of the endangered cactus ferruginous pygmy‐owl, property values dropped considerably. When the owl was later delisted, property values jumped back up. We use difference-in-difference and synthetic control designs to identify this effect with Zillow property value data. The results provide an estimate of the costs of this critical habitat designation, and they are considerable, contrary to the regulators’ position that critical habitat protection imposes no incremental costs beyond the original endangered species listing.

We study the bargaining power of investors and the contagion effects of investor-owned single family homes on nearby property values. By controlling for the characteristics of both buyers and sellers, we find that investors tend to have more bargaining power than owner-occupiers — they purchase at lower prices and sell at higher prices, all else equal. We identify two types of investors: Professional Investors (e.g., corporations and partnerships) and Individual Investors. We find differences in the behavior of these two types of investors. For example, Individual Investors tend to invest in homes similar in terms of unobserved quality to those purchased by owner- occupiers. The tendency to buy lower quality homes is primarily attributable to Professional Investors. We also find that Professional Investors have more bargaining power than Individual Investors. For the contagion analysis, we use a repeat sales methodology and find that increasing ownership by investors in a neighborhood is associated with a small positive effect on nearby property values.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is the largest supply-side housing subsidy in the United States, costing over $8 billion per year. LIHTC properties tend to be concentrated in low-income urban communities. Numerous studies have examined the spillover effects of these properties but have not accounted for their clustering or teased out the effects of introducing additional LIHTC developments to neighborhoods. We combine an interrupted time series model with a difference-in-difference approach to estimate the additive property value effects in Chicago and surrounding Cook County, Illinois. The development of subsequent LIHTC properties within a neighborhood augments the positive effects of the initial property as far as half a mile away, in both low-income and higher-income areas. The effects are most pronounced in neighborhoods with low median incomes.

This paper documents that national housing market expansions have been associated with accelerating gentrification. Specifically, property values and the share of educated residents increased more in downtown locations than in suburbs during periods of national-housing-market expansions. This difference-in-differences holds conditional on changes in local income. A range of additional empirical tests suggest that the direct effect of lower borrowing costs, rather than indirect effects operating through income expansion, is responsible for accelerating gentrification. To interpret this evidence, I present a model in which a reduction in borrowing costs causes a decline in the cost of living in land-constrained areas for high-income households (relative to the cost for low-income households). An extended version of the model yields predictions for changes in home values and bachelors shares across MSAs that are supported by the data.

We present new methods for urban land valuation based on a high degree of irreversibility given that a substantial structure is present on the land. Irreversibility implies that land and structure value function as a whole until the option to tear down and redevelop becomes valuable. In a typical situation, where structures are far from teardown, irreversibility implies that land and structure value change at about the same rate over time. Land valuation methods based on irreversibility are compared to valuations based on vacant land sales and on land residual methods (land value equals property value minus the depreciated cost to build); both methods predict that land value is much more volatile than structure value whereas irreversibility implies a more stable ratio of land value to property value. We fit all three methods to Maricopa County assessor data during a recovery period (2012-2018). Results show that the land value ratio behaves as predicted by irreversibility, not by the land residual or vacant land methods. We suggest new mass assessment procedures based on the value of the option to redevelop. We provide evidence that our procedures merit further study.

This paper couples a traditional hedonic model with architectural style classifications from human experts and machine learning (ML) enabled classifiers to estimate sales price premia over architectural styles, both at the building and the neighborhood-level. We find statistically and economically significant price differences for houses from distinct architectural styles across an array of specifications and modeling assumptions. Comparisons between classifications from ML models and human experts illustrate the conditions under which ML classifiers may perform at least as reliable as human experts in mass appraisal models. Hedonic estimates illustrate that the impact of architectural style on price is attenuated by properties with less well-defined styles and we find no evidence for differential price effects ofRevivalorContemporaryarchitecture for new construction.

The Three-dimensional structure of a protein depends on the interaction between their amino acid residues. These interactions are in turn influenced by various biophysical properties of the amino acids. There are several examples of proteins that share the same fold but are very dissimilar at the sequence level. For proteins to share a common fold some crucial interactions should be maintained despite insignificant sequence similarity. Since the interactions are because of the biophysical properties of the amino acids, we should be able to detect descriptive patterns for folds at such a property level. In this line, the main focus of our research is to analyze such proteins and to characterize them in terms of their biophysical properties. Protein structures with sequence similarity lesser than 40% were selected for ten different subfolds from three different mainfolds (according to CATH classification) and were used for this analysis. We used the normalized values of the 49 physio-chemical, energetic and conformational properties of amino acids. We characterize the folds based on the average biophysical property values. We also observed a fold specific correlational behavior of biophysical properties despite a very low sequence similarity in our data. We further trained three different binary classification models (Naive Bayes-NB, Support Vector Machines-SVM and Bayesian Generalized Linear Model-BGLM) which could discriminate mainfold based on the biophysical properties. We also show that among the three generated models, the BGLM classifier model was able to discriminate protein sequences coming under all beta category with 81.43% accuracy and all alpha, alpha-beta proteins with 83.37% accuracy.

We apply the hedonic pricing method to analyze the effects of conservation easements (CEs) on surrounding vacant land parcel prices within the Metropolitan Atlanta Statistical Area (MASA). First, we collected data on forest related CEs in 30 counties in MASA and randomly sampled 312 land parcels from these same counties for information related to land parcels. The distance between each property and the nearest CE, and between each pair of properties, are calculated and used to find spatial dependence. Results show that the total number of CEs in properties' surrounding areas enhances property values. In addition, the proximity to CE-protected open space after the CEs are established have positive price effects on the surrounding properties, and this effect diminishes with distance.

This paper analyzes the effects of hurricane Sandy on the New York City housing market using a large parcel-level dataset that contains all housing sales for 2003–2017. The dataset also contains geo-coded FEMA data on which building structures were damaged by the hurricane and to what degree. Our estimates provide robust evidence of a persistent negative impact on flood zone housing values. We show the gradual emergence of a price penalty among flood zone properties that were not damaged by Sandy, reaching 8% in year 2017 and showing no signs of recovery. In contrast, damaged properties suffered a large immediate drop in value following the storm (17–22%), followed by a partial recovery and convergence toward a similar penalty as non-damaged properties. The partial recovery in the prices of damaged properties likely reflects their gradual restoration. However, the persistent price reduction affecting all flood-zone properties is more consistent with a learning mechanism. Hurricane Sandy may have increased the perceived risk of large-scale flooding episodes in that area.

The circadian rhythms of building occupants are affected by the brightness and spectral colour property of the indoor luminous environment. The spectral colour property of the indoor luminous environment is determined by the spectral power distribution (SPD) of the luminaire light and light reflected by the interior finish. However, conventional lighting simulation programmes cannot calculate the spectral colour property of light reflected from the interior finish; thus, the influence of the indoor luminous environment on the circadian rhythms of occupants cannot be determined. Therefore, a Spectral Colour Property Assessment Tool (SCPAT) that utilises the spectral reflectance of indoor materials and SPD data of luminaires was previously developed by our research group. The accuracy of the SCPAT developed in our previous study was evaluated by studying the illuminance value of a conventional lighting simulation programme; however, the spectral colour property accuracy cannot be evaluated using the conventional lighting simulation programme. Accordingly, this study evaluated the accuracy of SCPAT by comparing the measured spectral colour property values in a full-scale mock-up with spectral colour property values calculated using SCPAT. The accuracy evaluation indicated that the average error ratio of the mean illuminance was within 2.5%; the average error ratio of the correlated colour temperature (CCT) was approximately 1.11%; and the average error ratios of the CCT, SPD and CAF of the light incident upon the field of view of occupants were 0.11%, 0.11% and 0.04%, respectively.

Removing vegetation close to houses is at the forefront of advice provided to home owners by fire management agencies. However, widespread clearing of trees and shrubs near houses impacts aesthetics, privacy, biodiversity, energy consumption and property values. Thus, stakeholders may oppose this practice. Regulators and property owners therefore require options for vegetation management that reduce risk to houses during wildfires without complete removal of trees and shrubs. Using data from 499 houses impacted by wildfires, we tested three hypotheses: (1) maintaining ‘green’ vegetation affords houses additional protection during wildfires; (2) risk posed by trees and shrubs near houses is reduced where they are arranged as many discrete patches; and (3) trees and shrubs retained in the upwind direction from which wildfires arrive represent greater risk to houses than trees and shrubs retained in the downwind direction. We found empirical support for each hypothesis. Increasing the mean Normalised Vegetation Difference Index (NDVI) (a measure of “greenness”) of vegetation near houses had the same effect on reducing house losses as removing some trees and shrubs. Trees and shrubs within 40 m of houses arranged as many discrete patches posed less risk than the same cover of trees and shrubs arranged as few discrete patches. Trees and shrubs retained downwind from houses represented less risk than trees and shrubs retained upwind. Our findings represent options for regulators or home owners seeking to balance risk posed by wildfires with benefits associated with retaining trees and shrubs near houses.

The revitalization programmes, which are meant to transform the neighbourhood community for better living, are presumed to bring positive value enhancements to the living environment of the city, while allocating limited land resources effectively to the highest and best use. By employing two hedonic price models and based on two sets of residential transaction data obtained from a former industrial-hub, Kwun Tong, in Hong Kong, the study investigated whether different modes of revitalization (redevelopment or wholesale-conversion) bring different externalities to the value of the neighbourhood properties in the city. Surprisingly, the findings suggest that revitalization programmes, irrespective of the mode, did not generate positive externalities to the property values in the vicinity. More precisely, neither redevelopment nor wholesale-conversion, in general, has brought significant positive value enhancements to the nearby properties. Though this finding is against the intuition that positive externalities generated by revitalization are capitalized into nearby property values, this also reinforces the intuition that the economic benefit of a single building revitalization is less apparent than an area based revitalization approach. Results, however, indicate that, although revitalization has not brought as much positive benefits expected, there are some positive indications that property values may be enhanced in the future. The results also revealed that the geographic scope of the influence for properties is apparent only within 200-m radius.

We offer an improvement on the traditional hedonic property value estimation by using a repeat sales matching estimator applied to a policy context where the distance to nearest permanently protected preserves changes over time. We use several strategies to control for unobserved heterogeneity with data from multiple transactions on the same residential parcels from Western Riverside County in Southern California. We have developed data on the conversion to permanent preserves over a 16-year period. We present an empirical strategy to differentiate geographically broad treatment effects from neighborhood unobservables using Coarsened Exact Matching.

In this paper we exploit the enactment of a city-level building height-restriction-law in some, but not all, counties located in the largest city of northeast Brazil to investigate how restrictions to urban land-use affect real estate market prices. Using a difference-in-geographic-discontinuity design, we show that the imposed restriction led apartments (houses) to experience a significant increase (decrease) in unit prices.

With the rapid development of smart phones and mobile internets, shared mobility services have become increasingly popular among travellers, and may influence housing values through their effects on people’s demand on subway services. This paper makes one of the first attempts to investigate the aggregate impact of different shared mobility services on housing values near subway stations, by conducting an empirical analysis on a dataset of apartment resale records in Beijing. We find that, the on-demand ride service offered by transportation network companies (like Didi) is more of a substitute than a complement to subway, leading to a reduction in house price in the vicinity of subway stations. In contrast, dockless bikesharing service brings about a greater complementary effect than substitution effect on subway usage, resulting in house price appreciation in the proximity of subway station. The effects are found to be heterogenous at different temporal and spatial scales.

The quarrying sector is characterized by external effects, which are not commonly reflected in mineral prices. The aim of this study is to estimate the external effects from aggregate quarries which are in close proximity to population centers, by using the hedonic pricing method. The study was conducted on three quarries adjacent to population centers, with different characteristics in terms of quarrying, topography and type of population. By applying an econometric estimation of the shadow price on properties adjacent to the quarries, the results indicate that proximity to quarries lead to a negative impact on property values. According to the study’s results, increasing the distance from the quarry by 10%, correlates with an increase of about 1% in the property’s value. Despite substantial differences between the various quarries, the resulting effect is nearly identical, suggesting that the perceived damage is similar among the different populations. The external effects from the quarries cause a decrease of roughly 8.6% in property prices. These findings have several evidence based policy implications regarding the allocation of quarry franchises and on setting a levy on the activity of quarries in close proximity to population centers.

Urban greenways are receiving increased attention due to the implications they have for the sustainable development of 21st century cities. Although preferences of greenway users have been heavily investigated, research on residents’ perceptions of living in close proximity to these greenways pales in comparison. With this gap in mind, residents living within two socio-economically different neighborhoods adjacent to the Atlanta BeltLine Trail were surveyed about common neighborhood concerns and how the BeltLine’s development alleviates or exacerbates these concerns. By simultaneously asking residents about both neighborhood concerns and the BeltLine’s impact on these concerns, modified Importance-Performance (IPA) graphs were created with four quadrants depicting where the BeltLine is successful and areas where it has aggravated problems. From the 381 responses received, the top five most important neighborhood concerns were crime, property taxes, vandalism, property values, and places for outdoor recreation. The BeltLine was perceived by residents to be improving property values, places for outdoor recreation, and social spaces for gathering, while slightly increasing litter, crime, vandalism, and property taxes. This can be seen on the graphs where most of negatively connoted concerns fell in the “Concentrate here” quadrant with the positively connoted concerns falling in the “Keep up the good work” quadrant. T-test results revealed that the affluent Northside neighborhood viewed the impacts of the trail as more positive than the transitioning Southwest neighborhood. Results suggest that greenway planners should tailor greenway development projects towards individual neighborhoods as they are likely to have different concerns and expectations of urban greenways.

We tested the longstanding (but untested) premise that loess cover (thickness and texture) positively impact the value of land parcels. To do this, we visited 1178 upland sites across 12 counties in Wisconsin with a mix of land uses; each site was underlain by loess of varying thickness. We sampled the loess at each site with a 195-cm long hand auger, and measured its thickness. The per-acre value of each parcel was then determined, where possible, using an online website. Parcels that contained buildings and structures, those whose per-acre values were not listed on the web site, and sites for which we lacked accurate thickness data (because the loess was > 195 cm thick) were eliminated from the dataset, resulting in a final count of 461 sites for analysis. The data, compared statistically using simple linear and logarithmic regressions, indicate that land values are highest on sites with thicker and siltier loess. This conclusion is in agreement with observations made on the ground while sampling. The strongest correlation (R2 = 0.268; P-value

Renewal of old communities is an inevitable process in urban development. Old community renewal brings multiple benefits to communities and their residents. However, existing studies on the benefits of old community renewal usually focuses on single aspects, such as energy savings or property value increase. An integrated framework that provides a holistic assessment of community renewal benefits is missing. To address this limitation, this paper proposed an emergy-based method to quantitatively assess the benefits systematically from economic, social, and environmental perspectives. Based on the emergy theory, the proposed method coverts various input and output during community renewal process into one standard unit—the solar emjoule (sej). The method was tested in a case study of a community renewal project in Nanjing, China. It was found that the emergy input in the case study was 3.46E+19 sej, while the output from the renewal activity is 1.82E+19 sej. The main benefit of old community renewal of the case study came from the maintenance minimizing and appreciation of fixed asset. Only 1.04% of total benefits of community renewal were social and environmental benefits. This study provides an integrated quantitative approach for benefits evaluation in community renewal projects. Decision makers could use the emergy analysis to conduct holistic assessment of community renewal activities and make informed decisions regarding old community renewal.

A considerable body of academic research has emerged in the last decade identifying many environmental consequences of unconventional hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’ or ‘UHF’) in the U.K. (for example, on climate change, air pollution, wastewater disposal and water contamination). However, there is much less research on the economic implications of fracking, particularly regarding property values and contributions toward energy security. This article will draw upon primary data collected through twenty semi-structured interviews with key-informants to the fracking industry in the U.K. (including a variety of interviewees from regulatory bodies, academia, the oil and gas industry, and anti-fracking campaigners, giving a reasonable breadth of knowledge, experience and opinion). Qualitative analysis of interview data concludes fracking will contribute only minimally to energy security, whilst having a perceived negative impact for the value of property, particularly those located within close proximity to extraction sites.

This article quantifies the impact of Airbnb’s short-term rentals on housing affordability in Portugal. We find that on average a 1pp increase in a municipality Airbnb share results in a 3.7% increase in house prices. When zooming our analysis to the main cities of Lisbon and Porto, we find that a 1pp increase in a civil parish Airbnb share leads to a 3.2% price increase. Finally, exploring the spatial heterogeneity of the impact of Airbnb within the two cities we find strong effects localized in the historical centers and areas attractive to tourists. Compared to a low touristy parish, house prices in a high touristy parish increased by 24.3% in 2015 and 32.3% in the 1st quarter of 2016, relatively to pre-Airbnb expansion period (pre-2014Q2).

Professional sports teams and facilities can generate negative or positive amenities to be capitalized into nearby property prices. We investigate the effect of the departure of two National Basketball Association teams in Seattle and Charlotte on nearby residential property values. Both arenas continued to operate after the teams left, so these departures represents a natural experiment to identify the net effects of a sports team separately from the effect of a facility and other events that take place in the facility. Results from a repeat sale regression model and hedonic price model indicate that the departure of the teams was associated with excess appreciation of condo prices near Key Arena and single family home prices near the Charlotte Arena, suggesting that the teams generated disamenities in these markets.

We conduct an analysis of the costs and benefits of public investment in demolishing dilapidated residential housing in Detroit. While we estimate a positive net impact of demolitions on nearby property values, we also calculate a low marginal impact on local property tax collections. Under existing housing market conditions in Detroit, demolition costs exceed the present value of additional property tax revenues resulting from demolitions over 50 years. Using efficiency as the criteria for justifying spending public funds on demolition, average property values would have to increase by a factor of five to justify the demolition program.

We exploit a unique characteristic of some charter schools in the metropolitan Atlanta area to identify property value capitalization of access to charter schools. The charter schools in this study designate small geographic areas within their attendance areas as priority zones. Each of the study charter schools has at least two priority zones: households located in priority one zones have a higher probability of admission than households located in priority two zones. We use this spatial variation in the likelihood of attending a charter school to identify the capitalization effect of increased charter school admission probabilities as the difference-in-differences within priority zone one and two border areas. Our results indicate that prices increased by six to eight percent for priority one zone homes compared to priority two zone homes after the opening of a new charter school. We also find that capitalization is stronger for homes with underperforming traditional public schools.

In this paper we examine the effect of light rail transit on the residential real estate market in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Norfolk's Tide light rail began operations in August of 2011 and has experienced disappointing levels of ridership compared to other light rail systems. We estimate the effect of the Tide using a difference-in-differences model and consider several outcome variables for the residential housing market, including sale price, sale-list price spread and the time-on-market. Our identification strategy exploits a proposed rail line in neighboring Virginia Beach, Virginia that was rejected by a referendum in 1999. Overall, the results show negative consequences from the constructed light rail line. Properties within 1500 meters experienced a decline in sale price of nearly 8%, while the sale-list price spread declined by approximately 2%. Our results highlight the potential negative effects of light rail when potential accessibility benefits do not out weigh apparent local costs.

Wind energy developments are often controversial. Concerns are often raised about negative impacts on local communities, including impacts on property values. Some of these negative impacts may be offset by compensatory payments made by wind developers. Community involvement in the planning and development process may also reduce negative perceptions associated with wind facilities. However, if the development is near a border between municipalities, states, or even countries, it is often the case that one or more jurisdictions will not be involved in the process or receive compensation, but will, nonetheless, face some costs or impacts from the development. We explore exactly this situation at the border between Canada and the United States in the Thousand Islands region where a wind farm is currently operating on the Canadian border island of Wolfe Island. Using a parcel-level hedonic analysis of property sales transactions, we find that properties in New York with a view of and/or in close proximity to the turbines significantly depreciated in value after construction of the turbines while no negative impacts were observed on properties in Ontario. We highlight a number of factors that could contribute to these differences in impacts on property values, which may also explain the variation in results that currently exists in the literature.

Today Landscape elements have been recognized as contributors to the physical quality of urban environments. More recently, they are considered as valuable contributors in increasing the property values, creating a place attractiveness, offering job opportunities, giving sense of social belonging, improving the public health, creating sustainable urban environment and improving the overall quality of life. The present research aims to use landscape elements in enhancing the urban environments by integrating these elements with renewable energy devices and creating Energy-scape elements. The research explores the impact of Energy-scape elements upon time, area, money and power produced by conducting two marketing survey cover the properties of landscape elements and renewable energy devices. This paper shows that landscape elements can be integrated with renewable energy devices and create Energy-scape elements, it also identifies Energy-scape elements and present its properties and measure its efficiency by applying it on a case study. A comparison between energy consumption before using Energy-scape elements and after using Energy-scape elements will also be presented. Energy-scape elements will help in reducing the growth of the global environmental problems such as ozone depletion and climate change and will help the 3rd world countries to develop since that the energy is the skeleton of any development. The objective of this research is to help landscape designers to understand the benefits of Energy-scape elements and to identify the type and location of Energy-scape system that can be used in their projects. The outcome is divided into two parts; theoretical outcome and empirical outcome. The theoretical outcome presents a database for the properties of Energy-scape elements that occurs from integrating landscape elements with different renewable energy sources. While, the empirical outcome presents a pilot project using Energy-scape elements and presents comparison between energy consumption before and after using Energy-scape elements.

Urban streams could concurrently bring about both positive amenities accruing to the view of waterscape and negative disamenities associated with water pollution. In this paper, we focus on a specific question that has not yet been explicitly answered in the extant literature: how to estimate the cumulative impacts of urban streams (which refer to the combined impacts of amenities and disamenities of multiple sources) in high density and high-rise urban contexts. A typical residential apartment complex (comprised of a number of apartment units located in dozens of mid- to high-rise commercial apartment buildings on a contiguous land parcel) in Guangzhou, south China, is used as a case study. A detailed palette of natural amenities and environmental disamenities of two bifurcated streams are quantified via the generalized spatial two-stage least squares (GS2SLS) model. In this model, an originally constructed 3-D spatial connectivity matrix, cube contiguity, is applied to address, in a sophisticated manner, an array of endogenous, exogenous, and error interactions along both horizontal and vertical dimensions that inherently exist in the spatial context of high-rise housing markets. Our results from spatial hedonic models at the micro-neighborhood level demonstrate that homebuyers tend to evaluate urban streams’ chemical, physical, and ecological features holistically. A cumulative impact is also found, as homebuyers would like to pay an extra premium for an apartment located farther away from both polluted streams. This study advances the extant literature by contributing to a novel and effective extension of the conventional two-dimensional spatial matrix which can capture the long-ignored spatial correlation existing amongst apartment units located on contiguous floors, as well as a robust estimation of the demand of urban natural and environmental amenities in the gradually rising mid- and high-rise housing market in both developing and developed countries.

Through the implementation of pedestrianisation projects, it is possible to create economically competitive and liveable urban areas, while the security and attractiveness of city centres are significantly increased by the improved accessibility provided by these schemes. After pedestrianisation, likely increases in property values can be interpreted positively; on the other hand, pedestrianisation, if necessary precautions are not taken, can also produce unwelcome consequences. When a pedestrianisation scheme achieves success, property prices rise, and small businesses (if they are tenants rather than owners) may fail to keep up with the inevitable rental increases. Despite increased sales, small businesses, many of whom supply distinctive goods or services, may have to leave the area because they cannot afford these increased costs. In this context, the aim of this article is to analyse the economic effects of a pedestrianisation scheme located on the Asian side of Istanbul, in Kadıköy historic centre and retail zone, by focusing on changes in retail structure during the post-pedestrianisation period. The project began in 2004 and was completed in 2009. Research in the area was conducted in 2014, and has a tripartite structure: a before and after land-use analysis to identify changes resulting from the pedestrianisation project, a survey involving pedestrians and shopkeepers, and interviews with the Association of the Retailers of the Kadıköy Historic Centre. Our research has shown that in the case of Kadıköy historic centre, the success of the pedestrianisation scheme has created a dilemma, namely the replacement of many smaller older businesses with domestic and international chain-stores or eating/drinking facilities as a result of increased shop rents, which entail particular problems for the majority of shopkeepers, who are tenants. Consequently, this has begun to introduce homogeneity into a richly diverse mixture of shops. The current situation might become a major problem if those existing shops which maintain the image and identity of the area are substantially displaced by ‘outside’ retailers who can afford the increased rents. This development is not however an immediate consequence of pedestrianisation, but rather a side-effect of improvements in the local physical environment, and increased economic activity. Awareness of this potential outcome of the pedestrianisation process should therefore oblige planning authorities to take preventive measures to protect the diversity of small individual shops, and hence save the image (and long-term economic future) of the pedestrianised area. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd

While a large literature addresses the societal cost of substance abuse across a number of domains, little is known about the impact of substance abuse on property values. This study uses unique data from Linn County, Oregon and a spatial, difference-in-difference identification strategy to test the impact of the discovery and the subsequent decontamination of clandestine methamphetamine (meth) laboratories (labs) on property values. Results suggest that even though meth labs are typically found in less-desirable neighborhoods with lower home prices, the discovery of a lab causes the price of nearby homes to drop by approximately six and a half percent. Further, the decontamination of homes used as meth labs results in an increase in property values by approximately five percent. Overall, these results suggest that beyond the potential direct benefits of reducing domestic meth production (e.g., reductions in crime, child abuse), disrupting domestic meth production has another important benefit in mitigating negative effects on property values. Also, state laws mandating the decontamination of meth labs and corresponding decontamination programs may yield significant positive net benefits. Finally, the fact that meth lab decontamination does not fully offsets the impact of discovery (homes recover about 75%) suggests a potential stigma effect associated with meth lab discovery.

The Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) is a $7 billion nationwide government program that was established to reduce the negative impacts of the housing crisis in foreclosure-concentrated neighborhoods. NSP rehabilitations aim to bring foreclosed and abandoned properties back to productive use. Very few quantitative studies have evaluated NSP and provided policy suggestions for future stabilization. Furthermore, there is some ambiguity about the channels through which foreclosures influence neighboring properties. This study fills the gap in the literature by evaluating the effects of NSP acquisition and rehabilitation in terms of the impact on elevating neighboring property values. In addition, it provides evidence that disamenity effects are a source of the negative impacts of foreclosures on their neighbors. Using a 2008–2014 repeated cross-section dataset for housing sales in the city of Chicago, the difference-in-differences estimates reveal that the average sales prices of homes within 0.1 miles of the NSP projects increased by 14.3% and these effects do not appear until the completion of the rehabilitation. Furthermore, large program effects are found for normal homes but not for foreclosure-related homes. The results vary under different contexts of NSP implementation, but the analytical approach presented in this study is reproducible for NSP studies in other regions.