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The opening of a new metro station, as a mode of the transportation corridor, potentially could have different effects on housing prices. We have investigated its effect on the value of residential properties around those stations, using data from large expansions of the metro network in Tehran, Iran. In the period of our study (April 2010 to December 2018), forty-five metro stations were inaugurated in Tehran. We use a difference-in-difference regression method to identify the causal effect of interest, where adjacent properties are used as the treatment group and similar but distant properties as the control group. The results indicate that, on average, the adjacent properties are affected by a 3.7 percent increase in price relative to distant properties. We also extend our study by categorizing new metro stations according to the extent of ex-ante access to other modes of public transportation such as bus rapid transit (BRT). We find 2 to 11 percent positive effect of new metro stations in regions with lower public transport, while in regions with ex-ante extensive public transportation system, we find less than 2 percent positive effect.

There is ongoing debate about flood risk discounts regarding property values. While some researchers claim that housing prices reflect flood risk, a growing body of literature has shown that flood ...

A common form of not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) activism is resistance to multifamily housing. Although NIMBY activism often targets both market-rate and subsidized multifamily development, studies of ...

This article uses eviction data to test the transit-induced displacement hypothesis—that the placement of new transit stations will lead to elevated property values, gentrification, and displacemen...

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.

Urban vacancy presents myriad concerns for American legacy cities, including cyclical disinvestment, property value and tax revenue decimation, increased crime, and high management costs. To addres...

This study explored the changes in housing values before-and-after the several stages of transit investments of SunRail stations in Orlando, FL by using a pre-post and intervention-control design. ...

This article explores the impacts of community land trust (CLT) properties on the real estate prices of nearby homes through a case study of a relatively large CLT in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We use...

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.

This paper examines the relationship between proximity to secondary schools and property values within three school enrollment zones in Auckland, New Zealand. Results indicate that, in the most sought-after school zone, house prices increase with proximity to school but decrease above 3.664 km. Moreover, we find that the nonlinear effects are most prominent at the lower quantile of the sales price distribution. In the other two school zones, proximity to school reduces house prices. These results demonstrate that distance to school still matters within each school enrollment zone.

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.

This study compares Issaquah Highlands’ home prices with those of traditional suburban single-family homes in the city of Issaquah. Issaquah Highlands is a community that was developed using New Ur...

Florida’s Gulf Coast is known as a retirement hotspot, with property values along the coast rising faster than almost anywhere else in the country. However, the coastal amenities that help boost prices, quickly turn to dis-amenities when there is a prolonged red tide bloom in the Gulf. Using a difference in differences hedonic valuation model, we examine six Southwestern Florida counties heavily impacted by four major algal bloom in the past 20 years. We find that affected properties within 1 mile of the coast sell for up to 30% less compared to similar homes sold during the same month in an unaffected county. With red tide predicted to increase in frequency and severity, mitigation of the effects must be paramount for these counties. Losses occur in almost all sectors of the economy, and for a state that relies so much on the health of the environment, declines in property values are a sign that action must be taken against these blooms.

Energy performance remains a debated topic in real estate, particularly with reference to the capitalisation effect with property value. An emerging corpus of research studies have investig...

Heritage property value is an important economic indicator to a country. Thus, it is imperative that the value is derived from an accurate and reliable method of valuation. However, in Malaysia, there are no specific standards that can be referred to for conducting an assessment for heritage property valuation. Thus, this paper fills the gap by reviewing five provisions of the Malaysian laws and four provisions of the international laws that are related to heritage property valuation. Thematic analysis of the documents is undertaken by using five keywords that relate to heritage property valuation, namely: definition, factors, method, procedure and type of values. Out of nine legal documents analysed, Valuation of Specialised Public Service Assets has the most information needed as a guidance for heritage property valuation.

In many metropolitan regions, transit-oriented developments are built to motivate the use of sustainable travel by promoting urban growth within walking distances of public transport stations. Changes in residential property values are a common way to assess the success of transit-oriented developments. However, studies that focus on property values alone have reported mixed effects. This paper attempts to evaluate the land value impact around commuter rail stations by analyzing the change in property values within the context of the transformation of socio-spatial neighborhood attributes. The study sets out to estimate the effect of Randstad Rail stations using real estate transaction data of residential properties and neighborhood socio-spatial attributes in the Rotterdam–the Hague metropolitan area of the Netherlands covering a period from 1985 to 2018. Adopting a quasi-experimental design, the effect is estimated for properties within different catchment zones around three commuter rail stations using a Difference-in-Differences Model and Multivariate Analysis of Variance. The results demonstrate the overall negative effect of the Randstad Rail on the value of residential properties at a distance equal to or less than 400 meters from the selected rail stations in the range of -18.8% to -11.5%. In contrast, a positive effect is observed for the residential properties located within a radius of 400 to 800 meters from the rail stations, which is estimated to be +15% to +33.2%. The findings also indicate a considerable socio-spatial transformation in the neighborhood composition after the opening of the rail stations in terms of neighborhood population density, land-use density, housing characteristics, and car ownership, which significantly affect the magnitude and direction of the impact.

Online short-term rental (STR) platforms such as Airbnb have grown spectacularly. We study the effects of regulation of these platforms on the housing market using a quasi-experimental research design. 18 out of 88 cities in Los Angeles County have severely restricted short-term rentals by adopting Home Sharing Ordinances. We apply a panel regression-discontinuity design around the cities’ borders. Ordinances reduced listings by 50 % and housing prices by 2%. Additional difference-in-differences estimates show that ordinances reduced rents also by 2%. These estimates imply large effects of Airbnb on property values in areas attractive to tourists (e.g. an increase in house prices of 15 % within 2.5km of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame).

In this study, we develop and apply a new methodology for obtaining accurate and equitable property value assessments. This methodology adds a time dimension to the Geographically Weighted Regressions (GWR) framework, which we call Time-Geographically Weighted Regressions (TGWR). That is, when generating assessed values, we consider sales that are close in time and space to the designated unit. We think this is an important improvement of GWR since this increases the number of comparable sales that can be used to generate assessed values. Furthermore, it is likely that units that sold at an earlier time but are spatially near the designated unit are likely to be closer in value than units that are sold at a similar time but farther away geographically. This is because location is such an important determinant of house value. We apply this new methodology to sales data for residential properties in 50 municipalities in Connecticut for 1994–2013 and 145 municipalities in Massachusetts for 1987–2012. This allows us to compare results over a long time period and across municipalities in two states. We find that TGWR performs better than OLS with fixed effects and leads to less regressive assessed values than OLS. In many cases, TGWR performs better than GWR that ignores the time dimension. In at least one specification, several suburban and rural towns meet the IAAO Coefficient of Dispersion cutoffs for acceptable accuracy.

When a city loses people and jobs, downtowns tend to face high vacancy rates and diminished tax collections due to property abandonment. With fewer resources and structures in poorer condition, these shrinking downtowns become less and less attractive for investors. This paper tackles this paradox by examining overall patterns of decline and downtown change in three New England (USA) cities. Specifically we ask, how does the process of urban decline impact occupancy, building conditions and property values in downtown districts? We found that statistically significant relationships emerge between property valuations and occupancy patterns, though these relationships vary among the three cities.

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.

Wassmer and Wahid (2019) set out to examine the relationship between affordable housing and property values to determine whether not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) sentiments toward affordable housing are ...

What are the local-level impacts of zoning change? I study recent Chicago upzonings that increased allowed densities and reduced parking requirements in a manner exogenous of development plans and neighborhood characteristics. To evaluate outcomes, I use difference-in-differences tests on property transaction prices and housing-unit construction permits. I detect significant, robust increases in values for transactions on parcels that received a boost in allowed building size. I also identify value increases for residential condominiums, indicating that upzoning increased prices of existing housing units. I find no impacts of the reforms, however, on the number of newly permitted dwellings over five years. As such, I demonstrate that the short-term, local-level impacts of upzoning are higher property prices but no additional new housing construction.

We measure the impact of a golf course as a residential amenity on surrounding home values in several communities in Shelby County, Alabama. We compare the values of homes in golf course communitie...

This research assesses the appreciation in residential property values in connection with proximity to the Little Miami Scenic Trail, a multi-purpose biking, hiking, and jogging trail built along an abandoned railroad corridor near Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. Applying two spatial hedonic frameworks, the spatial lag of X (SLX) model and the spatial Durbin error model, we conclude that proximity to trail entrances had significant impacts on property values for both, Euclidean and network distance measures. Specifically, the SLX results indicate that decreasing the distance to the closest trail entrance by one foot (meter) increases a house’s property value by US$0.92 (US$3.02) when using network distances.

Does the proximity of transit increase property values, and can one example apply to another? Using a spatial and temporal hedonic price framework, a study of light rail transit’s impact on residential property values compares the station area property impacts of the Green and Blue lines in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The study also points to when “value transfer” (used here to describe the comparison and application of property value impacts near transit) is appropriate, and what practitioners should keep in mind to maximize the effectiveness of the exercise. In the case of value transfer for transit, the study finds that intimate local knowledge matters more than special modeling specifications to appropriately capture the impacted properties and transfer the return of investment.

The relationship between the street environment and the health, education, mobility, and criminal behaviors of its citizens has long been investigated by economists, sociologists and urban planners. Home buyers were found to pay a premium for better street appearance. Prior studies considering streetscapes mainly focus on objective measures such as the number of nearby trees, the tree canopy area, or the view index of physical features such as greenery, sky or building. However, subjective perceptions may have complex or subtle relationships to physical features, individual physical features or simply summing them up do not capture people’s comprehensive perception. In contrast, this study proposed a new approach for the urban-scale application to quantify both subjectively and objectively measured streetscape scores for six important perception qualities, namely Greenness, Walkability, Safety, Imageability, Enclosure, and Complexity. Built on prior quantitative studies in urban design quality and emerging applications in deep learning and open source street view imagery for urban perceptions, we integrated existing frameworks to (1) effectively collect and evaluate both subjectively and objectively- measured perceptions; (2) investigate the coherence and divergence in ML-predicted subjective scores and formula-derived objective scores; and (3) compare their effects in affecting house prices taking Shanghai as a case study using a large-scale dataset on home transactions. The results implied: first, the percentage increase in sales price attributable to street scores is significant for both subjective and objective measurements. In general subjective scores explained more variance over structural attributes and objective scores in hedonic price model. Particularly, objective Greenness, subjective Safety and Imageability scores positively affected house prices. Second, for Greenness and Imageability scores, the subjective and objective measures exhibited opposite signs in affecting house prices, which implied that there might be mechanisms related to the psychological, social-demographical characteristics of street users that have not been fully incorporated by objective measures that taking view indices or recombination of them. In addition, certain objective measure might outperform subjective counterpart when the connotation of the perception is self-evident and not complicated, for example the Greenness. For those concepts were not familiar to the average person, subjective framework exhibits better performance. This is the first study comprehensively expanding hedonic price method with both subjectively and objectively measured streetscape qualities. It suggested that city authorities could levy a street environment tax to compensate the public budget invested in street environment where developers secured benefits from a price premium. This study enriches our understanding of the economic values of the subjective and objective measures street qualities. It sheds light on promising future study areas where the coherence and divergence of the two measurements should be further stressed.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Among urban planners, tax increment financing (TIF) is a popular economic development financing tool. Critics, however, claim that TIF is a fiscal bane, reducing property value for affected jurisdictions, especially school districts. TIF regulations in Iowa—on annual base values, returned excess increments, and protected debt service levy—provide the opportunity to test this argument. Using eighteen years of TIF district-level data, this study finds that TIF was most likely a fiscal boon for school districts. Given this finding, the study also provides several implications for TIF use and economic development planners in Iowa and elsewhere.

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.

The impact of big box stores on existing retail systems has been subject to considerable contention. It is debatable whether midsized box stores have the same impact on local communities as that of supersized box stores. Additionally, when a box store increases significantly in size and extends the range and depth of goods and services that it offers, it seems reasonable to consider that it can noticeably amplify its impact in a community or neighborhood. This study is unique in that it examines the localized impact of a Walmart that underwent conversion from a discount store to a supercenter in Toronto, Canada, in 2009. Before 2010, property values of the store, known as Dufferin Walmart, were considerable, but they increased dramatically afterward due to its supercenter conversion. The store has had a positive impact in providing new grocery space to an area of the city that previously resembled a food desert. There have been a number of adverse outcomes, however, with storefront closures and va...

Brownfields can have a number of adverse effects on the local environment and social welfare, including diminution of property values. Although many brownfield sites exist in China, there ...

This paper examines the impact of flood risk on the value of English residential properties. We find that a location within a flood zone significantly lowers property values even if we control for ...

The residential sector is a significant source of carbon dioxide emissions. Improving the energy efficiency of the housing stock can reduce carbon emissions and increase property values. In this paper, we examine whether residential energy efficiency improvements are capitalized into home prices in Anchorage, Alaska. The impact of a residential energy efficiency program on single-family house prices is estimated using both a hedonic pricing framework and a difference-in- differences estimator. The results indicate that participating homes sell for a premium of 4.2% compared to similar properties that did not participate in the program.

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.

Purpose The historic assets are heterogeneous and different to each other, and for this reason, consolidated valuation methodologies do not exist in practice or in the literature. It is, therefore, necessary to dwell on the study of a particular historic building type or category. The assessment process of the valuers of Venetian Villas was explored, focusing on the study of the valuation function construction. The paper investigated if a possible value function, based on the partition of the characteristics, which significantly influence the value, exists and it is generalizable to the whole set of Venetian Villas. The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge on the economic valuation of Venetian Villas. Design/methodology/approach An application of Hedonic Pricing study to a database of 71 Venetian Villas has been tested. This statistical procedure allowed the authors to discover which results in a percentage of property values can be attributed to the historical characteristics of a building. Using a multiple linear regression and its variables an analysis of residuals and data relating to the variance has been performed. Findings This research identifies and proposes, therefore, a valuation approach that can be generalizable to the whole set of Venetian Villas (over 4,000 properties). The models show that the most important variables which influence the value of the villas are: age, internal and external area, maintenance conditions, and author. This model could be used for future valuations of the same type of asset. Originality/value The model enables valuers to address better to the property valuation of the Venetian Villas through the valuation functions, which suggest which are the main features which focus in the case of a Venetian Villa valuation and what impact they have on the value asset. The model can be specifically used for valuation reports in the enhancement project of such properties.

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.

Most research examining the impact of distressed properties on nearby property values has assumed that each additional distressed property has the same marginal effect on nearby property values as the prior distressed property had. Scholars have suggested that there could be threshold effects in the impact of distressed properties, yet no research has explored this issue. Therefore, this research explores the presence of threshold effects in the impact of housing abandonment on nearby property values in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1991 to 2010. This research finds that the magnitude of the impact of housing abandonment does not increase proportionally to the number of nearby abandoned properties. Specifically, it finds that the marginal impact on nearby property values increases significantly when the number of abandoned properties within 250 ft. increases by more than two. The research also finds that the marginal impact drops significantly when the number of abandoned properties within 250 ft. increases by more than 14.

The relationship between neighborhood racial composition and property values is generally explained as a consequence of White household exit from racially and ethnically mixed neighborhoods. But some neighborhoods offer opportunities for households to exercise voice in response to neighborhood change rather than exit. This article argues that differences across neighborhoods in how they are governed play a significant role in mediating the relationship between property values and neighborhood racial and ethnic composition. Using geocoded data on sales of detached single family homes in Little Rock from 2000 to 2014, this article finds that neighborhood associations tend to increase the effect of the size of a neighborhood’s Black population on property values. At the same time, homeowner associations tend to reduce the effect of neighborhood Black population on property values.

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.

The effects of poverty on important outcome measures are devastating and well documented, but the conceptualization and operationalization of socioeconomic status (SES) are underdeveloped. Various indicators of SES are useful for different purposes. Free or reduced-price lunch (FRL) status is commonly used because of its convenience and predictive strength, but it has many limitations. This study explored property value as a convenient alternative or complement to FRL status. The conceptual alignment of property value with SES was compared with that of traditional indicators like parent income, education, and occupation. Empirically, hierarchical linear modeling and regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the effects of property value on math achievement in comparison with and in conjunction with FRL status. Property value is strongly related to Math achievement, and it complements conceptual and methodological flaws of FRL status by providing nuance at the local level and encompassing aspects of human and social capital.

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