The Impact of Urban Green Space on Housing Value: A Combined Hedonic Price Analysis and Land Use Modeling Approach

What the paper says

Urban green space (UGS) is increasingly considered as a nature-based solution to mitigate negative climate change effects and improve the quality of living environments. Although hedonic price (HP) modeling studies have yielded valuable insights about the UGS influence on housing value, from an area-development perspective the effects of UGS depend critically on the spatial allocation of UGS, which has not received much attention in the literature. In this paper, we combine HP analysis and land-use modeling to optimize the spatial allocation and evaluate the area-wide impact of UGS on housing value. Using transaction data from two middle-sized cities in the Netherlands, we estimate HP models considering different types of UGS and different types of housing. We show how the results can be incorporated into a housing land-use model and how the land-use model can be used to identify the spatial allocation of UGS that maximizes an area-wide (net) housing value. The results suggest that spreading green areas in neighborhoods results in higher housing value than centralizing green in a large urban park. Among the three housing types, detached houses benefit most from the UGS spreading strategy. Moreover, allocating UGS as green buffers is an effective way to increase housing value.