Abstract
Due to social demographic change and secularization, religious heritage sites in Europe are on the verge of losing their original functions. While the adaptive reuse seems to be a proactive strategy to preserve the historical and cultural value embedded in religious heritage sites, little is known concerning its external impact. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the external effect of reusing religious heritage on surrounding house prices. Employing both the parametric and non-parametric difference-in-differences hedonic model on a sample of 42 projects of reusing religious heritage and a rich dataset of housing transactions in the Netherlands, we find significant positive externality of reusing religious heritage on local house prices. The external effects are heterogeneous across differentiated project size and monumental status. Larger religious heritage reuse projects and those listed as national monuments exert greater influence on surrounding house prices.
Highlights
Religious heritage constitutes an important element that shapes the urban historical and cultural landscape in Western European countries
We examine the external effect of reusing religious heritage on local house prices
We begin with employing the standard parametric difference-in-differences approach to estimate the average treatment effect of religious heritage reuse by comparing house prices within an inner ring, i.e. treatment area, with house prices in the outer ring, i.e. control area, before and after the treatment
Summary
Religious heritage constitutes an important element that shapes the urban historical and cultural landscape in Western European countries. As house prices are partially determined by the willingness to pay by households for residential amenity (Small and Steimetz 2012), it seems plausible to argue that, besides cultural and historical value preservation, the adaptive reuse of redundant religious heritage may bring desirable amenities to nearby residents which can potentially be capitalized in surrounding property values. Religious heritage, such as churches and monasteries, are generally located in the heart of local communities that characterizes European urban landscape. The proportion of Dutch population with beliefs in Dutch Reformed or Roman Catholicism dropped dramatically
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