Impacts of Street-Visible Greenery on Housing Prices: Evidence from a Hedonic Price Model and a Massive Street View Image Dataset in Beijing

Yonglin Zhang,Rencai Dong

doi:10.3390/ijgi7030104

Abstract

Street greenery is a component of urban green infrastructure. By forming foundational green corridors in urban ecological systems, street greenery provides vital ecological, social, and cultural functions, and benefits the wellbeing of citizens. However, because of the difficulty of quantifying people’s visual perceptions, the impact of street-visible greenery on housing prices has not been fully studied. Using Beijing, which has a mature real estate market, as an example, this study evaluated 22,331 transactions in 2014 in 2370 private housing estates. We selected 25 variables that were classified into three categories—location, housing, and neighbourhood characteristics—and introduced an index called the horizontal green view index (HGVI) into a hedonic pricing model to measure the value of the visual perception of street greenery in neighbouring residential developments. The results show that (1) Beijing’s homebuyers would like to reside in residential units with a higher HGVI; (2) Beijing’s homebuyers favour larger lakes; and (3) Beijing’s housing prices were impacted by the spatial development patterns of the city centre and multiple business centres. We used computer vision to quantify the street-visible greenery and estimated the economic benefits that the neighbouring visible greenery would have on residential developments in Beijing. This study provides a scientific basis and reference for policy makers and city planners in road greening, and a tool for formulating street greening policy, studying housing price characteristics, and evaluating real estate values.

Highlights

Street greenery is an important part of urban green infrastructure
We aim to explore the impact of street-visible greenery on nearby property values by incorporating a modified indicator called the horizontal green view index (HGVI) into a hedonic pricing model to estimate the marginal prices of the characteristics
BC_DIS and C_DIS both had significant and negative correlations with Beijing’s housing prices, and the hedonic models did not have clear multicollinearity or autocorrelation, indicating that Beijing’s housing prices were affected by BC_DIS and C_DIS simultaneously. This result occurs because the early spatial development of Beijing was focused on expanding around the city centre, but after the inner built-up area was saturated, the external expansion model evolved toward multi-centre development with a fast urbanization process

Summary

Introduction

Street greenery is an important part of urban green infrastructure. Shrubs, and trees along both sides of roads can reduce noise pollution, purify the air, beautify the streetscape, and offer inhabitants ecological, entertainment, and recreational functions [1,2]. Street greenery is a public resource that provides residents aesthetic value and ecological benefits in addition to other, unconscious benefits. Trees along roads could reduce the oppressiveness of high-rise and high-density buildings [3,4]. Some studies have indicated that exposure to greenery in hospitals can improve patients’ moods and accelerate their recovery [5]. Beautiful street greenery can enhance the walkability of streets [6] and improve physical health [7,8,9]

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