Abstract
Although green interventions, like nature-based solutions, contribute to more sustainable urban environments and provide ecosystem services to urban populations, some impacts are not well understood. This particularly applies to social impacts in the domain of environmental justice, including (green) gentrification. Gentrification refers to a process in which green urban renewal raises property prices, which results in an influx of affluent people, displacing poorer residents. Our study conducts a meta-analysis based on 37 primary hedonic pricing studies, to estimate value transfer functions that can assess the effects of nature types on property prices in various urban settings. Urban nature has positive impacts on house value in the areas surrounding it, which depend on population density, distance to, and the type of, urban nature. We illustrate how the estimated benefit transfer function can be applied to natural interventions in a Dutch city, and visualize the obtained effects using mapping. These maps show the distance decay of the cumulative effects of urban nature interventions on the house value at the city and the neighbourhood levels. Our application estimated increases in local property values up to a maximum of 20 % compared with properties not affected by the interventions, with value equivalent of 62,650 USD, at average prevailing price level in a particular area in Utrecht. When new nature is being planned in urban areas our mapping approach can be used for guiding assessments of potential undesirable effects on property values that may lead to green gentrification, and for identifying where additional policies may be needed to contribute to environmental justice.
Highlights
Population projections indicate that trends of increased urbanization will continue (UN, 2018), which will increase pressure on the urban environment
Insights into the benefits of nature-based solutions as well as the potential gentrification consequences of introducing nature to an area need to be considered by policy makers and city planners (Lafortezza et al, 2018), for which a better understanding of how house prices relate with different types of urban nature is useful
The data used for the meta-model estimation contains observations that are value points obtained from primary hedonic pricing studies, evaluated at various distances from urban nature, which results in multiple value point observations per study
Summary
Population projections indicate that trends of increased urbanization will continue (UN, 2018), which will increase pressure on the urban environment. Insights into the benefits of nature-based solutions as well as the potential gentrification consequences of introducing nature to an area need to be considered by policy makers and city planners (Lafortezza et al, 2018), for which a better understanding of how house prices relate with different types of urban nature is useful. By gaining a better understanding of the drivers of increased house prices, the issues associated with gentrification can be acknowledged, better monitored and addressed In this way, this paper presents the quantification and assessment of ecosystem services and their impacts on urban populations by urban nature through interdisciplinary methods applied to understand distributive justice (Baró et al, 2020), with a particular focus on property markets as signal of potential green gentrification.
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