Abstract
Neighborhood development is primarily comprised of structural elements that include design elements, nearby amenities and ecological attributes. This paper assumes that the process of development itself also influences the character of the neighborhood—specifically, that the rate of development and build-out ratio influences neighborhood turnover. While the structural components clearly set a framework for development, the process of development expresses the character of the neighborhood in subtle messages conveyed through the market. Neighborhoods in the rapidly growing university town of College Station, Texas are analyzed in terms of neighborhood design, nearby amenities and landscape ecology components. Residential property records are used to characterize each neighborhood in terms of the rate of development and current build-out ratio. The multivariate analysis indicates that the development rate increases subsequent neighborhood turnover rates while the build-out ratio decreases it.
Highlights
Since 1960, the Census [1] has indicated that housing has started to consistently exceed a million a year
Several points are worth noting: (1) among neighborhood design elements, street patterns rather than total acreage or lot size are significant; (2) distance to grocery stores and specialty shops are not significant; (3) landscape ecology measures are mixed, depending on whether they represent grass or trees, and more sophisticated landscape ecology measures or the simple ratio of tree and grass coverage; and (4) neither Simpson’s diversity index nor appraised value were significantly related to transactions
The R2 of these models ranged from 0.044 to 0.143 depending on the period being considered; the individual coefficients are less likely to be significant and the directions are varied. These results suggest that neighborhood turnover in the current period is the partial result of prior development rate and build-out ratio, but neither development rate or build-out ratio are significantly impacted by prior neighborhood turnover
Summary
Since 1960, the Census [1] has indicated that housing has started to consistently exceed a million a year. Jacobs [2] argued that neighborhoods are messy places that evolve into extremely complex systems This suggests that the process of development may establish the character of a neighborhood in ways that have long-lasting impact on the residents. Et al [12] conducted a detailed case study of a neighborhood of 133 single-family houses in Charlotte, North Carolina They showed a series of problems (e.g., isolation from amenity, noxious facilities nearby, and limited oversight) with the process of development from 2001 to 2014 resulted in more than 600 ownership transactions. Charlotte is “... faced with an increasingly difficult array of challenges as the neighborhood attempts to climb out of the abyss of foreclosure and general neighborhood decline” [12] These problems are partly the result of the “tyranny of easy development decisions” [13,14,15]
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