Abstract
Urban heritage is often concentrated in conservation areas with a protected status. Previous research argues that urban heritage attracts especially higher educated households who are likely to have higher incomes. The presence of these households may have a further impact on the attractiveness of the neighborhoods concerned, for instance through endogenous amenities like better shops or schools. If this is the case for high income households, conservation areas will have a further impact on the area’s attractiveness through the demographic composition of the residential area. In this paper we investigate the interaction between the preference for urban heritage – as an exogenous amenity – and the preference for areas with a high concentration of high income households – as an endogenous amenity. We develop a logit-based sorting model in which different income groups interact and estimate it for the Amsterdam metropolitan area. Results show that all employed households highly value conservation areas and prefer to live in areas with a high concentration of high income households. We investigate the impact of urban heritage on house prices and welfare through counterfactual simulations. The disappearance of urban heritage would result in a substantially more suburbanized location pattern of the high income households in the Amsterdam metropolitan area, and to lower welfare for all income groups.
Highlights
Urban amenities play an important role in the current revival of interest in urban living
8 There are a number of important differences with the present paper. They apply the model to all municipalities in the Netherlands, whereas we focus on the Amsterdam metropolitan area and use much smaller spatial units
Their results refer to living in the municipality Amsterdam instead of another municipality, whereas the results reported here allow us to differentiate between various neighborhoods within the Amsterdam metropolitan area
Summary
Urban amenities play an important role in the current revival of interest in urban living. High income households will concentrate more in suburban neighborhoods, the location pattern of many U.S metropolitan areas This suggests that preservation and maintenance of cultural heritage is important to keep old inner cities vibrant centers of activity. Recent papers include Van Duijn and Rouwendal (2013) 7 who study the importance of ancient inner cities for the attractiveness of the larger urban areas surrounding them,8 Been et al (2016) who look at the position of preservation areas in the urban environment in which they are embedded, Ahlfeldt et al (2017) who propose a model for the designation of preservation areas and Koster and Rouwendal (2017) who consider the impact of restoration subsidies for neighborhoods..
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