Abstract
This paper examines the impact of historic amenities on residential housing prices in the city of Lisbon, Portugal. Our study is directed towards identifying the spatial variation of amenity values for churches, palaces, lithic (stone) architecture and other historic amenities via the housing market, making use of both global and local spatial hedonic models.Our empirical evidence reveals that different types of historic and landmark amenities provide different housing premiums. While having a local non-landmark church within 100 meters increases housing prices by approximately 4.2%, higher concentrations of non-landmark churches within 1000 meters yield negative effects in the order of 0.1% of prices with landmark churches having a greater negative impact around 3.4%. In contrast, higher concentration of both landmark and non-landmark lithic structures positively influence housing prices in the order of 2.9% and 0.7% respectively.Global estimates indicate a negative effect of protected zones, however this significance is lost when accounting for heterogeneity within these areas. We see that the designation of historic zones may counteract negative effects on property values of nearby neglected buildings in historic neighborhoods by setting additional regulations ensuring that dilapidated buildings do not damage the city’s beauty or erode its historic heritage.Further, our results from a geographically weighted regression specification indicate the presence of spatial non-stationarity in the effects of different historic amenities across the city of Lisbon with variation between historic and more modern areas.
Highlights
Historic cities are identifiable by their iconic historic buildings and monuments, which are a testimony to the city’s history as a whole
14 the bulk of historic amenities are located outside the historic central business district (CBD), it is likely that the location of these amenities in the CBD are not exogenous when, for historical reasons, they would have been erected in the oldest and most central areas of the current city
Global Model Results ordinary least squares (OLS) and spatial error model (SEM) estimates for proximity to historic amenities, concentration of historic amenities, and dwellings in a protected zone are shown in table 2 (a, b, and c respectively) with complete list of estimated coefficients presented in table A7 in the appendix
Summary
Historic cities are identifiable by their iconic historic buildings and monuments, which are a testimony to the city’s history as a whole. This is evident in European capitals such as Paris with the Eiffel Tower, the ancient structures and edifices of Rome, the Acropolis of Athens, or the Manueline and Moorish styled monasteries, towers and castle in Lisbon Residents of such cities value the aesthetic and cultural significance of these immovable cultural heritage goods and sites creating demand for living spaces in their proximity (van Duijn and Rouwendal 2013, Koster et al 2016) and increasing the value of real estate in these urban markets (Glaeser et al 2001, Carlino and Saiz 2008). In 2007, tourism and travel generated €9.5 billion in Lisbon representing 4.8% of gross domestic product and employing 9.8% of the working population (World Travel and Tourism Council 2007) while in November 2014 tourism revenue in Lisbon attributed to lodging generated €45.8 million (Instituto Nacional de Estistica 2015)
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