Abstract
Natural landscape views have positive sides, such as providing restorative effects to urban residents, and negative sides, such as deepening wealth inequality. Previous studies have mainly focused on the positives and rarely on the negatives. From this perspective, this study aimed to analyze the unequal impact of natural landscape views on housing prices for apartments in Seoul. We proposed a visual perception model to analyze natural landscape views and, based on a hedonic price model, we used ordinary least squares and quantile regression to estimate the marginal impacts on housing prices. The results show that: (1) natural landscape views had positive impacts on housing prices, but their impacts did not reach the level of structural and locational characteristics such as apartment area and the distance to subway stations; (2) natural landscape views had different marginal impacts by housing price range and, in particular, had much higher value-added effects on higher-priced apartments, meaning that if old apartment complexes are redeveloped into high-rise ones, the improvement in natural landscape views generates great profit for apartment owners and intensifies wealth inequality; (3) the geographic information system-based visual perception model effectively quantified the natural landscape views of wide areas and is thus applicable for the rigorous analysis of various landscape views.
Highlights
A natural landscape consists of a collection of landforms such as mountains, rivers, and lakes as well as natural vegetation [1]
We analyzed the impacts of natural landscape views on housing prices, and applied a visual perception model, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, and quantile regression to apartments sold in Seocho-gu, Seoul
The study found that natural landscape views unequally affect housing prices by price range; the marginal impacts are higher in higher-priced housing than in lower- and medium-priced housing, indicating that natural landscape views have negative sides such as deepening wealth inequality
Summary
A natural landscape consists of a collection of landforms such as mountains, rivers, and lakes as well as natural vegetation [1]. Views of such landscapes have restorative effects and provide psychological comfort to urban residents [2,3]. Researchers have attempted to analyze the impacts of natural landscape views on housing prices, generally using hedonic price models [5]. The marginal impact of a natural landscape view refers to the change in housing price for a unit change of the view variable, all other independent variables being constant. Most studies have found that the marginal impact of the natural landscape view had positive values, supporting that natural landscape views positively affect urban residents [4,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]
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