Urban Green Spaces and Housing Prices: An Alternative Perspective

Veronika Liebelt,Stephan Bartke,Nina Schwarz

doi:10.3390/su11133707

Abstract

Urban green spaces (UGS) are essential components of sustainable cities that provide many benefits to urban residents, such as recreation or aesthetics. Urban residents may be willing to pay for some of these ecosystem services. Indeed, studies investigating the formation of housing prices through hedonic pricing analysis have shown that UGS can influence housing prices. Hedonic pricing analysis puts housing units at the center of analysis. In this study, we investigate whether an alternative perspective provides additional insights into the effects of UGS on pricing. The proposed approach puts UGS into the center of analysis by applying an analysis of buffer zones to housing prices, thus, linking approaches from urban economics and landscape ecology. Such an analysis could deepen our understanding of the effects of UGS on housing prices by analyzing price–distance slopes around UGS-thus supporting more informed decisions on efficient UGS management and urban planning. Our results using a case study on Leipzig, Germany, demonstrate that the size of UGS affects price–distance slopes around them. We conclude that further investigations should be fathomed to unleash the potential of applying the analysis of buffer zones around UGS as a method to inform sustainable UGS design in cities.

Highlights

Urbanization is a global trend resulting in the rapidly growing urban population [1]
Figure 5; Figure 6 present the amalgam of price–distance slopes for Urban green spaces (UGS) for the city of Leipzig based on average mean price–distance slopes across all UGS
The analysis of buffer zones around UGS applied in this study provides additional details on the price -distance slopes with regard to the variable UGS distance that has been very often analyzed in hedonic studies [7,13,49,50,51,52]

Summary

Introduction

Urbanization is a global trend resulting in the rapidly growing urban population [1]. There is a significant number of factors that determine the values of housing properties in cities such as characteristics of housing and neighborhood (e.g., the presence of child care centers, schools, hospitals, level of crime, etc.), distance to the central business district and places of work. Hectic lifestyles, limited space for rest and mental and physical recovery, turn modern cities into stressful places of living [2]. Urban green spaces (UGS) provide valuable ecosystem services to residents, i.e., deliver “benefits people obtain from ecosystems” [3] (see the broader perspectives of Daily (1997) or Constanza et al (1997) [4,5]). The concept of ecosystem services broadly entails the services which are perceived, appreciated and valued by humans, such as recreational opportunities, aesthetic enjoyment, water retention and purification, and microclimate regulation (i.e., cooling effect) for cities [1].

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion