Value of oak woodlands and open space on private property values in southern California

Abstract

This paper evaluates the extent to which dedicated open space in California’s oak woodlands in a rapidly urbanizing area in southern California, influences private land and home prices. The Santa Rosa Plateau area in southern Riverside County was the location for this pilot study. Data on home and land value for 4,800 parcels surrounding an 8,300 acre oak woodland open space owned and operated a private land conservancy were collected. This was merged with spatial data from vegetation maps using a geographic information system (GIS). Distance from each parcel to the edge of the open space land, to the nearest trailhead and to the nearest stand of native oaks was calculated. Hedonic regression showed that both land and home value decreased as the distance from the open space boundary, trailheads, and local stands of native oak habitat increased. The model results were applied to the overall home and land parcels in the study area. A decrease of 10 percent in the distance to the nearest oak stands and to the edge of the permanent open space land resulted in an increase of $4 million in the total home value, and an increase of $16 million in total land value in the community. This demonstrates the off-site benefits of open space areas and native oak woodland stands in increasing overall land and home value of an entire community. There is economic value for conservation of native habitats. This promising method of analysis will be useful in future work to characterize how different configurations of open space design influence the land and home markets.