Abstract
Considering rapid urbanization worldwide, concern is growing that the resulting loss of green space affects welfare negatively. This study assesses how implicit prices of green amenities differ across apartments in different price groups to assess distributional impact of urban green amenities. Additionally, the paper proposes adjustments to enhance the standard hedonic model and increase comparability of estimates across study areas. Sales data for 6614 apartments in the suburbs of Stockholm, Sweden, an area that is relatively more prone to land conversion, were combined with GIS data on green urban areas and assessed in a simple log-linear model and quantile regression model. The results suggest that forested area even in a in a city with abundant green areas, have an impact on apartment prices. The price effect of green amenities differs strongly across both categories of ‘green area’ such as parks and forests, as well as, between the mean and the ends of the distribution of apartment prices. The proposed adjustments and results could be of use to other study areas.
Highlights
Urban ecosystem services are held to contribute to health and well being (European Commission, 2015) and public policy seemingly gives unprecedented attention to biodiversity’s contribution to welfare, such as in the G7-meeting and World Economic Forum
This paper relaxes that constraint by using the quantile regression to shed light on implicit prices of green urban amenities across categories of apartment prices, to approximate distributional impacts of urban green areas
The study contributes to the literature on valuation of urban green amenities by providing one of only few hedonic studies of Scandinavia; the study proposes adjustments of the conventional specification of the hedonic model to increase comparability of hedonic studies across loca tions and countries; a simple yet new attempt to control for view from the apartment in a context of abundant green areas which else risk masking the effect of green amenities on hedonic prices; and the use of pre-existing original data with unusual level of granularity and which is based on stated preferences
Summary
Urban ecosystem services are held to contribute to health and well being (European Commission, 2015) and public policy seemingly gives unprecedented attention to biodiversity’s contribution to welfare, such as in the G7-meeting and World Economic Forum. The consideration of how environmental status has varying effect across groups of the population gains traction in policy. Urban ecosystems vary in effectiveness to deliver ecosystem services, calling for a focus on appropriate spatial consideration and level of analysis (de Groot et al, 2010). Recent literature highlights the need to shed more light on the link between urban ecosystems and their distributional impacts with appropriate scale and granularity of analysis, at both the community and household level (Cortinovis et al, 2018)
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