PARENT SESSION
Oral Session # 67: Urban Ecology I: Dynamics, Values, and Systems.
Presiding: A Yeakley
Thursday, August 7. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM, SITCC Meeting Room 105.
Valuing proximity to forest patches at the neighborhood scale: A hedonic model using landscape metrics.
Mills, April*,1, Bjorn, Andrew1, Waddell, Paul2, Alberti, Marina1, 1 Department of Urban Design and Planning, Seattle, WA, USA2 Evans School of Public Affairs, Seattle, WA, USA
ABSTRACT- It has previously been shown that many homebuyers express preferences for houses located near natural features and in fact are willing to pay a premium for being located near open spaces, parks, and water features. This paper asks if homebuyers' affinity for natural landscape features at a neighborhood scale is reflected in the marginal benefit for houses located in natural settings over those located in more built environments. In this paper we test the hypothesis that single-family residents in King County, WA prefer houses closer to large forest patches and further from large patches of impervious surface. We use a hedonic pricing model that estimates the effect of structural, jurisdictional, locational, and spatial landscape attributes on housing prices. We specifically determine whether the marginal benefit of spatial landscape attributes significantly effect housing prices. Spatial attributes are measured at two scales (300m and 600m) using five landscape metrics: percent area of paved land, percent area of forested land, mean patch size, contagion, and the Shannon-index. Our preliminary results show that at the 600m scale, percent area of forested land has a significant marginal effect on housing prices. These results indicate that there is economic value in maintaining green space in urban environments while simultaneously reducing the ecological disturbance of sprawling development. One way to attract people away from sprawling suburban areas and closer to cities may be to design more natural areas within higher density urban environments.
Key words: hedonic regression, neighborhood effects, landscape metrics