The impacts of rail transit system on residential property values have been examined for many metropolitan areas in the U.S. But there are few studies on the effects of light rail in a non-zoning city. As the rail transit in the largest non-zoning city, Houston’s light rail transit line, or the so-called METRORail, has not received much attention from the planning research society since it opened to the public in 2004. A previous study by the author utilized 2007 household data to analyze the impacts of Houston’s METRORail line and found the net effects of the rail transit line change significantly at different distances from the rail stations. One limitation of that study was that the physical environment and neighborhood characteristics of the station areas may not have had notable changes over a relatively short time span, i.e., three years after the opening of the light rail. This study employs 2010 InfoUSA household data to re-examine the effects of Houston’s METRORail line. Similar to the previous studies, the author adopts a traditional ordinary linear regression (OLS) to investigate the contribution of a set of variables representing the physical, neighborhood, and accessibility characteristics of properties, and also employs a multi-level regression model (MLR) to examine the hierarchical structures of spatial data explicitly. In addition, this study tests the spatial autocorrelation in the modeling process and analyzes its effects on the results. The modeling results suggest that the METRORail line has had significant net positive effects on residential property values. The MLS model captures the difference of these effects with more spatial details. The spatial regression model improves model fit, but spatial autocorrelation is not completely eliminated.

中文翻译：

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轻轨对非分区城市住宅物业价值的影响：休斯敦METRORail公交线路的一项新测试

在美国的许多大都市地区，都已经研究了轨道交通系统对住宅资产价值的影响，但是在非分区城市中，关于轻轨的影响的研究很少。作为最大的非分区城市中的铁路运输，休斯敦的轻轨运输线（即所谓的METRORail）自2004年对公众开放以来，并未受到规划研究学会的广泛关注。作者先前的研究利用2007年的家庭数据分析了休斯敦的METRORail铁路线的影响，发现铁路运输线的净影响在距火车站不同距离处发生了显着变化。该研究的局限性在于，车站区域的物理环境和邻里特性在相对较短的时间范围内可能没有显着变化，即 轻轨开放三年后。这项研究使用了2010年InfoUSA的家庭数据来重新检验休斯顿的METRORail产品线的影响。与以前的研究类似，作者采用传统的普通线性回归（OLS）来研究代表属性的物理，邻域和可及性特征的一组变量的贡献，并且还采用了多级回归模型（MLR）明确检查空间数据的层次结构。此外，本研究在建模过程中测试了空间自相关，并分析了其对结果的影响。建模结果表明，METRORail产品线对住宅物业价值产生了显着的净正影响。MLS模型通过更多的空间细节捕获了这些效果的差异。