Using Zillow data to value green space amenities at the neighborhood scale
Section snippets
Introduction and background
Urban and suburban green spaces, such as trees and parks, benefit both people and nature. Green spaces, or “urban green infrastructure”, enhance the lives of community residents by promoting healthy activities, providing cleaner air, sheltering residents from negative effects of undesirable land uses, and increasing social interaction (Ayala-Azcárraga et al., 2019; Groenewegen et al., 2006). Green spaces also benefit nature by providing habitat to various species, controlling erosion and
Data scale and coverage
Zillow, Inc. is a real estate database that, in addition to estimating home values, delineates approximately 8000 neighborhoods in metropolitan areas across the United States (Fig. 1). Zillow developed neighborhood boundaries by contacting individual chambers of commerce, tourism, and convention boards, speaking with local real estate agents, and using various online sources (see https://www.zillowgroup.com/news/7000-neighborhood-boundary-files-in-shapefile-format/). We restricted our sample to
Baseline model (Model 1)
Table 2 tabulates the parameter estimates for all four models. Of the 18 structural, demographic, and community predictor variables in the baseline model, 12 are found to be statistically significant (P ˂ 0.10), including the fixed effects for U.S. state and metropolitan area, which are omitted from Table 2 for brevity. We compared models with and without fixed effects for metropolitan area; the partial F test rejected the null hypothesis with P ˂ 0.001, confirming the presence of submarket
Discussion
The signs of the estimates in the baseline model are consistent with our expectations and with previous studies (Fernandez and Bucaram, 2019). School and traffic indicators have been shown to be important variables in other studies (Czembrowski and Kronenberg, 2016; Gibbons et al., 2014), but our model estimates only college/university and development intensity to be significant, while road type, highway and k-12 school are not. Aspect is another feature that we find to be significant in the
Conclusion
Cities and neighborhoods across the United States are grappling with ways to accommodate more humans while at the same time capitalize on the economic, aesthetic, and health benefits of green spaces. We estimate the economic benefits of environmental attributes by applying the hedonic pricing method to a dataset of almost 6000 Zillow neighborhoods across the United States. The Zillow neighborhood as a unit of observation is useful not only because it is efficient and extensible, but also
Declaration of competing interests
The authors whose names appear on the title page have NO affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest (such as honoraria; educational grants; participation in speakers’ bureaus; membership, employment, consultancies, stock ownership, or other equity interest; and expert testimony or patent-licensing arrangements), or non-financial interest (such as personal or professional relationships, affiliations, knowledge or beliefs) in the subject matter or
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Jonathan R. Holt: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft. Mark E. Borsuk: Supervision, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors report no declarations of interest.
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