The value of green and blue space: Livability, walkability and house prices

Abstract

Urban green and blue spaces are important amenities within highly urbanised areas which offer social, economic and ecological benefits and provide a number of valuable direct and indirect ecosystem of services to surrounding land uses and urban households. Existing research has revealed that green (and blue) space is not a uniform environmental amenity but rather a set of distinct aesthetic and hydromorphological characteristics which impact upon house prices in different ways. Moreover, the different utility-bearing preferences for green or blue space has been shown to be related to income and education levels and inequalities driven by socioeconomic differences, hence, the relationship between housing prices and these amenities might vary considerably across a wide metropolitan area. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to examine the heterogeneity of green and blue space using 4,985 sales transactions applying quantile regression to investigate the proximity effects of diverse types of blue spaces on property prices across different conditional distributions.