Valuing open space and land-use patterns in urban watersheds

This article presents the results of a hedonic property value analysis for an urban watershed in New Haven County, Connecticut. We use spatially refer enced housing and land-use data to capture the effect of environmental vari ables around the house location. We calculate and incorporate data on open space, land-use diversity, and other environmental variables to capture spa tial variation in environmental quality around each house location. We are ultimately interested in determining whether variables that are reflective of spatial diversity do a better job of describing human preferences for ho using choice than broad categories of rural versus urban areas. Using a ric h data set of over 4,000 houses, we study these effects within a watershed that includes areas of high environmental quality and low environmental qua lity as well as varying patterns of socioeconomic conditions. Our results s uggest that, in addition to structural characteristics, variables describin g neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics and variables describing land use and environmental quality are influential in determining human values. We also find that the scale at which we measure these spatially defined env ironmental variables is important.