At the just completed Virginia Environmental Law Journal Symposium, Vicki Been (NYU) presented her empirical work in environmental and land use planning. Her co-authored paper, entitled The Effect of Community Gardens on Neighboring Property Values, is available on SSRN. The Abstract:
Cities across the United States
increasingly are debating the best way to use vacant infill lots. The
community garden movement is one of the major contenders for the space,
as are advocates for small public pocket parks and other green spaces.
To allocate the land most efficiently and fairly, local governments
need sound research about the value of such gardens and parks to their
host communities.
At
the same time, cities are looking for new ways of financing the
development and maintenance of public garden and park space. Some have
turned to tax increment financing to generate resources, other are
introducing impact fees or special assessments to cover the costs of
urban parks. In order to employ such financing mechanisms, both policy
concerns and legal constraints require local governments to base their
charges on sound data about the impacts green spaces have on the value
of the neighboring properties that would be forced to bear the
incidence of the tax or fee.
Despite the clear public policy
need for such data, our knowledge about the impacts community gardens
and other such spaces have on surrounding neighborhoods is quite
limited. No studies have focused specifically on community gardens, and
those that have examined the property value impacts of parks and other
open space are cross-sectional studies inattentive to when the park
opened, so that it is impossible to determine the direction of the
causality of any property value differences found. The existing
literature also has paid insufficient attention to qualitative
differences among the parks studied and to differences in
characteristics of the surrounding neighborhoods that might affect the
parks' impacts.
Applying hedonic methods to a unique data set
of all property sales in New York City over several decades, we
compared the prices of properties within a given distance of community
gardens to prices of comparable properties outside the designated ring,
but still located in the same neighborhood. By examining whether and
how this difference changed once a community garden was established, we
account for any systematic differences between the sites used for
community gardens and other land in the neighborhood, thus resolving
questions about the direction of causality and helping to disentangle
the specific effects of community gardens from other contemporaneous
changes occurring across neighborhoods and properties in the city.
We
find that the opening of a community garden has a statistically
significant positive impact on residential properties within 1000 feet
of the garden, and that the impact increases over time. We find that
gardens have the greatest impact in the most disadvantaged
neighborhoods. Higher quality gardens have the greatest positive
impact. Finally, we find that the opening of a garden is associated
with other changes in the neighborhood, such as increasing rates of
homeownership, and thus may be serving as catalysts for economic
redevelopment of the community.
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