Location, Regional Accessibility and Price Effects: Evidence from Twin Cities Home Sales

摘要

Regional location factors, with measures of regional accessibility foremost among them,exert a strong influence on urban property markets. While accessibility represents an importantregional-scale factor, more local influences such as proximity to urban highway links mayalso positively or negatively influence the desirability of a location. In this paper, we use across-section of home sales in Hennepin County, Minnesota from the years 2001 through 2004,along with a set of disaggregate regional accessibility measures, to estimate the value of accessto employment and resident workers. We also estimate the (dis)amenity effects of locationsnear major freeway links that have recently undergone, or were scheduled to undergo (as of thetime period covered by the home sales), major construction to add capacity. The richness of thehome sales data set allows us to control for a number of structural attributes, as well as somesite characteristics, while additional neighborhood characteristics (such as income levels andlocal educational quality) are added from supplemental data sources. Empirical results indicatethat households highly value employment access, while access to other resident workers (i.e.competition for jobs) is considered a disamenity. Proximity to local highway access points ispositively associated with sale price, while proximity to the highway link itself is negativelyassociated with price. The paper concludes with some implications for research and practice ofthe concept and measurement of the relationship between location and land value.