Impact of Urban Green Space on Residential Housing Prices: Case Study in Shenzhen

Public resources such as transportation, hospitals, parks, and schools are important factors in housing prices. However, studies on property value have mainly concentrated on transportation, and few studies have focused on the effect that green space has on property values. Researchers have mainly focused on specific parks within different communities rather than parks (on a larger scale) to study the average impact of green space on housing prices. Therefore, the objective of this research is to quantify the effect of public resources on property value, especially green space, using the hedonic pricing method (HPM). This paper focuses on 71 parks within Shenzhen to make results universal. Transaction price data and the structural attributes of 6,473 dwelling units were collected. This paper looks at HPM from three dimensions: structural attributes, location variables, and environmental variables. The results showed that (1) proximity to a central business district (CBD) produced the greatest effect on housing prices, followed by distance to park, distance to school, distance to arterial road, and distance to subway; (2) proximity to a park noticeably contributes to housing prices at 0.041%, and housing prices decline at a rate of 20,920 CNY (US$3,356)/km depending on distance to the nearest park; and (3) the average influence radius of Shenzhen parks was 1.73 km, and the 71 parks could promote an increase in value across 412.14 km(2) of land. This research will be helpful in residential housing purchase decision-making, for reasonable estate development layouts (for developers), and for governments (in terms of increasing environmental tax to promote green space preservation). (C) 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.