No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This article examines and makes explicit the co-constitutive relationship between density techniques, their depoliticization effects, and heightened land commodification in Taiwan's acceleration to a real estate–oriented economy. TDR (transfer of development rights) and density bonusing are two almost omnipresent practices in urban land development in Taiwan. We ask how their technocratic approach—using predetermined formulas to bracket density use while almost entirely foreclosing community negotiation—has played a formative role in accelerating land commodification. Using mixed research methods, the case study of Central North in New Taipei City helps lay bare how formulaic density rules enable planners to embed their epistemic assumptions about what constitutes a good city within intensified property development. Mimicking the calculative practices performed by the real estate sector, we use residual valuation methods to estimate the maximum price-lifting effects of 18 real estate development projects. We show that formulaic rules allow density to enter cost–benefit analysis spreadsheets as a profit booster in advance of actual granting of extra density, emboldening aggressive land brokering, buying, and selling, which churn up land prices. We argue that the technical depoliticization generated by TDR and density bonusing has become the most effective catalyst in creating a politically less contested and financially more calculable urban world in which capital's acquisitive appetite for land's monetary value is intensified. We conclude by discussing the implications for how to move density from a domain of technical rules and real estate finance to a politics of land.

Due to housing stock heterogeneity, most academic discussions on price dispersion in the housing market have traditionally focused on the search behavior of consumers and neglected the housing and neighborhood characteristics that are related to price dispersion. This study applies a rich empirical data set from Taipei to explore the neighborhood characteristics that are associated with a higher degree of dispersion in housing price and associated likelihood of such. We track the housing transactions at the residential community level, and group the communities based on the coefficient of variation of the transaction prices in each community after controlling for community and housing characteristics. We apply a multinomial logistic regression to examine which neighborhood characteristics are more likely to be associated with higher price dispersion. We find that communities with higher price levels and built by government agencies are less likely to have high price dispersion, while those that are older, priced lower or have a minimum floor area of 50 pings are more likely to have higher price dispersion.