Architecture and the Housing Market: Nineteenth Century Row Housing in Boston's South End

Abstract

This study combines historical and quantitative methods to determine the market response to a major nineteenth century American urban architectural form-the speculatively built row house. The paper estimates a hedonic price index which decomposes the original purchase price of the row house into a set of prices for the characteristics of the house, including detailed architectural features. In turn, the estimated prices for the architectural features reveal the market's response to the aesthetic design. With more than 3,500 row houses, its tree-lined streets, and scattered parks, Boston's South End is the largest Victorian residential district remaining in the United States. The homogeneity of the brick bowfront row house form, coupled with the variety of architectural features, provides an unusual opportunity to test the effect of architecture on market values. We find that variables for lot size, house size, and location within the neighborhood explain 74 percent of the price of a row house. Architectural style and features account for an additional 14 percent of the price of the house and are more highly valued when they differentiate a row house from its neighbors. These are significant results, for they provide systematic statistical evidence that architectural design matters in the marketplace. "But tell me: When you say; 'The value of a building,' do you really lay more stress on the subjective value than the dollar value?" "On both. For human nature determines that subjective value, sooner or later, becomes money value; and the lack of it, sooner or later, money loss. The subjective value is far higher, by far the more permanent; but money value is inseparable from the affairs of life; to ignore it would be moonshine."

Architecture: A Missing Piece in Real-estate Studies of Sustainable Houses

“…Their regression analysis considered variables of lot and house size, neighborhood characteristics, construction materials, architectural style, and individual architectural features and found that in total, these features account for 14% of the price. Their findings, again, support the notion that architecture and planning can have a positive impact on property values [20].…”

“…They also acknowledged that good design usually costs more but that is not necessarily the case [18]. Smith and Moorhouse (1993) also studied the effect of architecture on residential sector prices in Boston. Their regression analysis considered variables of lot and house size, neighborhood characteristics, construction materials, architectural style, and individual architectural features and found that in total, these features account for 14% of the price.…”

Methods in assessing the values of architecture in residential neighbourhoods

“…Saha, 1991;Rode, 2014;Elci, 2018;Sharif, 2012) ( Table 2). The aesthetical value appeared under-represented with only one-quarter of the articles referring to aesthetics (Nordwall, 2013;De Jong, 2014;Smith, 1993;Bazzaz, 2016;Jalaludin, 2012;Riccardo, 2012;Suikkari, 2008). Moreover, the age value revealed under studied.…”

“…Researchers assess, for example, the influence of types of urban design (Ryan, 2007;Song, 2012), use or modifications (Portnov et al, 2005(Portnov et al, , 2006, energy efficiency (Fuerst, 2016), refurbishment (Yau, 2008) or heritage status (Rickman, 2009) on property price. Smith (1993), for example, researched on the relation between aesthetical and financial-economic values of 19th century row housing in Boston. The variation and background of architectural styles and attributes are identified by historical sources and building data.…”

The Environmental Roots of Urban Renewal in Boston

“…9 To accommodate population growth, landlords bought up properties as they declined in value. 10 As a result, many large residences became lodging houses where workers rented rooms of varying quality for the night, week, or month. Lodging houses comprised about 10 percent of housing in the neighborhood while a majority of residents lived in tenements.…”