Does crime in parks affect apartment prices?

Abstract

This is the published version of a paper published in Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention. Citation for the original published paper (version of record):Iqbal, A., Ceccato, V A. (2015) Does crime in parks affect apartment prices?. A park is a desirable feature when people are purchasing a property. Buyers are ready to pay more for properties surrounded by natural amenities, such as a pleasant park. However, if a park is targeted by crime and disorder, then it may have a negative effect on people's appraisal. The aim of this study is to reach a better understanding of how parks and crime rates affect housing prices taking into account residential properties and parks type. Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, is used as the case study. The methodology has two stages. An extensive field work was performed in a selected number of parks to help characterize the parks in Stockholm. This information was gathered with secondary data about parks using Geographic Information System. This pre-assessment was later followed by the analysis of 2008s apartment sales using hedonic modelling to assess the effect of parks alone and in combination with crime rates. Results suggest that the effect of parks on prices vary by park type (increased with, e.g. features of cultural and national interest and decreased with ball games or boating facilities) while an aggregated measure of parks lowers overall apartment prices. More interestingly, findings show that the price of apartments tends to be discounted in areas where parks have relatively high rates of violence and vandalism. Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and

Park proximity, crime and apartment prices

“…Spatial data analysis was used as an input into the hedonic models. Although the methodology used in this work is different, the results are in line with some of the previously reported empirical results and confirm that the proximity of parks as an environmental amenity has an effect on apartment prices (Iqbal and Ceccato 2015). Our results also demonstrate that the impact of parks on apartment prices is different in the different segments of the apartment market in…”

“…(2) distance to the nearest GPs, (3) distance to the nearest NPs, (4) distance to the nearest LPs and (5) distance to the nearest PBs. This procedure is entirely different from that used in a previous study by Iqbal and Ceccato (2015), which focused on all park attributes and all types of parks. In the hedonic price equation distance included as distance and square of distance, that is, a non-linear relationship.…”

“…inhabitants in year 2011 (SCB 2013 The park and open spaces in Stockholm are shown in Figure 1. In accordance with previous research by Iqbal and Ceccato (2015), several house structure and neighbourhood locational attributes were used for the year 2008. Most of the neighbourhood-level data, including park and neighbourhood locational attributes, were provided by the Stockholm City Planning Administration; the sales transaction data were provided by Valueguard Technology AB.…”

“…Researchers have also suggested that the lack of demographic data and land use data used to create the ratios often limits crime analysis over time (Ceccato & Wilhelmsson, 2011). The total number of users in each park might be considered a good indicator (Iqbal and Ceccato 2015), but such data were not available.…”

“…One approach involves employing the location attribute by using the shortest distance to a park as a main variable. The shortest distance to a park variable is considered a better choice than using park as an aggregate measure (Iqbal and Ceccato 2015). A second approach involves investigating the effect of park types on housing prices.…”