Relationship between value of open space and distance from housing locations within a community

This research uses a sequence of hedonic spatial regressions for a metropolitan housing market in the Southeastern United States to explore a new procedure that establishes the relationship between the value attributable to open space and distance from housing locations (a “distance-decay function”) within a given community. A distance-decay function allows identification of the range of distance over which open space affects housing values and the estimation of a proxy for the value added to nearby houses resulting from hypothetical open space preservation. Ex post analyses of the open-space regression coefficients suggest marginal implicit price functions for three types of open space that decay as open space area increases with respect to house location. After controlling for other factors in the spatial hedonic model, simple distance-decay functional relationships were established between the implicit prices of developed open space, forest-land open space, and agriculture-wetland open space and the buffer radius of the open-space areas surrounding a given housing location. The proposed method may be useful for identifying the range over which preferences for different types of open space are exhibited.