The Walkability Premium

Katharine Worth writes up a new study that used regression analysis to assess the relationship been home prices and the Walk Score of the neighborhood in which they’re located. The conclusion was that “[a]fter controlling for all of these other factors that are known to influence housing value, our study showed a positive correlation between walkability and housing prices in 13 of the 15 housing markets we studied.” In other words “there is a real and measurable pent up demand for homes in walkable neighborhoods.”

Some additional thoughts. One is that though Walk Score is a fun tool, the methodology is far from perfect, and you would almost certainly see a stronger walkability/value correlation if you had a better metric for walkability. Another is that car use is associated with a lot of currently underpriced negative externalities and obviously this would look different if those were priced properly. In a more speculative vein, it also strikes me that American history has left us with a weird situation in which our cities tend to be walkable in inverse proportion to the quality of their weather. Boston or Chicago in the winter are terrible places to walk a quarter of a mile and then wait for a bus. In a city with the climate of San Diego or Los Angeles, things would look different.