GIS-Based Estimation of Housing Amenities: The Case of High Grounds and Stagnant Streams

We use GIS and econometric methods to estimate the marginal implicit values of environmental amenities associated with residential land parcels in the mountain town of Logan, Utah. Amenities include proximity to open spaces (such as parks, golf courses and lakes), commercial zones, major roads, streams, and general visibility of surrounding topography in the valley as determined by the elevation of the land parcel. The amenity value estimates are corrected for spatial autocorrelation. We find a positive relationship between a parcel’s value and its elevation, and a negative relationship between value and adjacency to a stagnant stream. To our knowledge, this is the first hedonic study to assess the effect of stream stagnancy on land value.