Walkability – Proximity To Amenities Affects Value

Real estate agents often chant the mantra “location, location, location,” which essentially means “find a home in a well-kept neighborhood with good schools and a low crime rate.”

Some may cite a fourth factor, “Walkability,” a concept supported by self-styled “new urbanists” who advocate denser cities designed for the pedestrian and mass transit as much as for the car. In their ideal neighborhood, you could walk to a bookstore and then to an ice cream shop, and your children could walk to school, probably unescorted. (It sounds like so many movie depictions of America in the 1950s.)

They argue that Walkability lowers crime – that good people on the streets drive away the bad guys – and that it generally improves life and sharply raises home values. Whether it helps homes retain their value when the market slumps, however, seems a harder question to answer.

A study published by C.E.O.’s for Cities, a group of urban redevelopment advocates, found that in many ways, the street corner beats the cul de sac. It looked at the sales of 90,000 homes in 15 American markets to estimate how much value was associated with something called the Walk Score. Using a 100-point scale, this score rates the number of destinations, including libraries, parks and coffee shops, within walking distance of a home.

The scores for many North American cities can be found at Walkscore.com by typing in an address. For instance, the White House scores a near-perfect 97: a “walker’s paradise,” the Web site says. Another famous home, the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles, rates a 25.

The study found that houses with above-average Walk Scores commanded a premium. It was as much as $30,000 in cities like Charlotte, N.C., Chicago, Sacramento and San Francisco, wrote Joe Cortright, the study’s author and an economist at Impresa, a consulting firm in Portland, Ore.

The correlation failed to hold in 2 of the 15 cities studied – Bakersfield, Calif., and Las Vegas, where housing prices decreased in walkable neighborhoods.

Courtesy of Damon Darlin, New York Times