Browsing by Subject "historic preservation"
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Item Determinants of Historic and Cultural Landmark Designation: Why We Preserve What We Preserve(2010-02) Noonan, Douglas S.; Krupka, Douglas J.There is much interest among cultural economists in assessing the effects of heritage preservation policies. There has been less interest in modeling the policy choices made in historic and cultural landmark preservation. This article builds an economic model of a landmark designation that highlights the tensions between the interests of owners of cultural amenities and the interests of the neighboring community. We perform empirical tests by estimating a discrete choice model for landmark preservation using data from Chicago, combining the Chicago Historical Resources Survey of over 17,000 historic structures with property sales, Census, and other geographic data. The data allow us to explain why some properties were designated landmarks (or landmark districts) and others were not. The results identify the influence of property characteristics, local socio-economic factors, and measures of historic and cultural quality. The results emphasize the political economy of implementing preservation policies.Item Finding an Impact of Preservation Policies: Price Effects of Historic Landmarks on Attached Homes in Chicago 1990-1999(2007-02) Noonan, Douglas S.The impact of landmark designation on prices of the property and its neighbors sits at the core of the policy debate and empirical research on historic preservation. Yet these studies suffer from serious methodological limitations and biases. First, as important unobserved characteristics likely correlate with landmark designation, an omitted-variable bias results. Second, if designations depend on property values or neighborhood housing market conditions, the endogenous selection process further undermines inferences about preservation policies’ effects. This article outlines more robust empirical strategies and presents new evidence on landmark designation effects on property values. For a sample of Chicago home sales during the 1990s, a hedonic price analysis suggests that landmark buildings and districts sell at a small premium. To address the omitted-variable bias, a repeat-sales approach demonstrates significant spillover effects of landmark designation on prices. These estimates are also robust to sample-selection bias and some forms of spatial autocorrelation.Item Making -- or Picking -- Winners: Evidence of Internal and External Price Effects in Historic Preservation Policies(2011-05) Noonan, Douglas S.; Krupka, Douglas J.This article measures the impacts of historic preservation regulations on property values inside and outside of officially designated historic districts. The analysis relies on a model of historic designation to control for the tendency to designate higher-quality properties. An instrumental variables model using rich data on historic significance corrects for this bias. The results for Chicago during the 1990s indicate that price impacts from designation inside a landmark district vary considerably across homes inside the districts. Controlling for extant historic quality, which the market values positively, restrictions apparently have negative price effects on average both within and outside districts.Item The Many Dimensions of Historic Preservation Value: National and Local Designation, Internal and External Policy Effects(Taylor & Francis, 2017) Oba, Tetsuharu; Noonan, Douglas S.; School of Public and Environmental AffairsThis analysis examines the internal and external policy effects of national and local register programmes for historic preservation. Robust hedonic pricing models are crucial to informing policy proposals and understanding how property markets relate to urban heritage. Estimating a repeat-sales hedonic model with neighbourhood trends and spatial mixed models, novel to this literature, offers a marked improvement in terms of jointly identifying internal and external policy effects, comparing national and local designations, separating policy from heritage effects and estimating models robust to spatial dependence and trends in hedonic prices. Historic designation variables, while often individually insignificant in the model, are always jointly significant in explaining varying appreciation rates. Local districts exhibit no consistent price impacts across the models. Being located inside a national district confers a price premium that increases over time in the preferred model specification, while prices fall in national districts’ buffers after designation. The sensitivity of results to model specification raises questions about alternative approaches to spatial dependence in the data in the urban historic preservation context. Evidence of the influence of historic district designation on property turnover and renovation investments is also examined.