Determinants of Historic and Cultural Landmark Designation: Why We Preserve What We Preserve

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 paper 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.heritage preservation policy, landmark designation

Empowerment Zones, Neighborhood Change and Owner Occupied Housing

This paper examines the effects of a generous, spatially-targeted economic development policy (the federal Empowerment Zone program) on local neighborhood characteristics and on the neighborhood quality of life, taking into account the interactions amongst the policy, changes in neighborhood demographics and neighborhood housing stock. Urban economic theory posits that housing prices in a small area should increase as quality of life increases, because people will be more willing to pay to live in the area, but these changes in prices and quality of life will also affect the demographics of the population through sorting and the housing stock through reinvestment. Using census block-group-level data, we examine how housing prices respond to the Empowerment Zone policy intervention. Changes in the other dimensions of neighborhood quality (demographics and housing stock characteristics) will also help determine the total, or full effect on housing values of the policy intervention. This paper estimates these direct and indirect effects in a simultaneous equations setting, compares indirect and full effects, and examines the robustness of the effects to alternate estimation strategies. We find strong evidence for substantively large and highly significant direct price effects, while results suggest that the indirect effects are substantively small or even negative.economic development, empowerment zones, porperty values, household mobility, sorting

Making – or Picking – Winners: Evidence of Internal and External Price Effects in Historic Preservation Policies

Much has been written identifying property price effects of historic preservation policies. Little attention has been paid to the possible policy endogeneity in hedonic price models. This paper outlines a general case of land use regulation in the presence of externalities and then demonstrates the usefulness of the model in an instrumental-variables estimation of a hedonic price analysis – with an application to historic preservation in Chicago. The theoretical model casts doubt on previous results concerning price effects of preservation policies. The comparative statics identify some determinants of regulation that seem, on the face of it, most unlikely to also belong in a hedonic price equation. The analysis employs these determinants as instruments for endogenous regulatory treatment in a hedonic price analysis. OLS estimation of the hedonic offers results consistent with much of previous literature, namely that property values are higher for historic landmarks. In the 2SLS hedonic, robust estimates of the "own" price effect of historic designation are shown to be large and negative (approx. -27%) for homes in landmark districts. Further, significant and substantively important (positive) external price effects of landmark designations are found. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings for historic preservation.hedonics, built heritage, heritage valuation, real estate economics

Neighborhood Dynamics and the Housing Price Effects of Spatially Targeted Economic Development Policy

Neighborhoods are the result of a complicated interplay between residential choice, housing supply and the influences of the larger metropolitan system on its constituent parts. We model this interplay as a system of reduced-form equations in order to examine the effects of a generous spatially targeted economic development program (the federal Empowerment Zone program) on neighborhood characteristics, especially housing values. This system of equations approach allows us to compute direct effects of the policy intervention as well as the effects mediated through non-price channels such as changes in the housing stock or neighborhood demographics. In the process, we are able to shed light on the rich simultaneity among neighborhood characteristics, including housing prices.economic development, simultaneity

Empowerment Zones, Neighborhood Change and Owner-Occupied Housing

This analysis focuses on the evaluation of policies relating to cultural heritage production – a modest discussion in the larger context of sustainable heritage tourism. In particular, a detailed discussion of a landmark preservation policy in Chicago follows

Determinants of Historic and Cultural Landmark Designation: Why We Preserve What We Preserve

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

City Air and City Markets: Worker productivity gains across city sizes.

Higher nominal wages in urban areas are well-documented phenomena which imply higher productivity of urban workers. Yankow and Wheeler show that these gains come through a variety of sources including static agglomeration economies and dynamic learning and matching efficiencies in cities. Yet, earlier articles offer little evidence of how the effects of learning and matching on urban wage differentials vary by city size. This article allows for the relative importance of these productivity advantages to differ according to the size of the city and finds significant differences between small, medium, and large cities. We find that learning efficiencies are most important in medium-sized cities, while a mix of learning and matching efficiencies are important in the largest and smallest cities

Making—or Picking—Winners: Evidence of Internal and External Price Effects in Historic Preservation Policies

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87166/1/j.1540-6229.2010.00293.x.pd

On Metrizability of Invariant Affine Connections

The metrizability problem for a symmetric affine connection on a manifold, invariant with respect to a group of diffeomorphisms G, is considered. We say that the connection is G-metrizable, if it is expressible as the Levi-Civita connection of a G-invariant metric field. In this paper we analyze the G-metrizability equations for the rotation group G = SO(3), acting canonically on three- and four-dimensional Euclidean spaces. We show that the property of the connection to be SO(3)-invariant allows us to find complete explicit description of all solutions of the SO(3)-metrizability equations.Comment: 17 pages, To appear in IJGMMP vol.9 No.1 (2012

Neighborhood dynamics and price effects of Superfund site clean-up

Numerous hedonic price analyses estimate price effects associated with hazardous waste site remediation or other environmental variation. This paper estimates a neighborhood transition model to capture the direct price effect from Superfund site clean-up and the indirect price effects arising from residential sorting and changes in investment in the housing stock following clean-up. First-difference models of neighborhood change and a national sample are used. This approach fails to find consistent positive direct price effects. Positive indirect effects, however, may arise through residential sorting and neighborhood investment spurred by remediation. The findings can be sensitive to policy endogeneity and model specification