Menu
City Know-hows
Target audience
Urban planners, city governments, social housing providers
The problem
Access to affordable housing supports peoples’ health and wellbeing, yet, not all houses are affordable nor are they located in amenity rich liveable neighbourhoods.
Typically, more established neighbourhoods are amenity-rich and more liveable whilst amenity-poor neighbourhoods are more affordable but located in outer-suburban locations, placing people far from the places and destinations they need.
By incorporating disadvantage, our research explored an overlooked aspect of the relationship between housing affordability, walkability and the built environment.
What we did and why
We studied whether relationships between walkability and house prices (i.e., price premiums or discounts) differed by neighbourhood-level disadvantage. We did this by using hedonic pricing models stratified by five levels of disadvantage using data from metropolitan Melbourne, Australia and explanatory built environment variables including walkability and its components (street connectivity, dwelling density and destination access), and public transit access. Hedonic pricing models are useful for measuring the value of environmental features when no other estimates exist.
Our study’s contribution
We found that:
Our findings suggest that houses in disadvantaged neighbourhoods were more affordable because they lacked amenity in terms of walkability, destination access and transit.
Impacts for city policy and practice
Future planning could redress inequities in walkability and housing affordability by retrofitting existing neighbourhoods and making new neighbourhoods more walkable from the outset. Increasing densities in outer suburban areas could make destination and transit provision and access more viable. However, in established amenity rich neighbourhoods with good access to destinations and transit, inclusionary zoning policies could reduce inequities by ensuring these neighbourhoods have social and affordable housing.
Further information
Full research article:
Related posts
Our research studies how 16-25-year-old Londoners’ perceptions of parks management practices affect their use of these public spaces. Our aim was to address a knowledge deficit regarding the role of spending time in green space and young people’s mental wellbeing. For policymakers and practitioners aiming to manage parks as health infrastructure, this information is essential, given this cohort is at a critical developmental stage for building mental health resilience.
High-rise apartment buildings are increasingly popular in large cities, however, urban land availability for outdoor communal spaces is limited. Creating communal spaces for high population density is a challenging task. Past research indicates the importance of the immediate environment in stimulating social interaction and the spatial organization for social activities can play an important role. One may ask whether the design of communal spaces within high-rise buildings can stimulate social interaction among residents.
Our study wanted to know more about the relationship between neighborhood walkability and crime in New Orleans, generally finding that the relationship between the two depends on the level of walkability, type of crime, and socioeconomic conditions of the neighborhood. Walkability was related to less crime in economically impoverished neighborhoods. Improving walkability in economically disadvantaged areas may help reduce crime.
