Community Gardens And Property Values

"Applying hedonic methods to a unique data set of all property sales in New York City over several decades, we compared the prices of properties within a given distance of community gardens to prices of comparable properties outside the designated ring, but still located in the same neighborhood. By examining whether and how this difference changed once a community garden was established, we account for any systematic differences between the sites used for community gardens and other land in the neighborhood, thus resolving questions about the direction of causality and helping to disentangle the specific effects of community gardens from other contemporaneous changes occurring across neighborhoods and properties in the city."

"We find that the opening of a community garden has a statistically significant positive impact on residential properties within 1000 feet of the garden, and that the impact increases over time. We find that gardens have the greatest impact in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Higher quality gardens have the greatest positive impact. Finally, we find that the opening of a garden is associated with other changes in the neighborhood, such as increasing rates of homeownership, and thus may be serving as catalysts for economic redevelopment of the community."

[Editor's note: Excerpts from abstract of working paper. Full article may be downloaded for free from the site below.]