Monday

The more "walkable" the neighborhood, the higher the home's value, a study finds.

We know that pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods are generally safer (busy streets typically drive crime elsewhere) and healthier (walking burns approximately the same amount of calories per mile as does running), but does "walkability" actually increase home values? According to a recent study by C.E.O.'s for Cities, a group of urban redevelopment advocates, it does.

The study looked at the sales of 90,000 homes in 15 markets in order to estimate how much value was associated with "walk scores" from Walkscore.com, a website that uses a 100-point scale to rate the number of destinations, libraries, parks, restaurants and coffee shops within walking distance of a home.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

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.

So far, there is no definitive study concluding that the more walkable neighborhoods hold their value better when the real estate market declines. But Mr. Cortright wrote in a study done a year earlier for the same group that the spike in gasoline prices in 2005 popped the housing bubble. He found that distant suburbs had the largest declines in home values, while prices in “close in” neighborhoods, typically those that were the most walkable, held up or, in a few cases, increased.

Click here to read the entire New York Times article, "Street Corners vs. Cul de Sacs." Also check out Walkscore.com to rate your home's walk score. C'mon, it's fun! We did it, and The Sheldon rates as a "walkers paradise," coming in at 97/100 points!