Not in my neighbour's back yard? : Laneway homes and neighbours' property values

UBC Faculty Research and Publications

Not in my neighbour's back yard? : Laneway homes and neighbours' property values Davidoff, Tom; Pavlov, Andrey; Somerville, Tsur

Abstract

Single family zoning is often defended by homeowners as necessary to preserve neighbourhood amenities, but blamed by economists for making housing less affordable by constraining supply. In 2009, the City of Vancouver (Canada) rezoned 95% of single family areas to allow small “laneway homes" behind main residential structures. The goal was to increase rental housing supply with minimal disruption to rezoned neighbourhoods. We exploit this regulatory change to estimate the magnitude of externalities from density. We find small and statistically insignificant average spillovers from the addition of laneway housing on the values of adjacent properties. Laneway homes' impact is greater and statistically different from zero on more expensive properties. [This work was released in 2019 and updated in 2021. A previous version with an alternate title was published in 2018 and is accessible here: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/65186]

Item Metadata

Title	Not in my neighbour's back yard? : Laneway homes and neighbours' property values
Creator	Davidoff, Tom; Pavlov, Andrey; Somerville, Tsur
Date Issued	2021-09-07
Description	Single family zoning is often defended by homeowners as necessary to preserve neighbourhood amenities, but blamed by economists for making housing less affordable by constraining supply. In 2009, the City of Vancouver (Canada) rezoned 95% of single family areas to allow small “laneway homes" behind main residential structures. The goal was to increase rental housing supply with minimal disruption to rezoned neighbourhoods. We exploit this regulatory change to estimate the magnitude of externalities from density. We find small and statistically insignificant average spillovers from the addition of laneway housing on the values of adjacent properties. Laneway homes' impact is greater and statistically different from zero on more expensive properties. [This work was released in 2019 and updated in 2021. A previous version with an alternate title was published in 2018 and is accessible here: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/65186]
Subject	Externalities (D62); Land use regulations (R52); Housing Demand (R21)
Geographic Location	Vancouver (B.C.)
Genre	Article; Preprint
Type	Text
Language	eng
Date Available	2019-03-12
Provider	Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Rights	Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
DOI	10.14288/1.0376805
URI	http://hdl.handle.net/2429/68636
Affiliation	Business, Sauder School of; Non UBC; Strategy and Business Economics, Division of
Peer Review Status	Unreviewed
Scholarly Level	Faculty
Rights URI	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Aggregated Source Repository	DSpace

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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