Impacts of street tree abundance, greenery, structure and management on residential house prices in New York City

Urban trees have been widely linked to residential house prices. However, most existing studies focus on using tree abundance and greenery measures to evaluate the economic benefits of urban trees, while disregarding the effects of tree structure and tree-related management such as intentional maintenance and stewardship. We hypothesize that tree abundance, greenery, structure, and tree-related management are associated with house prices through offering local benefits that accrue to private homeowners and providing desirable living environments. We take street trees in New York City (NYC) as a case study to test the hypothesis. We first derived street tree canopy cover from high-resolution satellite images, street greenery from Google Street View, and street tree structure (e.g., species diversity, tree size, and tree health) and streetscape management variables (e.g., tree stewardship, tree guards that are a man-made structure to protect trees and enhance tree growth, and sidewalk damages adjacent to street trees) from the 2015–2016 street tree census data in NYC. We then built spatial hedonic price models to examine the associations between the above-mentioned street tree variables and residential house prices, after controlling for a variety of covariates. We found that HPMs that incorporate street tree structure and streetscape management offer stronger explanatory power than the one with only street tree abundance. Among the street tree-related variables we considered, tree canopy cover, green view index, tree stewardship and tree guards are statistically associated with increased house prices, while there are no such relationships for species richness, trees’ health status and streetscape sidewalk damages. More research is needed to understand the potential mechanisms and causal pathways that urban tree abundance, structure, and management affect residential house prices.