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 systematic review of the impacts of neighbourhood design on well-being found strong evidence linking design principles such as walkability and access to green space with health and well-being.
The global COVID-19 pandemic, with its associated issues of isolation, enhanced hygiene practices and contact tracing brought up a number of issues to the public domain, many of which bordered on the nexus between urban planning and public health. We examine how new ideas concerning the linkages between urban planning and public health revealed by the COVID-19 crisis can be integrated into practice and how we might leverage this knowledge to build more just, healthier and liveable cities.
To create healthy urban places and spaces, public acceptance is key to success.
