I have always enjoyed living in nature. My house in Connecticut years ago abutted a forest preserve with running trails, and my house in Alabama overlooked a lake. The lake was swampy, and sure, there was always a worry about rattlesnakes in the yard, but I spent hours out on my deck looking at the view.
I’m not alone in wanting to live near nature. A 2022 survey from the National Association of Home Builders found that nearly 60% of respondents rated a “connection to the outdoors/nature” as an important influence in their homeowner wish list. Home builders suggest expansive floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors to meet this need.
Build Better Cities
We know that most people like views of nature. But how do we convince city planners to create more opportunities for nature? As an urban economist, this is exactly the kind of question I have been tackling for the past 15 years.
It turns out this particular question is hard to answer. The value of a home can be measured by the market price. But how do we measure the value of a view?
Traditionally, economists have controlled for amenities like distance to a public park, or the quality of the school district. A “view” is hard to quantify and therefore hard to put into any kind of rigorous analysis framework.
The Technology Revolution
When I started this research, AI was still in its infancy and people didn’t know much about it. There was no Chat GPT. There was no Grok or Claude. In fact, we just called the idea of having a computer automatically generate insights from an image “machine learning.”
I decided I could use machine learning to create a “view” variable that captured the essence of the view. This was a new methodology at that time.
To do this, I first took pictures of views of parks, with shrubs, trees, and green space. Then I used Google Street View data to get images of what every house in the dataset can see from their window. Most often, that was an image of the house across the street. Sometimes, it was a park or other amenity.
I then had my algorithm compare every “view” to my park images and generate a number to describe how similar the view was to a park. (I wanted to call the variable “parkiness.” But because economics is a fairly serious field, I had to come up with something more formal for the research paper.)
The Value of an Image
In 2017 when I was a professor at the University of Richmond, together with my co-author Tim Hamilton of the University of Richmond, we used this data to write a research paper on the amenity value of natural views. We used data on home sales in Denver and ran Google Street View images through my new algorithm.
Park-Like Views & Home Prices
When the AI classifies a view as park-like, we see big gains:
- The home value increases by 3-3.5%
- This translates to about $15,000 of value for an average homeowner in Denver
- If we scale this up to all 600,000 homes in Denver, park-like views are valued at $1.1 billion.
This holds even when controlling for home features like the number of bedrooms and the type of neighborhood.
Neighborly
That means if the neighbor across the street adds green to their landscaping, you directly benefit. It is a great example of the positive spillovers that neighbors can bring each other.
But there is a lesson on negative spillovers too. If your neighbor’s property is blighted – i.e., broken windows, overgrown grass, a car in the lawn? Your house depreciates in value.
What does this mean for cities?
- Stop thinking of parks as only as places to visit. Start designing them as scenery to see. Build parks, especially long and narrow parkways along wide streets to maximize views.
- Underserved areas are view deserts. Equity is difficult to achieve when some residents have a view of a blighted, run-down house across the street. Identifying and improving blighted properties can go a long way to improve equity in your city.
How we help
After writing this paper, I started thinking about putting my ideas to practical use. We just started a new company, Placemetry, that provides cities and counties with recent images of properties and AI-generated insights on property characteristics and view scores.
Want to learn more? We look forward to hearing from you.
Erik Johnson, CEO of Placemetry