Impacts of rail transit access on land and housing values in China: a quantitative synthesis

ABSTRACT

Rail transit investment has been viewed as a prominent policy instrument for local and regional development. However, little is known about to what extent the theorised changes in land and housing values arising from rail transit access can be substantiated by evidence in a large developing country context. This paper presents a quantitative review of empirical studies that analysed the impacts of rail transit access on land and housing values in China. We review empirical analyses in 67 studies from 1997 to 2018 for which we encode quantitative results along with a range of theoretically combinations of spatially contextual characteristics, data and methodological-design characteristics. The results show that there are significant variations in the size estimates of effects of rail transit access across studies. Such variations are associated with rail project types, data and methodological designs. Our study provides the insights on what has already been known and what needs to be known on evaluating real estate consequences of rail transit improvements in developing countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Rail transit
• land use
• housing market‌
• urban development
• China

Acknowledgements

We thank David Banister, the Editor, and anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. We thank members and colleagues at events of the Urban Economics Association, Regional Science Association International and the International Association for China Planning for their encouragement to write this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41971194], the Young Teacher Scientific Research Cultivation Fund Project of South China Normal University [grant number 19sk08], and the Key Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research of Ministry of Education of China [grant number 17JZD013]. We thank the Research Center for the Industrial Development of Guangdong and its RegionalCooperation with Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.