Policy Impact and House Price Development at the Neighbourhood-level—a Comparison of Four Urban Regeneration Areas using the Concept of “Artificial” Value Creation

Abstract

Urban planning measures and restructuring policies tend to cause unintended increases in house prices. The study compares urban renewal areas with respect to such policy impact on housing and neighbourhood quality and house prices in two city-contexts: Amsterdam and Budapest. It shows how four neighbourhoods that have been subject to various forms of urban regeneration differ in their trajectories of house price development. The results tie with well-documented, mostly Anglo-American experiences of related phenomena such as New Urbanism, Neo-traditional communities and gentrification. Furthermore, the study merges two research objectives that often are seen as incompatible: housing markets and urban regeneration.

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to all interviewed experts for providing valuable information about the studied areas, and to the Housing economics theme group of OTB, and to Hugo Priemus and others, present at the conference of Research Committee on Housing and Built Environment RC43, Durban 2006. The author would also like to thank Wenche Larsen at the Department of Geography of NTNU for preparing the maps. Finally, the author is thankful to Editor Philip Cooke and the two anonymous referees for their comments that helped in revising the draft into a publishable shape.

Notes

Smith et al. (2006) argue that such shortage can be created artificially in situations where the market-place of house-buying becomes a “casino”, with the actors involved behaving emotionally: professional intermediaries becoming ignorant; buyers throwing money away; and sellers raising their expectations and successfully realizing them.

The main reason for choosing these two cities and these four neighbourhoods is to cover the relevant dimensions under study: East versus West, active versus passive local government, pre-war versus post-war neighbourhoods, and success stories versus “cases where the jury is still out”. The other reason is that of convenience: obtaining valuable qualitative data from colleagues who worked under the commission of the project organization of Buurt Negen—one of the two Amsterdam neighbourhoods covered. As it turned out, this case was not the best possible from the point of view of the application of the method, which prompted me to look for other cases from the same city and from a different city in a different country, with a comparative study in mind.

This would be almost the same thing as isolating the pre-war buildings in inner city districts as one of the referees suggested, but which would have been a more complicated procedure, because of the few identifications in the Budapest dataset.

In Oude Pijp the prices doubled already between 1990 and 1996 (Boer, 2005).

Diamantbuurt, the south-eastern portion of de Pijp, was not included in the datasets, as it is of fundamentally different nature than the rest of de Pijp.

In order to save space, the results of these calculations are not shown here, but are available from the author upon request.