A Quantitative History of Human Scale Neighborhoods in America
2016
ACCOMPANIMENT TO MASTERS THESIS
UC BERKELEY CED
Can housing markets provide a peek into how people value urban design? My masters thesis at UC Berkeley takes a quantitative look at the relationships between urban design and property values in 38,000 neighborhoods in 50 US cities. Its findings indicate that moderately dense, fine grain neighborhoods with a mixture of uses have risen in value far more rapidly than their less human scale counterparts. The map above provides a peak into the history of those desirable neighborhoods – a typology that has become increasingly rare as its value rises.