The willingness to pay for urban sustainability

Quite recently certification systems for sustainable development of neighborhoods and communities came to the market. These systems try to define urban sustainability through sets of criteria that in a variety of ways measure aspects in developments that have an influence on environmental, social and economical issues. The idea in this thesis is to investigate the monetary values on these criteria, derived from property prices from apartments and single family houses in Copenhagen. In order to make proper estimates on the monetary values for certification criteria a hedonic price model is used. The model holds property prices from about 20 000 sales as dependent variable which is then correlated, through multiple regressions, with variables made out of the criteria. Translation from certification criteria into measurable variables is done with great consideration to contemporary urban theory. It turns out that 19 of all measured criteria are statistically significant. From this result the conclusion would be that people are not very willing to pay for urban sustainability, but going back to theory and earlier studies it seems more likely that it is a question of scale. Since previous studies implies that many of the key factors in urban sustainability are positively valued on a city scale, the result from this thesis could be viewed as complementing in the sense that it shows that people are not willing to pay for urban sustainability within their neighborhood but on the city scale they might be.