Impact of Superfund Site Completions on Local Housing Markets
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Superfunds
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This paper tests whether the completion of a Superfund environmental cleanup project influences prices in the local housing market. This research is motivated by a concern about the efficiency of the provision of environmental cleanup services as a public good. Generally, economists believe that the value of local public goods are capitalized into house prices, and use increases or decreases in local housing prices as a proxy for measuring the benefits of public goods to local residents. This paper uses a linear regression to measure the change in local house prices attributable to the completion of a Superfund project, and uses that change as a proxy to measure the economic value provided to the community by the cleanup. In census tracts that contain or neighbor a tract that contains a Superfund site, the completion of a Superfund project is associated with a 3.26 percent increase in house value on average.