Big Yards or Green Space?

Zoning regulations that include a maximum housing density sometimes require that houses be quot;clusteredquot; in one section of a subdivision and the rest of the land be left as a common green space. We examine house sales in one county on the fringe of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area to determine if homebuyers value this common open space or if they prefer for the land to be distributed among the lots. The data indicate that households value strongly their own private lots. While we do find in our analysis that households value having common open space in their subdivisions and they value having a lot that is adjacent to subdivision open space, they do not value those amenities nearly as much as a larger lot