Valuing Historical and Cultural Amenities with Hedonic Property Valuation Models

Historical resources provide public good amenities. Often the costs of preservation of historic resources fall to individuals while the public benefits of preservation are poorly understood and not quantified. In this paper we examine the impact of historical and cultural amenities on residential property values to examine the spillover benefits historic resources provide in the housing market. Identifying such impacts have not been done to date, partly due to the problem of identifying the isolated statistical effect of the historic area using non-market valuation techniques and also due to the lack of adequate study areas. The data for this study spans three jurisdictions in Virginia containing three major historic sites. The geography provides a unique setting in which to isolate the effect of historical amenities on residential property values. Our study is unique in that it uses revealed preference information for quantifying the economic benefits of historical and cultural resources.