Determining how wealth impacts a household's value of environmental amenities during an economic bust and recovery

Hedonic modeling and quantile regressions were used to measure the impact of recessions on households of different wealth levels value environmental amenities. The value of amenities has been studied over time and over different wealth levels, but we believe we are the first to do so simultaneously. We studied the years 2008 through 2016 and our target amenities were distance to water, distance to the nearest park, mature landscaping, and FEMA flood zones. The environmental variables were intersected with yearly dummy variables and these were regressed against the log of house prices on the deciles with a set of control variables. This gives us a matrix of relative amenity values over time and for different wealth levels. We found that distance to water add the greatest value, environmental amenities impact households with greater wealth more, and amenities provide the greatest relative value at the bottom of a recession.