Impacts Of NIMBY Facilities On Surrounding House Prices

With the development of economic and the advancement of society, the residents’ environmental awareness and need for housing have been improved dramatically in China. In this context, the location, construction and operation of many municipal facilities are likely to stimulate the rejection and protest of surrounding residents, which is called NIMBY (Not in my backyard) movement. This problem has become more and more serious amid China’s rapid urbanization and construction in the past several years. The NIMBY contradiction is a worldwide problem, as the western countries has spent more than several decades on discussing, researching and dealing with it. But in China it’s still a new and hot topic which involves a lot of political, economic and sociological issues remain to be studied.This thesis summarizes the concepts, causes, as well as solutions of NIMBY facilities and builds a model from the perspective of residential choice to measure these facilities’external influences on surrounding house prices. The value of externality may indicate the residents’attitudes toward the NIMBY facilities, or reflect their negative willingness to pay for them, which will deepen our understanding on NIMBY facilities and help to solve the conflicts. Specially, this thesis takes large and medium sized waste transfer stations in Shanghai as a case, and build a hedonic model to analyze their influence on the surrounding house prices based on the study on the spatial differences of 25,761 second-hand house prices of Shanghai in September 2010. The results of this thesis are supposed to provide references for the urban planning and land using planning so the governments are able to locate and sit municipal facilities and residents more scientifically, reducing or avoiding the currencies of NIMBY contradictions.Through the empirical study, this thesis finds that:1) The waste transfer stations have significant negative impacts on the surrounding house prices. The house price drops 0.28% or 37 Yuan per square meter while the distance to the waste transfer station decreases 100 m.2) The impacts of the waste transfer station on the surrounding house prices are nonlinear. The average max impact distance of waste transfer station is about 2,000 m. Within this range, the house price rises while the distance to the station increases. However, the distance farther, the rising slower. Until the distance reaches 2,000 m, the house prices will level off.3) Different waste transfer stations have different impacts on the surrounding house prices. The house price drops 0.60% while the distance to the large-size waste transfer station decreases 100 m, or 0.29% to the medium-size one, which indicates large-size stations show a greater externality.4) Waste transfer stations have different impacts on surrounding house prices of different prices. The existing of waste transfer stations shows a greater impact on high-price and low-price houses. The reasons are likely that high-income groups pay more attention to environmental quality, while low-income groups are more sensitive to house prices.