Neighbourhoods still Matter Because Housing Market Actors Believe They Matter

Abstract

The urban neighbourhood – though increasingly assailed as a problematic spatial construct – still matters in contemporary societies because it is a crucial unit of reference in metropolitan housing markets. The logic is as follows. Key housing market actors – households, owners, developers, and agents – believe that the local area in which they live, own property, or try to sell property influences their own wellbeing for a number of social-psychological and/or economic reasons. Because these people then act on their neighbourhood-related beliefs in a variety of ways, this implies that neighbourhoods are important: they generate collective behavioural responses. Put more succinctly, neighbourhoods must still matter because housing market actors believe they matter and then behave based on these beliefs. Evidence to support this logic is assembled here from a wide variety of interdisciplinary sources. For households, we observe the strong relationship between neighbourhood conditions and satisfaction, housing search, and intra-urban mobility. For property owners and developers, we observe how neighbourhood attributes strongly influence property values and, relatedly, the virulence of NIMBY protests when changes in these a ributes are considered threatening. For housing agents, we see continued evidence of discriminatory exclusion and geographic steering on the basis of neighbourhood racial/ethnic and income composition.