What effect does air pollution have on housing prices?

According to Tejarat News, the researchers examined the impact of air pollution on housing prices in the period 1392 to 1397, stating that the index of airborne particles with a diameter of less than 2.5 microns (PM2.5), a negative and significant effect on housing prices And the increase in this pollutant will reduce housing prices.

According to ایسناIn recent years, Iran has faced serious problems in the field of air pollution, especially in metropolitan and industrial cities. Air pollution causes many problems, but the economic costs it incurs are not directly measurable. For this reason, indirect methods are used to measure the economic costs of air pollution.

One way to measure the cost of air pollution is to calculate it through housing prices. Families consider a variety of factors to provide housing, and if other factors are constant, people are willing to pay more to live in an area with less air pollution.

Various pollutants such as particulate matter, lead, ozone and carbon monoxide cause air pollution, and each pollutant has a concentration that can be measured over a period of time. The concentration limit, which is dangerous for people’s health, is also known.

Air pollution and the programs that are implemented to deal with it, impose direct and indirect economic costs on governments and people. From a policy perspective, knowing the amount of this cost and comparing it with the cost of implementing air pollution control policies is very important for urban planning. For this reason, it is necessary to conduct economic research on the harms of air pollution.

Accordingly, researchers from the Higher Institute of Management Education and Research in Tehran conducted a study on the impact of air pollution on housing prices in the metropolitan area of ​​Tehran during the period 1392 to 1397.

This study was performed using a combination of micro data of housing transactions of the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development and pollution indicators of the air quality monitoring system for more than 50,000 residential houses that were traded at least twice in the desired period, and the effect of different air pollution indicators on Housing prices were estimated.

The studies of this study showed that the airborne particulate pollutant index with a diameter of less than 2.5 microns (PM2.5), had a negative and significant effect on housing prices in the period 1392 to 1397. So that a standard deviation of increasing the index of this pollutant reduces housing prices by 3.1 percent. In other words; If the average annual particulate matter index of less than 2.5 microns for a residential home increases by 50 units (becomes unhealthy), housing prices will fall by 21 percent.

Pollutants of particulate matter less than 2.5 microns are more visible in the air and have a greater impact on the quality of breathing in the short term.

It was also found that the impact of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and carbon monoxide (CO) pollutants on housing prices is negligible. According to the researchers in this study; It seems that the insignificant impact of these two pollutants on housing prices is due to the fact that these two pollutants are not visually visible and do not have an immediate effect on health. Also, these two pollutants are less decisive in the total index.

In conducting this research, Parham Heidari Bahadori and Mohammad Hosseini; Researchers from the Higher Institute of Management Education and Research in Tehran participated in the study.

The findings of this study were published in the winter of 1400 in the form of a scientific article entitled “The Impact of Air Pollution on Housing Prices in Tehran” in the scientific research quarterly “Planning and Budget”.