"Does Land Conservation Financially Harm Renters?" by Corey Lang and Jarron VanCeylon
 

Document Type

Working Paper

Date of Original Version

2025

Abstract

Environmental public goods and hazards are unequally distributed, with minority and low-income communities faring far worse. While environmental improvements are likely to benefit disadvantaged groups, these improvements can increase the desirability of neighborhoods and increase housing prices. For homeowners, this yields a gain in equity but can negatively impact renters through increased housing costs. This paper seeks to evaluate how rental prices respond to gains in land conservation relative to owner-occupied home values using a panel of census and conservation data from the United States. We employ a first-difference regression model and use propensity score matching as a pre-processing method to improve the comparability of areas with and without new conservation. Overall, our results suggest that local gains in conservation do not capitalize into rental prices but do capitalize into home values. We pair these results with several robustness checks and alternative models, all of which support our primary findings.

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