Mark van Duijn (p), Maaike Hofstra

Liv Osland

In the past decades, many historic buildings have lost their original function. In many cases, where it is worth to stakeholders to preserve the culturual aspect, considerable investments have been made to transform the historic building. The transformation of historic buildings are often designed to stimulate local economies and the livibility of neighborhoods. There is little knowledge about the indirect or externalities of transforming historic buildings on the local economy, and especially whether these externalities are uniform for different types of historic buildings. This paper investigates the heterogeneous externalities of transformation projects of built heritage on local housing markets in the Netherlands. It exploits variation in the timing of the transformation to identify the effects of historic building transformations on residential property markets. We combine data on housing sales between 1990 and 2015 with data from the RCE Netherlands Cultural Heritage Agency on 173 transformation projects of built heritage. We find overall positive external effects of transformation of historic buildings on surrounding house prices. These effects are significantly different between agricultural, leisure, industrial, office and religious built heritage transformations and between highly urbanized areas and other urbanized areas.

Adam Tyrcha (p)

Liv Osland

See also full (draft) paper

This paper investigates the impact of different forms of migration on housing availability in Sweden. The objective of the paper is to study how impacts of migration on housing availability vary in different regions, and how migrants of different origins have differing impacts on housing availability. Migration is broken down into groups including internal migration, foreign-born migration, and refugee migration as a subset of foreign-born migration, and is analysed with regard to its impacts on housing availability in Sweden. Housing availability on the national level is analysed, but also on subsets of the national level, including by looking more specifically at geographical regional differences. Further, the differences found between municipalities with different urban characteristics are also analysed. This analysis is done using survey data on housing availability on the municipal level in Sweden, dating from 2005 to 2015, which when paired with statistical data from government sources enables the use of probit regression analysis. An instrumental variable approach is also incorporated, in order to account for the potential impacts of endogeneity on our results.

Primary findings show that overall, on the national scale, internal migrants have stronger impacts on housing availability than foreign-born migrants, meaning internal migrants appear to be more responsible for housing shortages. This also holds true for rural areas, and particularly so for smaller urban areas, where internal migrants appear substantially more impactful than foreign-born migrants. Meanwhile, in major cities neither internal nor foreign-born migrants appear to be particularly impactful. In terms of geographical differences, it is found that in the southern and central parts of Sweden, impacts of internal and foreign-born migration on housing availability do not appear to vary particularly much depending on geographic location, but that these impacts do appear to be more substantial than those found in the northern parts of Sweden. Further, when breaking down foreign-born migrants into smaller groups, it is found that refugee migration has relatively strong impacts on housing availability. Indeed, both overall, and in rural areas, refugees as a group have stronger impacts on housing availability than internal migrants, and than other foreign-born migrants excluding refugees. However, in smaller urban areas, internal migrants appear to have stronger impacts than either of the other two aforementioned groups. Hence, it appears that the impacts of refugee migration on housing availability are relatively strong in many, but not all, urban settings.

Zofia Bednarowska (p)

Liv Osland

The paper presents a spatial model explaining spatial impacts governing the consumption space paradox (CSP), i.e. regions that host both retail oversaturation and dead malls – closed shopping malls. Use of gravitation theory and catchment area as determinants of consumption space success or failure go some way to contributing to a partial explanation of this CSP. This research moves it forward.
A Spatial AutoRegressive with additional AutoRegressive error structure model (SARAR/SAC) confirmed the CSP is not only driven by the socio-economics of the catchment area, but also by mobilities and spatiality. The model identified spatial impacts: consumer mobility potential shaped by mobilities infrastructure and peripheral location and neighbourhood structure of consumption space competition. The CSP works due to similarity and proximity between consumption spaces, as spatial dependencies between them were discovered on the regional level in the model. Consumption space spillover is strong and negative, i.e. regions with higher consumption space density affect the neighbouring regions’ by decreasing their consumption space density.
This research offers conceptualization of CSP and proves CSP is more than an economic problem, as it implies spatial disparities, social and racial exclusion. CSP’s should be brought to attention when discussing liveable and inclusive regions