Institutional Analysis of Neighborhood Collective Action

Sublocal governance organizations may provide a way for some urban neighborhoods to stabilize and improve property values. Recent advances in collective action theory, spatial statistical methods, and data availability now make it possible to more directly evaluate the effects of these organizations. The analysis combines geocoded assessor's data and data from a survey of neighborhood and homeowner associations to analyze a model of prices of single-family homes in Little Rock, Arkansas, from 2012 to 2016. The results show that neighborhood and homeowner associations both have significant positive effects on neighborhood property values relative to unorganized neighborhoods and that the effect of neighborhood associations is at least as large as that of homeowner associations. Moreover, the results indicate that neighborhood association structure mediates the effect on property values, although this is not the case for homeowner associations.