Willingness to Pay for Attributes of Location Efficiency

This paper examines U.S. residential consumer willingness to pay for location efficiency, a normative advancement of new urbanism. Drawing on a national sample of multi-family housing data joined to measures of urban form and spatial structure, empirical models suggest three contributions to the literature. First, renters are willing to pay for greater location efficiency and for individual attributes of more efficient locations. Second, renters’ tastes and preferences for location efficiency are spatially heterogeneous. Third, location efficiency data appears to provide a meaningful level of control for locational quality. These contributions extend prior research efforts related to bid rent and urban amenities.