Geographical Scope of University Expansion and its Impact on Land and Housing Markets

The discussion on the role of universities in the community has come under sharp focus during the last two decades. Universities are increasingly being seen as engines for economic growth and community development. Although an intuitive understanding of the possibilities of positive impact of universities on the community is widely shared, actual research on such impacts is inadequate. In addition, impacts are often understood more in terms of the general economy and much less in terms of impacts on specific segments of the market. The most important weakness of the debate relates to the lack of rigorous methodology to establish the geographical scope of the impact. Drawing insights from spatial statistics, this research establishes a more rigorous methodology to estimate the geographical scope of the impact on housing and land markets and estimates the impact through spatial hedonic pricing models. In addition, it analyzes two cases of university initiatives that have positively impacted their surrounding land and housing markets to draw policy insights.