Beautiful city: Leisure amenities and urban growth

By Gerald A. Carlino, Albert Saiz. Journal of Regional Science, 2019

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Modern urban economic theory and policymakers are coming to see the provision of consumer leisure amenities as a way to attract population, especially the highly skilled and their employers. However, past studies have only provided indirect evidence of the importance of leisure amenities for urban development. In this paper we propose and validate the number of leisure trips to MSAs as a measure of consumer revealed preferences for local leisure-oriented amenities. Population and employment growth in the 1990s was about 2 percent higher in an MSA with twice as many leisure visits: the third most important predictor of recent population growth in standardized terms. Moreover, this variable does a good job at forecasting out-of-sample growth for the period 2000-2006. "Beautiful cities" disproportionally attracted highly-educated individuals, and experienced faster housing price appreciation, especially in supply-inelastic markets. Investment by local government in new public recreational areas within an MSA was positively associated with higher subsequent city attractiveness. In contrast to the generally declining trends in the American central city, neighborhoods that were close to "central recreational districts" have experienced economic growth, albeit at the cost of minority displacement.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e8c18bf0cf53a7a2c58d4c3e46187ca86b4aa4c

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Citations in the corpus

A New Spatial Hedonic Equilibrium in the Emerging Work-from-Home Economy? (2021, background): “…and productivity are small enough within MSAs that MSA values can be used.25 It is interesting to note that a more-recent QOL measure developed by Carlino and Saiz (2019), based on the volume of online photo postings of metro-area scenes, is strongly correlated with Albouy’s QOL measure (see…”
Short-term rentals and the housing market: Quasi-experimental evidence from Airbnb in Los Angeles (2018, unknown): “Carlino & Saiz (2008), for example, show that the number of tourists visiting a city is a good predictor of the growth of U.S. metropolitan areas in the 1990s.”