Natural landscape views have positive sides, such as providing restorative effects to urban residents, and negative sides, such as deepening wealth inequality. Previous studies have mainly focused on the positives and rarely on the negatives. From this perspective, this study aimed to analyze the unequal impact of natural landscape views on housing prices for apartments in Seoul. We proposed a visual perception model to analyze natural landscape views and, based on a hedonic price model, we used ordinary least squares and quantile regression to estimate the marginal impacts on housing prices. The results show that: (1) natural landscape views had positive impacts on housing prices, but their impacts did not reach the level of structural and locational characteristics such as apartment area and the distance to subway stations; (2) natural landscape views had different marginal impacts by housing price range and, in particular, had much higher value-added effects on higher-priced apartments, meaning that if old apartment complexes are redeveloped into high-rise ones, the improvement in natural landscape views generates great profit for apartment owners and intensifies wealth inequality; (3) the geographic information system-based visual perception model effectively quantified the natural landscape views of wide areas and is thus applicable for the rigorous analysis of various landscape views.
Housing prices and wealth inequality in Western Europe