NYC-WTC_000187725

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

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of suburbs to people employed in the central cities. Families moved out to the suburbs and chose to commute to their jobs.by car, thus being able to purchase larger houses in more attractive suburban settings. Land and housing values in the suburbs rose and, because of the exodus from central cities, land and housing values in the central cities fell.

On balance, the net effect of such value shifts in a metropolitan area is probably a positive one. Families which remained in the central cities benefited from lower rents there and families which moved out to the suburbs benefited from time and cost savings associated with commuting and from the more attractive public goods offered by suburban communities. The changing land and property values also affected revenues of the various municipal governments. Keeping property tax rates the same, suburban governments reaped larger real property revenues while central cities lost revenues as their tax bases declined.

Transit improvements aimed at central cities tend to act as a catalyst for the partial reversal of the effects of urban-suburban road building. Such improvements can increase the attractiveness of city locations for both residential and commercial activity. Hence, if such improvements are substantial, it is natural to expect that values will increase in the city areas which are positively affected and decrease in the suburban areas which are negatively affected. In areas adjacent to the improvements, at transit stations or along transit corridors, value increases will be appreciably greater closer to the improvements, than at further distances serviced by them, all other differences like zoning being explained. The above discussion, we hope, adequately portrays the complex nature of property value changes in metropolitan regions. On the one hand, there are large shifts in values among the different parts of a region such as cities and suburbs, counties, competing transport corridors, municipalities and neighborhoods as well as among different types of real estate such as housing and commercial. On the other hand, there are changes in values at the parcel level which is the smallest possible geographic unit for which changes can be considered. It is difficult to deal with both of these scales in the same model. To deal with both of these scales, two models were developed in this study. A regional-scale model (NYREG) which predicts shifts in values within the region and a parcel-scale model (NYSTA) which predicts the structure of parcel-specific property values in relation to transit stations. NYREG: Regional Equilibrium Model On the regional scale, the complex effects of transport

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