Environmental health valuation through real estate prices

Abstract

Environmental health studies are a really central topic in the debate about territorial development. Territorial transformation was sometimes characterized by interesting phenomena of enhancement and requalification, sometimes by speculative tensions inattentive to the quality of life systems and to the sustainability of processes by territory itself. This kind of attitude has often caused an environmental health decay and a significant decrease in human quality life. The main obstacle to the possibility of orienting the transformation initiatives of the territory in the perspective of sustainability is to be found in the scarce ability to understand the intrinsic economic value that these operations incorporate. We are now used to thinking exclusively in terms of market and income, so territorial interventions are almost guided exclusively by economic evaluations of and speculative ones. In a transdisciplinary perspective, the appraisal analysis can provide an important interpretation key in the analysis of territorial dynamics, intended to guide urban development policies in the logic of sustainability. This paper intends to study some environmental feedbacks in coastal areas and to demonstrate how real estate prices can be used as a marker of environmental health, examining relationships between real estate prices and environmental variables through the use of the Hedonic Model. The hypothesis has been validated by the application of the proposed methodology to a case study in Fuscaldo, in the south of Italy. The results show a correlation between environmental health and real estate prices, proving that an excessive urbanization and a poor attention to environmental issues lead to a decrease in human quality life.