Street Widths, International Ports of Entry and Border Region Housing Values

Abstract

This research employs 22 explanatory variables and a stratified random sample of 562 housing units to estimate a hedonic pricing model for the El Paso, Texas housing market. Prior studies report that structural characteristics are more influential than factors related to location for home valuation. Results obtained confirm this behavior among list prices in El Paso, but also highlight interesting items related to location in this market. Namely, distances from parks, downtown, and international bridges to Mexico are negatively correlated with housing prices. Furthermore, street widths, a topic of recent policy controversy in El Paso, are also found to be inversely related to single-family housing values. Whether these results are unique to the El Paso metropolitan economy or representative of other border housing markets is unknown. © 2011, Journal of Economic Issues / Association for Evolutionary Economics.