July 2023
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28 Reads
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1 Citation
Land Economics
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July 2023
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28 Reads
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1 Citation
Land Economics
April 2023
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75 Reads
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13 Citations
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
High-quality water resources provide a wide range of benefits, but the value of water quality is often not fully represented in environmental policy decisions, due in large part to an absence of water quality valuation estimates at large, policy relevant scales. Using data on property values with nationwide coverage across the contiguous United States, we estimate the benefits of lake water quality as measured through capitalization in housing markets. We find compelling evidence that homeowners place a premium on improved water quality. This premium is largest for lakefront property and decays with distance from the waterbody. In aggregate, we estimate that 10% improvement of water quality for the contiguous United States has a value of $6 to 9 billion to property owners. This study provides credible evidence for policymakers to incorporate lake water quality value estimates in environmental decision-making.
December 2022
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82 Reads
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26 Citations
In the US, the cost of water and wastewater services is rising three‐times faster than inflation. Over the next 20–25 years, required investments in water infrastructure are estimated to exceed $1 trillion, further increasing service costs. Combined with stagnating income levels, especially for poor households, increased costs will likely aggravate water affordability issues. Here, we document the extent of water affordability concerns in the US across income, geography, and race. We find that 10% of households face water affordability concerns, defined as expenditures on essential water and sewer services greater than 4.5% of annual household income. Households in the lowest income decile pay on average 6.8% of their annual income on water and sewer service. Our estimates are based on a large‐scale data set on water and sewer rates matched with Census block‐group‐level socioeconomic characteristics and covering approximately 45% of the US population. We demonstrate that using median household income at the county level drastically understates the extent of the water affordability problem. Additionally, we find that the number of households facing affordability concerns is positively associated with the proportion of black residents and negatively associated with Hispanic residents even after conditioning on prices and poverty levels. Lastly, we show that self‐sufficient water affordability policies that provide a lump‐sum rebate to low‐income households and are paid for by income taxes redistribute the burden borne by low‐income customers with fewer unintended consequences for non‐essential consumption than policies that change marginal incentives for water and sewer consumption.
... Contributors to this article have used ZTRAX data to estimate: the cost of land acquisitions for conservation purposes (Nolte 2020); property value effects of national parks and historic sites (Zabel, Nolte and Paterson 2024); the benefits of lake water quality (Mamun et al. 2023;Swedberg et al. 2024); the effects of water markets on agricultural land values (Chaudhry, Fairbanks and Nolte 2024); the cost of hazardous chemical releases and the benefits of subsequent cleanups Guignet et al. 2024); the risk of flood damage to residential homes (Gourevitch et al. 2023); the effects of flood insurance policies (Hennighausen et al. 2024;Pollack et al. 2024); and property value impacts of critical habitat under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (Mamun, Nelson and Nolte 2024). Through this work, we have identified common problems of working with large-scale property data, and experimented with potential solutions in the following areas: ...
July 2023
Land Economics
... Exposure to contaminated waters through recreation can lead to illnesses; an estimated 90 million recreational-waterborne illnesses occur each year in the United States (4). In addition, degraded water quality can adversely affect property values adjacent to impaired waterbodies (5,6) and individual wellbeing (7). Therefore, there is an urgent need to better understand sources, fate, and transport of pathogen pollution in surface waters. ...
April 2023
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
... Most studies of water affordability consider simply water bills as the numerator of the affordability index, the most apparent financial recurrent expenditure associated with water consumption, whether basic (García-Valiñas et al., 2010a;Sebri, 2015), actual (Mack and Wrase, 2017), or hypothetical (Beard and Mitlin, 2021;Cardoso and Wichman, 2022). The bill includes the amount directly associated with the water service, but it can also consider other costs, such as those related to sewage collection, wastewater treatment, infrastructure fees, subsidies, and lifelines (Goddard et al., 2022). ...
December 2022