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Abstract
This research looks at the impact of high-voltage transmission lines (HVTL) on surrounding property values, using a microspatial approach. It is based on a sample of 507 single-- family houses sold over the 1991-96 period in the City of Brossard, in the Greater Montreal area, Canada. Findings suggest that although severe visual encumbrance due to a direct view on a pylon or conductors does exert a significantly negative impact on property prices with depreciations ranging from 5% to well in excess of 20%, being adjacent to the easement will not necessarily cause a house to depreciate and may even increase its value in similar proportions where proximity advantages exceed drawbacks.
Introduction
Over the past two decades, environmental issues have drawn greater attention in the economic and real estate literature, particularly with respect to their impact on property prices. Despite its inherent weaknesses (Rosen, 1974), the hedonic approach remains the most reliable tool for measuring environmental negative externalities since it brings out buyers' disutility stemming from any perceived hazard through their actual pricing behavior. Using multiple regression analysis, it can indeed isolate the respective market value contribution of each attribute of the residential bundle, physical as well as neighborhood-related. For that reason, numerous environment-oriented hedonic analyses have been performed on the residential market since the early 1980s. The vast majority of them deals with issues such as air and sea water pollution (Diamond, 1980; Brookshire, Thayer, Schultze and D'Arge, 1982; Palmquist, 1984, 1988; Graves, Murdoch, Thayer and Waldman, 1988; Murdoch and Thayer, 1988; Kask and Maani, 1992; and Mendelsohn et al., 1992), the nearby presence of landfill, incinerator and nuclear plant sites (Nelson, 1981; Gamble and Downing, 1982; Smith and Desvousges, 1986; Cartee, 1989; Michaels and Smith, 1990; Zeiss, 1989, 1990; Mundy, 1992; Nelson, Genereux and Genereux, 1992; and Ketkar, 1992), as well as airport and highway proximity (Nelson, 1980; O'Byrne, Nelson and Seneca, 1985; Pennington, Topham and Ward, 1990; and Uyeno, Hamilton and Biggs, 1993). The impact of chemical contamination (Ford and Gilligan, 1988), the proximity of a pipeline (Kask and Maani, 1992; and Simons, 1999), the presence of trees in the neighborhood (Orland, Vining and Ebreo, 1992) and the impact of earthquakes (Murdoch, Singh and Thayer, 1993) have also been investigated....