Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

by Jeff Speck

Now that it has been around for a few years, some resourceful economists have had the opportunity to study the relationship between Walk Score and real estate value, and they have put a price on it: five hundred to three thousand dollars per point. In his white paper for CEOs for Cities, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Home Values in U.S. Cities,” Joe Cortright looked at data for ninety thousand distinct home sales in fifteen markets nationwide, places like Chicago, Dallas, and Jacksonville. After controlling for all other factors that are known to impact house price, he found a clear positive correlation in all but two of those markets.● In a typical example, Charlotte, North Carolina, Cortright found that an increase in Walk Score from the metropolitan average of 54 (somewhat walkable) to 71 (very walkable) correlated with an increase in average house price from $280,000 to $314,000.17 That’s two thousand dollars per point, or two hundred thousand dollars across the full scale. Interestingly, two hundred thousand dollars is about the minimum price you can pay for an empty buildable lot in the more walkable parts of Washington, D.C.