Is all space created equal? Uncovering the relationship between competing land uses in subdivisions

Evaluating the importance of different forms of open space to households requires an evaluation of the service flows provided by each type of open space. For many non-market goods, these flows occur over multiple spatial scales and require analysis that simultaneously accounts for capitalization at each scale. To meet this often overlooked need, we apply a newly developed extension to the Hausman-Taylor model that treats multiple housing transactions occurring in a spatial location as a panel. This methodology allows us to account for omitted variables within a subdivision while instrumenting for variables identified through differences between subdivisions. We measure capitalization of open space at three distinct spatial extents: adjacency, walkability, and subdivision-wide. We find that the interactions between subdivision open space and private open space in the form of lot size change from complementarity at small scales to substitutability at large scales. These results confirm much of the intuition developed by ecologists and public planners on the likely service flows associated with open space and show how our approach to accounting for multiple spatial scales of capitalization in the evaluation of non-market goods could be beneficial to other areas of applied research.