| Abstract: |
The city beautiful movement, which in the early 20th Century advocated city
beautification as a way to improve the living conditions and civic virtues of
the urban dweller, had languished by the Great Depression. Today, new urban
economic theory and policymakers are coming to see the provision of consumer
leisure amenities as a way to attract population, especially the highly
skilled and their employers. However, past studies have only provided indirect
evidence of the importance of leisure amenities for urban development. In this
paper we propose and validate the number of leisure trips to MSAs as a measure
of consumer revealed preferences for local leisure-oriented amenities.
Population and employment growth in the 1990s was about 2 percent higher in an
MSA with twice as many leisure visits: the third most important predictor of
recent population growth in standardized terms. Moreover, this variable does a
good job at forecasting out-of-sample growth for the period 2000–2006.
"Beautiful cities" disproportionally attracted highly-educated individuals,
and experienced faster housing price appreciation, especially in
supply-inelastic markets. Investment by local government in new public
recreational areas within an MSA was positively associated with higher
subsequent city attractiveness. In contrast to the generally declining trends
in the American central city, neighborhoods that were close to "central
recreational districts" have experienced economic growth, albeit at the cost
of minority displacement. |