How Scenes Drive Housing Prices in Beijing

Wu (2011) proves that Scenes heavily influence the urban residential choices in China. In that paper, an analytical framework is constructed to study 375 counties of 35 large cities in China. The objective of this paper is to improve on the previous analytical framework and delve into an examination of neighborhood level housing markets. Specifically, we focus on the city of Beijing in this paper and collect a dataset which includes three-year housing prices data and 85 types of amenities from 220 neighborhood areas in Beijing. In addition, we develop a novel technique to overcome the drawbacks of the original theory in spatial evaluations due to strong spatial autocorrelations among housing prices. We also employ geographically weighted regression and Kriging mapping to support our analyses. Our conclusions are the following: (1) the distribution of local culture and amenities is polarized in Beijing; (2) housing prices in Beijing are significantly influenced by neighborhood level culture and amenities; (3) the distribution of housing prices in Beijing has the shape of a comet, corresponding to the distribution of local culture and amenities, and with tails spreading towards the northwest.