Abstract:

Based on the GIS data o f Beijing’s public facilities, this paper evaluates the accessibility of housing to six types of public facilities, namely educational facility, medical care facility, sports facility, culture facility, shopping facility and parks, in Beijing’s inner city. By calculating the Nearest - Distance Accessibility from newly built residential projects to each category of public facilities as well as employing the traditional Hedonic price model, this paper empirically tested the impact of accessibility to public facilities on housing prices. The results of this paper show that, firstly, in terms of Nearest- Distance Accessibility Criteria, parks, hospitals and gyms are the most easily accessible public facilities while shopping centers, culture facilities and Sports Center (as expressed by ‘Game’in the paper) are among the hardest accessible group. Secondly, when grouping the housing units by location and price level, it turns out that houses within 4th Ring Road as well as higher price groups will enjoy better accessibility to public facilities. Third, there exists positive correlation between the accessibility of housing to key high schools, sports centers, cultural facilities and parks and the housing prices, which implies that the externalities of these public facilities shall have well been capitalized into housing prices.

Key words: public facility, spatial accessibility, hedonic price model