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Population

Valuing Natural Amenities David McGranahan*, David McGranahan,

There is broad agreement across in rural sociology—and several other disciplines—that natural amenities have played a key role in attracting new rural residents over the past several decades.  Despite their importance, the measurement of local amenities has remained problematic, as what is an amenity is often simply asserted or assessed by its relation to migration or population change—essentially the dependent variable.   Roback (1982, 1988) developed an argument that county amenity values are embedded in higher housing values and/or lower area earnings than found in less amenity-endowed locations.  In this paper, we draw on the Census 2000 special tabulations of rural (nonmetropolitan) county owner-occupied single-unit houses with limited land and without business activities attached, regress this group’s median house value on its median homeowner income (both loge), and use the residuals as indicators of rural county housing relative amenity value.  We then create 2 county amenity scores using coefficients from separate regressions of amenity value on measures of landscape and climate. The next step is to use these and other measures of county amenities in equations predicting amenity score and net migration in post-2000.   Among the provisional findings are:  climate and landscape measures together explain 52% of the rural county variance in amenity values while other variables, including seasonal housing and recreation employment, add only 12% to the total; seasonal housing is high in counties with attractive landscapes, no matter the climate; and net migration patterns are consistent with the amenity results—migration in 2000-2020 and 2020-2024 continued to shift population into areas with attractive (valued) landscapes and away from counties specializing in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing.