NEIGHBOURHOOD - ATTRIBUTES MEANING AND CONCEPT
Neighbourhood generally refer to a geographic entity comprising physical attributes such as roads, parks, rivers and rail ways and with a homogeneity of housing within an area. Elif (2009) opined that researchers on neighbourhood quality has focused on three board headlines to arrive at their findings. They include examining the relationship between environmental quality and housing areas and user’s well being, focused on housing and its environment via user satisfaction and perception and finally concerning neighbourhood quality as a factor in housing price structure. This research will consider how neighbourhood quality helps in the determination of house prices.
Several factors ranging from accessibility, physical characteristics of the neighbourhood services and facilities, social environment, individual site and dwelling characteristics all forms part of what informs the selection of new residence (Brown and Moore, 1970). They further stated in the work that besides all the above mentioned attributes, location is also one key determinants of house price. Location is a time – distance relationship or linkage between a property or neighbourhood and all other possible origins and destinations of people going to or coming from the property or neighbourhood. Herold and Leonard (1991) opined that more distance location with more attractive features and amenities despite long community will command more value than closer locations lacking attractive features and amenities. In the opinion of Adesoji (2010), good quality housing provides the foundation for stable communities and social inclusion. This presupposes to say that people will go any length to get good value for their money.
With this development in many metropolitan areas, upper income households tend to live outside the centre of the city while lower income families continue to reside in the cities, close to employment centres.
In the work of Palma et al. (2007), they undertook an analysis of disproportion in the spatial distribution of accessibility and neighbourhood quality in Paris metropolitan region, they found out that local amenities are generally capitalized into the housing market. Cobb (1984) explained that the variation in rent rates in housing area is dependent on housing area related uniqueness. In that line of thought, Elif (2009) opined that housing sales price depends on the neighbourhood amenities associated with the residential area and that urban migration progress towards amenity rich area despite the high housing cost. Elif (2009) was in agreement with Basil and Michael (2004) when he posited that empirical analysis confirms that neighbourhood variables have a strong positive impact on house value. Rogerson (1999) on his submission said characteristics that increase neighbourhood quality are simultaneously significant ones which have positive impact on either housing price or rent. All these studies are explorative and focused on relationship between neighbourhood quality levels and housing prices rather than determine the price effect of neighbourhood quality on housing price. In this study, neighbourhood quality is measured on the bases of housing and neighbourhood characteristics.