The Spatial Effect of Accessibility to Public Service Facilities on Housing Prices: Highlighting the Housing Equity

Understanding how public service accessibility is related to housing prices is crucial to housing equity, yet the heterogeneous capitalisation effect remains unknown. This study aims to investigate the spatial effect of public service accessibility on housing prices in rapidly urbanising regions. Here, we propose a novel methodological framework that integrates the hedonic price model, geographical detector model and the spatial association detector model to understand housing equity issues. The rapidly rising housing prices, vastly transformed urban planning and heterogeneous land use patterns make the urban centre of Wuhan a typical case study. High-value units of public service accessibility are concentrated in built-up areas, while low-value units are located at the urban fringe. The results indicate that larger public services have more significant clustering effects than smaller ones. Recreational, medical, educational and financial facilities all have capitalisation effects on housing prices. Both the geographical detector model and the spatial association detector model could identify the drivers of housing prices, but the explanatory power of the latter is greater and could enhance the validity and reliability of the findings. We further find that the explanatory power of the driving factors on housing prices obtained from the spatial association detector model is greater than that of the geographical detector model. Based on the spatial association detector model, the main drivers of public service facilities are accessibility to restaurants and bars and accessibility to ATMs. In addition, there are bivariate or nonlinear enhancement effects between each pair of driving factors. This approach provides significant insights for urban environmental development planning and local real estate planning.