| evelopment impact fees have been increasingly used over the past 30 years by local governments, in part because of their appeal to local voters. The fees are typically one-time fees paid by developers to local governments intended to cover the cost of extending public services to new developments. Revenue from these fees is used to pay for sewer and water lines, police and fire protection, libraries, schools, roads, and parks, as well as other local public goods. While some research has been conducted about the incidence of these fees on new and existing housing prices, as well as on the price of land, past efforts have suffered from a paucity of data as well as insufficient methodological rigor. This dissertation examines the incidence of development impact fees on both land and housing prices.;The area of focus for this dissertation is the Orlando, Florida metropolitan area, which consists of six counties and approximately 70 townships. Data for this dissertation were gathered primarily from local governments, including Property Assessor's Offices (housing and land sale data), Planning Departments and Engineering Offices (impact fees), and from state government (property tax millage rates). The study covered a 5-year time period, from 1997 though 2001, and examined approximately 279,000 sales of new and existing houses and 45,000 land parcel sales. The methodological approach employed is that of hedonic modeling. The sale price of each house and land parcel in question is regressed on available descriptive data as well as dummy variables indicating location of the unit in question. Regressions were carried out at the township, county, and metropolitan-area-level. A White's Correction was used to correct for heteroskedasticity, and spatial autoregression was tested for using an approach introduced by James LaSage.;The results generated are generally in line with other studies of this nature. While the regression results at the township level vary widely, the metropolitan level results are much more believable, and indicate that a... |
