The vertical city: Rent gradients, spatial structure, and agglomeration economies

Crocker H. Liu, Stuart Rosenthal (ssrosent@syr.edu) and William Strange

Journal of Urban Economics, 2018, vol. 106, issue C, 101-122

Abstract: Tall commercial buildings dominate city skylines. Nevertheless, despite decades of research on commercial real estate and horizontal patterns of urban development, vertical patterns have been largely ignored. We document that high productivity companies locate higher up, with less productive offices lower down and retail at ground level. These patterns reflect tradeoffs between street access and vertical amenities. Vertical rent gradients are non-monotonic, independent of nearby employment, and large. Doubling zipcode employment is associated with a 10.7% increase in rent, consistent with the presence of agglomeration economies. Moving up one floor has the same effect on rent as adding roughly 3,500 workers to a zipcode.

Keywords: Commercial real estate; Access; Amenities; Spatial structure; Rent gradient; Vertical; Agglomeration economies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O18 R30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (46)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119018300214
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:juecon:v:106:y:2018:i:c:p:101-122

DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2018.04.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Urban Economics is currently edited by S.S. Rosenthal and W.C. Strange

More articles in Journal of Urban Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).