The allometry of housing prices in urban scaling laws and an equalised dwellers’ utility across settlement sizes

Luca S. D’Acci

Environment and Planning B, 2026, vol. 53, issue 3, 626-646

Abstract: Large cities have benefits offset by costs. Since the inter-urban Rosen–Roback model, economists interpret the attractiveness of a city in terms of spatial equilibrium: a cost-benefit balance across locations. High incomes are counterbalanced by high prices or disamenities. A cross-sectional regression analysis on the ∼ 8000 Italian municipalities whose population sizes range from around 30 to 3 million, found the following association: by doubling the population of a settlement, holding constant its per capita income and touristic presences, its house price rises by 9%. House price increases are not offset by an increase in income. Bigger cities are more expensive than smaller. This opens reasoning upon indirect economic valuations of the value - or cost  if you see it differently - (opportunities, services, vibrancy…) that urban size has for people who choose - or must  choose - bigger settlements. At the best of my knowledge, this is the first work, in this form, finding a scaling coefficient for house price. It resulted around 0.13, namely, by passing from a town of 10˙000 inhabitants to a city of 1 million inhabitants (even if holding constant tourism and income), the average house price would almost double (+82%), almost tripled (+183%) from a village of 1˙000 inhabitants to a 3 million inhabitants’ city, and almost quadrupled (+282%) from a hamlet of 100 inhabitants to a 3 million inhabitants city.

Keywords: urban scaling; Rosen–Roback model; urban size; estimate-urban-cost; spatial equilibrium; rural-urban; spatial utility function; residential decision (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23998083251342626 (text/html)

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:sae:envirb:v:53:y:2026:i:3:p:626-646

DOI: 10.1177/23998083251342626

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning B
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().