Transferring land use rights with transportation infrastructure extensions: Evidence on spatiotemporal price formation in Shanghai

Abstract

To address the efficiency and sustainability of residential suburbanization under state leasehold systems, this study examines the price formation of long-term land-use rights for general and compensational housing empirically, considering the successive expansions of new metro lines and highway networks during 2004–2016 in Shanghai—one of the world’s fastest growing megacities. The results of our spatial autoregressive models infer that the accessibility benefits of metro extensions are considerably capitalized into both the ask and transaction prices of land-use rights for general housing in the suburbs, whereas those for highway construction are insignificant. A series of spatiotemporal regressions demonstrate that the premiums for proximity to new metro stations bid by private developers are much higher than those asked by local governments during pre-metro years, probably due to local governments' strategic site arrangements for transit-oriented suburbanization and/or developers' speculative land acquisitions in Shanghai's upward suburban housing market. This study further reveals that the prices of land-use rights for compensational housing do not reflect any economic externalities attributable to metro stations and highway interchanges, which might trigger the unfair redistribution of property rights, accessibility, and economic opportunities among relocated farmers around city-fringe areas.