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A long‐standing argument for historic preservation of houses has been the positive externalities that it produces. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the externality associated with the designation of historical houses in San Diego, California under the Mills Act.

The Mills Act allows for individual houses to be designated as historically significant. This results in neighborhoods where historically designated houses are side‐by‐side with houses with no particular historic significance. The positive externality hypothesis predicts that the value of a house should be a function of the number of historically designated houses within the neighborhood. The proximity of historically designated houses on the sales price of other non‐historic houses is valued using hedonic regression analysis.

The results suggest that a house's value is increased by 3.8 per cent by having a historical house within 250 ft, and by 1.6 per cent by having a historical home located between 250 and 500 ft away. Under the Mills Act, property taxes are lowered on the historically designated properties, costing local governments tax revenues. Based on the results presented in this paper, the overall taxable basis for the neighborhood increases by $1.8 million for each historical home. Estimates are provided that show that local governments might expect a net tax revenue gain of US$14,000 per house per year.

The Mills Act is a market‐based approach to historic preservation. Homeowners are encouraged to pursue designation of their property for property tax reductions. This paper demonstrates that local governments also gain through this program through higher property tax revenues.

This paper aims to analyze the effect of floor level on condominium prices in San Diego, California. The authors determine whether “higher‐floor premiums” exist in the condominium market for a large California city. Further, they investigate how the floor premium varies throughout a building, particularly whether it is quadratic and whether there is a “penthouse premium” for top‐floor units.

The paper utilizes a data set of 2,395 condominium sales occurring in San Diego between 2006 and the second quarter of 2011. Using hedonic pricing analysis, the authors model the housing price as a function of condominium, building and neighborhood characteristics.

The results suggest that there is a higher‐floor premium for condominiums in San Diego. Specifically, an increase in the floor level is associated with about a 2.2 percent increase in sale price. The higher‐floor premium appears to be quadratic in price, suggesting that price increases at a decreasing rate above the mean floor level. The authors also find evidence for a penthouse premium, though this effect disappears once “floor” is controlled for in the model.

There has been little direct research on the floor effect in condominium prices. The studies that have used floor level as an explanatory variable have been predominately in Southeast Asia. The results suggest that the floor effect is more complex than previously modeled.

This paper seeks to explore the roles that different measures of housing stock and socio‐economic diversity have on the value of residential homes in San Diego, California.

This paper employs a hedonic pricing model to estimate the effects of different measures of diversity on housing prices based on a sample of approximately 6,500 houses in San Diego County, California. The measures of diversity can be classified broadly as either socio‐economic diversity (racial and ethnic diversity, variation in income, education, age, etc.) or diversity in housing stock (variability in housing and lot size, the age of structures, the mix or single family and multiple family, etc.).

The results suggest that home prices increase with greater diversity in the size of homes in a neighborhood, but tend to decrease with higher levels of diversity in the age of homes. In addition, there is evidence that smaller than average houses on smaller than average lots command a premium over other houses in the neighborhood.

The role of socio‐economic diversity on housing prices has been studied extensively. This paper explores the role of housing stock diversity in explaining variation in housing prices.