Influencia de los Espacios Verdes Urbanos y la Percepción de Seguridad en los Precios de Vivienda en Bogotá.

Abstract

This research aims to analyze how green spaces, measured by the total number of trees in various localities of Bogotá, influence the perception of security, and how these perceptions affect housing prices. To achieve this, spatial autoregressive models (SAR) were employed to capture spatial autocorrelation and mediation models were used to examine direct and indirect effects. The primary data was extracted from the Mercado Libre website using web scraping techniques. The results show that green spaces have a direct negative effect on housing prices, although not statistically significant in all specifications. Additionally, green spaces significantly reduce the perception of insecurity, which in turn has a significant negative effect on housing prices. Perception of insecurity acts as a partial mediator in this relationship. Mediation indicators show that although the mediated effect is small, its contribution is marginally significant. Between 12.1% and 47% of the impact of green spaces on housing prices is mediated by the perception of security, indicating a complex relationship between green spaces, security perception, and real estate value. The Sobel p-value, which measures the statistical significance of the mediated effect, was found close to the threshold of significance (0.056 and 0.072), suggesting that mediation by perception of insecurity is relevant but not conclusive. This is corroborated by robustness analyses, in which mediation indicators differ and are not significant in several models. Although green spaces have a positive impact by reducing the perception of insecurity, this mediated effect does not always translate into a significant increase in housing prices, suggesting that other factors may be influencing real estate valuation in Bogotá.