A person might expect that a landfill would always negatively impact the value of neighboring properties.  Not so, says Montana State University professor Richard Ready.  While essentially all high-volume landfills drag down surrounding home prices, his research has found that some lower-volume facilities can leave nearby homeowners unscathed.  In a 2010 Journal of Real Estate Research study, Dr. Ready determined that roughly one-quarter of landfills processing less than 500 tons of waste a day have no negative effect on surrounding home values. Low-volume landfills that do exert a negative effect, pull down adjacent property values by 2.7% on average, with prices going back up by 1.3% with each additional mile a house is from the landfill. (The study didn’t identify the characteristics of low-volume landfills that have a negative impact and those that don’t.)  High-volume landfills (equaling or exceeding 500 tons of waste a day), on the other hand, drop adjacent property values by 13.7% on average, with that pricing impact decreasing by 5.9% a mile.  In other words, if you must live near the dump, do try to make sure it’s a small one.  Dr. Ready notes that a number of earlier studies had shown little or no effect of some landfills on home values, but that there were concerns as to whether those findings were due to small sample sizes.  In the JRER paper, he used a meta-analysis of all available landfill/housing-price studies, along with original data from three Pennsylvania landfills, to better get at the question.  “And with this analysis we found that, yes, there really are differences between landfills, and we can say with high confidence that not every landfill has the same effect,” he says.  Recent studies have found similar correlations between landfill proximity and home value, but Dr. Ready says he isn’t aware of any that have compared sites by volume.  Looking at waste volume made sense in that it is likely correlated with other factors, such as a landfill’s truck traffic, physical footprint and visibility, Dr. Ready notes. It is also relatively straightforward to compare across sites, he says.  Less easy to account for is the “aesthetic prominence of the landfill on the surrounding landscape,” he says. “Some landfills you can see from miles around and others, if you didn’t know they were there, you wouldn’t be able to tell.”  “My intuition tells me that aesthetic prominence must matter,” he adds. “But without visiting every landfill that has ever been studied it’s really hard to get good measures of their aesthetic prominence.”
Whether garbage dumps and waste sites affect property prices depends on how close they are and how big