In a typical year in the United States, over 1,000 schools open or change boundaries within their school district. This can have massive effects on the value of properties impacted by these changes, since property values are heavily influenced by the quality of the local schools. But these changes can take years, from announcement to actual implementation. Using the opening of Frederick Douglass High School in Lexington, Kentucky as context, Chris Bollinger and colleagues find that rezoning impacts on property values can occur years ahead of implementation. They find that when a property is expected to be rezoned from the low-performing schools (measured by ACT scores) to a school with higher performance, the property value increased by almost 5%. To learn about Bollinger’s work click here:
