Toxic sites and housing prices

Excerpts from the Globe's environmental blog.

Say the word Superfund when buying a house and, well, people get nervous. So you'd probably think that if one of these hazardous waste sites got cleaned up, housing prices would rise accordingly.

Not so, according to new research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology environmental economist Michael Greenstone, who co-wrote a paper this month in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Greenstone compared neighborhoods around Superfund sites to neighborhoods surrounding toxic sites where Superfund cleanups did not take place and found that house prices and rental rates did not increase when a site was cleaned.

The average cleanup takes 12 to 13 years to complete and costs about $43 billion, according to Greenstone. Greenstone questions whether it's money well spent. "The housing market's clear message is that the cleanups are not worth it to the people living near these sites," he said.

By now, Massachusetts residents have gotten used to neglected parks and beaches: There are toilets that don't work, buildings that need paint, and garden plots filled with more weeds than flowering buds.

But does it have to be like that? I just got back from Chicago where the greater metropolitan area is flush with well-maintained parks, gardens, bike trails, and jogging paths. There are even areas of the beach on Lake Michigan set aside for dogs. A dog beach!

The Massachusetts park system, the sixth largest in the nation, was once celebrated for its parklands. But in the last 15 years, the state has accumulated a backlog of maintenance problems that will cost $1.2 billion to fix. Environmentalists say parks across the state are plagued with crumbling infrastructure, trash buildup, and insufficient staffing.

BETH DALEY