Land Assembly in Amsterdam, 1832-2015

Inner city redevelopment frequently involves the assembly of small lots into bigger ones. We analyze joint lot development and the influence of coordination and transaction costs of land assembly on the exercise of the redevelopment option, using Amsterdam micro housing information for 1832, 1860 and 2015. In all, we have a complete set of building structure and household characteristics for dwellings on almost 30,000 lots for each of these years. We estimate a logit model to predict joint lot redevelopment, based on structural characteristics of lots and dwellings and on social characteristics of their occupants. The results show that both types of characteristics significantly explain land assembly, and the regression coefficients adhere to the theoretical land assembly literature. This paper contributes importantly to our knowledge of the specific land parcel and structural physical characteristics that impact redevelopment. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to study the joint characteristics of the potentially combinable lots, and to document and quantify the role of social characteristics in land assembly. Acknowledgements We are indebted to seminar participants from seminars at the Free University Amsterdam and at the University of Cambridge, and also participants of the annual AREUEA meeting 2016 and the Lincoln Institute Urban Economics and Public Finance Conference 2016 for their useful comments. We are truly grateful for discussions of earlier versions of this paper by Will Larson, Chris Redfearn and Albert Saiz. HISGIS / Fryske Academy is thanked for generously giving us access to their data. Matthijs Korevaar has provided valuable research assistance.