Highway Capping

This paper examines the hypothesis that a highway capping project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had a significant positive effect on nearby home prices. We use a difference-in-differences approach to estimate how proximity to the cap impacts home prices, after the cap’s announcement and opening. We find that homes within one mile of the cap, after the construction decision date and the end-of-planning date (2015 and 2018, respectively), significantly raised home sales prices by approximately 10 percent, while homes sold in the same areas after the completion (in 2021) were not significantly affected. These results are robust to various distance cutoffs. We discuss the issues that would complicate this increment to be captured in practice.