A group of UGR lecturers has designed a method to divide the city in zones which contain houses whose quality is homogeneous. Such division does not coincide with that used by the Administration, which divides the city into districts according to a geographical criterion.
If the Administration took into account housing quality when fixing the taxes, a fair taxation system could be obtained applying this zone division. In such a case, the houses located in the same area would have the same tax rate as they would have a similar quality. If the taxation criterion was based in housing quality, the current administrative division would not be the most appropriate for achieving a fair taxation system. This would be a serious problem, since equity is a basic principle which must govern the action of Public Administration.
Under the title “A geo-statistical method to define districts in a city”, lecturers of the University of Granada Rafael Cano Guervós, Jorge Chica Olmo and José A. Hermoso Gutiérrez have designed a technique to stratify and divide the city according to housing quality.
The research work is divided into two parts: a first one, where they design the zone division method and its application in the city of Granada, and a second one, where they compare the district division of the Public Administration and that resulting from applying their technique.
Housing global quality
In this study, they come to the conclusion that what makes houses more different is their “global quality”, which includes aspects like state of conservation of the houses, the number of rooms, zone quality (level of services, shops, recreational areas, etc.), the contruction quality of the building and of the housing.
From a housing sample where the characteristics above mentioned were observed, it is possible to obtain a zone division of the city which delimits internally homogeneous areas, as for housing quality, although they can be near or distant from each other.
Thus, researchers apply this new methodology in the city of Granada and divide the city into four areas or levels: a high-quality area (level 4) which stretches in the centre of the city; level 3 (medium-high), which acts as a buffer between the highest quality areas and those medium-low; below, levels 2 (medium-low) and 1 (low), which would be those with lower housing quality, are located in the southeast and south of the city, although the area with worse housing quality (level 1) is polarized around the south and the north of the city.
The Administration and, specifically, the centre of property management has showed interest in this research work.
Likewise, the new methodology can be applied aplicar to the variable “housing price”, obtaininig city areas where prices were similar. This way both the seller and the buyer would have a more exhaustive knowledge of the real-estate market; the buyer could look for a house on the basis of its characteristics, price and location.
The methodology used to create the new tool is based on a combination of different techniques: They study geographical aspects through a technique of spatial estimate called Kriging (which is part of the Theory of Regionalized Variables), which considers the spatial location of the housings; in addition, they use multivariate techniques like Principal Compound Analysis, Canonical Population Analysis and multivariate contrasts.
This methodology can be used in other fields like: property valuation, town planning, electoral sociology, business marketing, security of the public, etc.
Reference: Prof. Rafael Cano Guervós.
Phone number: 958-249911.
E-mail: rcano@ugr.es
Prof. Jorge Chica Olmo.
Phone number: 958-249922.
E-mail: jchica@ugr.es
Prof. José A. Hermoso Gutiérrez. Phone number: 958-249914.
E-mail: jhermoso@ugr.es
Department of Quantitative Methods for Economics and Management
