How Heat Stress Mediates the Impacts of Street-level Environmental Features on Housing Prices: A Comparative Study of Center City and Outside Areas in Philadelphia

Abstract

Urban heat increasingly shapes housing markets, but existing studies often use coarse data and overlook spatial differences. This study develops an SEM-centered framework, with RF-SHAP as a non-parametric robustness check, to examine how 1-meter Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), Green View Index (GVI), and Built View Index (BVI) relate to housing prices in Philadelphia. The results show different valuation patterns: in Center City, higher heat stress is associated with lower housing prices, while in Outside Areas, socioeconomic factors dominate alongside a modest positive UTCI–price association that may partly reflect spatial openness. These findings highlight the importance of microclimate-aware, spatially differentiated planning strategies for climate-resilient urban development.