Replication data for "The politics of urban trees: Tree Planting is associated with gentrification in Portland, Oregon"

In the paper: "The politics of urban trees: Tree Planting is associated with gentrification in Portland, Oregon", we address our central research question: is urban-tree planting associated with gentrification? These data and the associated program file included in this data publication can be used to replicate the second-stage model of gentrification in the analysis presented in the paper (Donovan et al. 2021).

We defined gentrification as an increase in the median sales price of single-family homes in a Census tract compared to other tracts in the city after accounting for differences in the housing stock such as house size and number of bathrooms. We used tree-planting data from the non-profit Friends of Trees, who have planted 57,985 yard and street trees in Portland (1990–2019). We estimated a mixed model of gentrification (30 years and 141 tracts) including random intercepts at the tract level and a first-order auto-regressive residual structure. Tract-level house prices and tree planting may be codetermined. Therefore, to address potential endogeneity of tree planting in statistical modeling, we lagged the number of trees planted by at least one year.

This data publication contains the STATA code and all data used for the gentrification model. The data provided include the tract-level random effect from the annual hedonic models (dependent variable), number of street trees planted in the tract (the variable of interest), and other variables that may influence gentrification in a neighborhood (overall tree canopy cover, proximity to light rail lines, presence of historic places, and mean house age and mean house size).
These data (and associated program file) were collected for the purpose of evaluating the hypothesis that urban-tree planting increases neighborhood gentrification in Portland, OR.
For more information about these data see Donovan et al. (2021; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2020.102387).