A Hedonic Approach to Coastal Resilience in Post-Hurricane Maria’s Puerto Rico

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, resulting in reduced beach width and dune flattening in certain coastal areas. Economic development activity observed in coastal regions of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria has partly focused on commercial and housing construction projects. The following study seeks to estimate the implicit value attributed by coastal homeowners to natural infrastructure attributes that may serve not only for recreation, but also as protection from future extreme weather events. We estimated a hedonic valuation model to assess the implicit value attributed by coastal homeowners to key natural attributes, emphasizing beach width and property elevation. Property owners sufficiently close to the coastline (1,000 m or less) implicitly assigned a positive value to beach width at their closest coastal location. An unexpected result was that elevation, when interacted with beach and human-made coastal types, was negatively associated with property prices, an indication of the importance of closeness to sea level. Given the impact of extreme weather events in coastal regions, hedonic valuation data on natural coastal attributes such as beach width can provide valuable information not currently considered in coastline development permitting.