Where to live in 2100? An exploration of long term future housing preferences by looking at the preferences of today's millionaires

Any type of urban and housing policy faces the challenge of predicting qualitative aspects of long term future housing demand, while these are notoriously hard to predict. In this paper we explore a new way of grasping with housing preferences that may shape future demand. We take inspiration from two sources. First Maslowís notions of human development, which state that the more lower needs (a.o. mere economic needs) are satisfied the more important the love of higher values becomes. Since from a long term perspective society grows richer and richer it seems that we will increasingly strive to fulfill higher needs. Therefore in this paper we analyze the housing preferences of people of who can be assumed that they are currently satisfied in their basic economic needs: millionaires. Second, to support our approach, we take inspiration from the recent interest in natural field experiments in economics (Harrison and List, 2004) . We interpret the real world choices of housing locations of Dutch millionaires as a natural experiment. Where do people prefer to live when money is hardly an issue? This paper analyses the housing locations of the rich in the Netherlands. It analyses a set of 600 houses with an asking price of over Euro 1 million as to their volume, gardens, distance to urban centers and distance to public nature areas. The housing location preferences of millionaires show two extremes: a modest amount in highly urban areas and a large amount in highly green/rural areas. Urban and peri-urban areas are unpopular. However, nearly all green/rural locations assessed are located within a range of 30 kilometers from a highly urban city. The millionairesí properties are often very close to public nature areas; areas often highly valued by the general public and often of high nature quality. The average volume of the millionairesí property is 4 times that of the average Dutch property, while its garden space is 61 times the average. Interpretation of these result for future oriented housing and urban planning suggest that major shifts in housing preferences may occur with rising wealth. Furthermore tensions between the private and public enjoyment of attractive or high quality nature areas rank high; especially of areas that are within the 30km range of urban centers. In these areas the development of new housing concepts that combine the private enjoyment of the view upon green with public accessibility of these same green areas may be useful.