Street Trees’ Obstruction of Retail Signage and Retail Rent: An Exploratory Scene Parsing Street View Analysis of Seoul’s Commercial Districts

Urban greening initiatives, including the incorporation of street trees, have been widely recognized for a variety of environmental benefits. However, their economic impact on retail, in particular, the impact of street trees on the visibility of signs, has been underexplored. Street trees can obscure retail signs, potentially reducing customer engagement and discouraging retailers from paying higher rents for such locations. This paper investigates how the blocking of retail signage by street trees affects monthly rent in developed commercial districts in Seoul. It identifies, through Google Street View and state-of-the-art deep-learning-based semantic segmentation methods, environmental elements such as street trees, sidewalks, and buildings; quantifies their proportions; and analyzes their impact on rent using OLS regression, controlling for socio-economic variables. The results reveal that rents significantly diminish when street trees blocking views of retail signs increase. Our findings require more nuanced consideration by planners and policymakers in balancing both environmental and economic demands toward sustainable street design and planning.