In this paper we examine empirically the market for local amenities in the Paris metropolitan region.
We find first that there is considerable inequality in the spatial distribution of these local amenities,
including accessibility, environmental and social indicators. We use a spatial representation and Lorenz
curves to examine the degree of inequality in these amenities, and this provides evidence that some
amenities (or disamenities) are much more inequitably distributed than others. The most extremely
unequally distributed amenities are noise (due to its concentration near airports), “Redevelopment Areas”,
presence of water (lakes and rivers) and forests, and presence of train and subway stations. Some
indicators, such as the “Poulit accessibility” measure, were by contrast remarkably constant over the
region. We recognize that local amenities should be capitalized into the housing market, and explore the
willingness to pay of households for these amenities within the Paris region using alternative
specifications of a location choice model. One of the core questions we examine is the spatial scale of the
amenity effects and how this is captured in a location choice context. By estimating models at both a
commune and at a grid cell level, we obtain new insights into how households in the Paris region trade off
amenities against each other and against housing cost. We find that the residential location choice model
fits the data moderately better at the smaller scale of the grid cell compared to the commune.
