The Staggering Value of Urban Land

The total value of America’s urban land is astounding, adding up to more than $25 trillion as of 2010—that’s roughly more than double the nation’s total economic output or GDP in 2006, according to a recent study by economists at the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan. Nearly half the total value of America’s urban land, 48 percent of it, is packed into just five superstar metro areas: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, with land in and around the urban center being the most valuable by far.

The study by economists David Albouy and Minchul Shin of the University of Illinois, and Gabriel Ehrlich of the University of Michigan, used data from CoStar, a national real-estate database, covering land transactions from 2005 through 2010. The data contains detailed information on the address, lot size, and price for each transaction, and covers 69,000 land sales that span more than 75,000 square miles.