ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights how city trees and green space serve as a formative, and often supportive backdrop for social benefits ranging from personal development to more liveable, safer communities. Evidence-based interpretations and inferences point to why all people need metro nature in their lives in order to attain better quality of life, and to engage with other people in more constructive and productive ways. Estimating the values of nature's services helps local governments to weigh costs against returns from development or prioritize payments for green versus grey infrastructure. Property sales prices or assessments are statistically regressed against home and property characteristics to estimate how a difference in a natural feature relates to a change in property value. Property value gains can be captured by local governments as increased property tax assessments or as excise taxes on sales, with the revenues applied to the annual costs of urban forest or parks programs.
