Green roofs have recently seen increasing popularity in many cities, such as New York, due to their cooling effects, stormwater control features, and aesthetics and amenity values. Few known studies, however, have attempted to quantify the benefits of green roofs into monetary values. We use hedonic regression techniques to obtain estimates that apartment rents in buildings with green roofs in the Battery Park City area of New York were about 16% higher on average than in buildings without green roofs. Battery Park City is located in the Upper Bay Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) watershed. If we were to extend the Battery Park City findings to the entire Upper Bay CSO watershed and if all buildings in the CSO watershed were to install green roofs, our results imply that rental receipts in the watershed could increase by as much as approximately $2.1 billion monthly.
