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In the U.S., where rising home values are essential to increasing Americans’ net worth, property values are fiercely defended from anything that might scare off future buyers, including addiction treatment centers. But a new study finds that these fears may be overblown.

In fact, substance abuse treatment centers do not lower property values. Repeat: do not.

In a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Brady Horn and Aakrit Joshi of the University of New Mexico and Johanna Maclean of Temple University looked at residential property values for Seattle from 2003 to 2016. They compared this data with government records showing the exact locations of all licensed substance treatment centers in the city.

They found that although such centers do tend to locate in areas with lower property values, they don’t significantly reduce property values. The centers locate in areas where values are already an average of 2.2% lower than they are elsewhere in the city.

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This study is one in a chain of studies that have attempted to be more nuanced in how the pluses and minuses of a neighborhood (what academics somewhat euphemistically call “amenities and disamenities”) affect housing prices. As the researchers put it, the pros and cons of any neighborhood “are not likely to be randomly assigned across neighborhoods.” When something like a drug treatment center moves in, it’s not throwing a dart at a map and choosing its location randomly.

For example, a 2003 study found that a registered sex offender moving into a neighborhood decreased property values by an average of 17%. But sex offenders aren’t scattered arbitrarily across cities and towns. They have their own inner reasons for choosing to live in one place or another. Most of them choose housing in cheaper places. Another researcher, using a method that took that into account, published findings in 2008 that sex offenders only cause a 4% drop in property prices.

In the study on drug treatment centers, the authors found that when they didn’t account for differences in neighborhoods, it looked like a new facility would cause a 3.4% to 4.6% decline in property values. But once they took differences between neighborhoods into account, any decline was no longer statistically significant.

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Of course, the findings are based only one city, and it’s a city that has a lot going for it: Amazon, Starbucks, and Nordstrom are all headquartered there, and Costco, Microsoft, and Expedia are in the greater metro area. Housing prices there have doubled since 2012, according to Zillow, and there’s now a real shortage of affordable options. Perhaps that means the city is somewhat more immune to “disamenities” than other cities throughout the U.S.

But the authors make a compelling case, and synthesize lots of previous research on what really makes a difference in housing value. Short version: probably nothing that would surprise you. Property values rise thanks to good schools, green spaces, diversity, walkability, and low crime rates. They decline in response to things like airport or train noise, nuclear waste sites, and wildfires. Other things — drug treatment facilities, sex offenders, even strip clubs (yes, someone studied that) — don’t make much of a difference. You might not want to live next to a strip club, but it won’t hurt your investment in your home.

In a country where the rate of opioid fatalities has quadrupled in the last 20 years, 10% of adults admit to using illicit drugs in the last 30 days, and significant numbers struggle with alcohol, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have more substance treatment centers available. One additional benefit: they’ve been shown to reduce crime, which is good for society, local economies, and of course property values. As the researchers conclude, “our findings suggest that the potential benefits of [treatment centers] to the community may offset potential costs.”

In other words, NIMBYs go home.

Write to Sarah Green Carmichael at Sarah.Carmichael@barrons.com