PUI2017 Extra Credit Project Proposal
Problem Description:
Nearly 79% of all of New York City’s energy consumption and carbon emissions come from energy use in buildings. For improving the sustainability and efficiency of the energy use, the New York City aims to implement a plan of reducing carbon emission by 80% by the year 2050. Since people and the government are aware of the environment issues, the release of the information about building energy efficiency may have impact on its market value because of public reputation or other reasons. So it is significant to find how does the building's energy performance have impact on its housing price ? 
Data:
The Local Law 84 datasets will be used which requires owners of large buildings to annually measure their energy and water consumption in a process called benchmarking and the data is available on NYCgovernment website. This datasets has many variables that are expected to correlate with housing price , including building type,floor area, energy use intensity, water usage, green house gas emission etc. I will also use PLUTO datasets to get information about building age and use the property assessment data from the NYC Department of Finance which values  all NYC properties every year as one step in calculating property tax bill . The three datasets will be merged by BBL(borough, block and lot) and outliers will be removed by using property method during the data processing  .
Analysis:
The market value will be modeled with a multilinear regression of those independent variables. Several types of linear regression will be applied (including log-log and semi-log type) to get different models of housing price . The hierarchical regression will also be used to see whether the variable related to energy performance  would actually impact the housing price if other variables are controlled.
References: 
"Green Noise or Green Value? Measuring the Effects of Environmental Certification on Office Values" this paper found significant price premier for LEED-certified buildings and Energy Star.  "Doing Well by Doing Good? Green Office Buildings" this paper found private market does incorporate the information of energy use in the determination of rents and asset prices. And there are also many articles that indicated the impact of building's energy efficiency on its value or pricing.
Deliverable:
I expect to find a good model among the above variables to find   how does the building's energy performance have impact on its housing price. The owner of the building may try to make improvement on the energy performance based on this model to increase the price, supporting the NYC carbon reduction plan at the same time.