How Heat Stress Mediates the Impacts of Street-level Environmental Features on Housing Prices: A Comparative Study of Center City and Outside Areas in Philadelphia

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Urban heat increasingly shapes housing markets, but existing studies often use coarse data and overlook spatial differences. This study develops an SEM-centered framework, with RF-SHAP as a non-parametric robustness check, to examine how 1-meter Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), Green View Index (GVI), and Built View Index (BVI) relate to housing prices in Philadelphia. The results show different valuation patterns: in Center City, higher heat stress is associated with lower housing prices, while in Outside Areas, socioeconomic factors dominate alongside a modest positive UTCI–price association that may partly reflect spatial openness. These findings highlight the importance of microclimate-aware, spatially differentiated planning strategies for climate-resilient urban development.