7 neighborhood threats to your home's value (cont.)

Power plants. The data are fairly clear on the impact of a power plant on nearby home values — it usually hurts them. A study (PDF) from the University of California at Berkeley shows that home values within two miles of a power plant can be decreased between 4% and 7%.

Landfills. A study (PDF) from the Pima County, Ariz., assessor’s office shows that a subdivision near a landfill loses 6% to 10% in value compared with a subdivision that isn’t near a landfill — all other residential factors being equal, including house size, school quality and residential incomes.
Robert A. Simons, an urban planning professor at Cleveland State University, says that if you live within two miles of a Superfund site — a landfill that the government designates as a hazardous-waste site — your home’s value could decline by up to 15%.

Sex offenders. Living near a registered sex offender is one of the biggest downward drivers of home values. Researchers at Longwood University in Farmville, Va., concluded that the closer you live to a sex offender, the more your home will depreciate. In the paper, "Estimating the Effect of Crime Risk on Property Values and Time on Market: Evidence from Megan's Law in Virginia," Longwood researchers say, “The presence of a registered sex offender living within one-tenth of a mile reduces home values by about 9%, and these same homes take as much as 10% longer to sell than homes not located near registered sex offenders.”