The Politics of Local Affordable Housing Policy

• In Event: Home Is Where the City Is: Supporting, Defending, and Designing Urban Housing

Abstract

In this paper, I propose that local interest groups substantially influence local policy choices, and that the preponderance of their efforts concern governance rather than electioneering. This adds to a burgeoning literature on local interest groups, and presents a new measurement strategy. In this paper, I draw on non-profit tax reporting data from the United States to identify, categorize, and measure the strength of housing interest groups headquartered in large U.S. localities. This dataset includes advocates, direct service providers, non-profit housing developers, neighborhood defenders (Einstein et al. 2020), landlords, and economic development organizations. The relative strength of these categories is captured across 128 localities and 27 years of data based on an index of group count, total assets, total income, and average age. This represents a replicable measurement of local housing interest group strength in the U.S. based in freely available administrative data.

I hypothesize that the relative strength of different local housing interest categories drives progressive housing policy interventions in U.S. cities from 1995 to 2022. I collect longitudinal data on six “progressive” (Goetz 1993) local affordable housing policies: housing trust funds, inclusionary zoning (i.e. inclusionary housing), housing linkage fees, rent control (i.e. rent stabilization), and source-of-income anti-discrimination. To create a policy mix, I use a clustering algorithm to create eleven input policy instrument types based on intra-policy variation, and then apply latent variable analysis to represent the data as a two-dimensional policy mix. The two dimensions represent the “Policy Effort” and “Growth Support” of each locality-year’s affordable housing policy mix. Preliminary regression results show that the relative strength of non-profit developers and housing advocates is positively associated with a locality-year’s “Policy Effort”, non-profit developers and landlords are negatively associated with “Growth Support”, and economic developers are positively associated with “Growth Support”.

Author

• Henry Watson, Georgetown University