Political Architecture: Do Style and Neighborhood Fit Impact Housing Politics?

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

Abstract

Urban America is facing a housing affordability crisis, with residents of nearly all the nation’s largest cities spending an increasing share of their incomes on housing costs. The housing affordability crisis is associated with many deleterious outcomes, such as reduced economic mobility and homelessness. Economists have shown that the root cause of the housing affordability crisis is not enough housing. One of main culprits of slow housing production is local public policy, particularly land-use regulations which restrict the supply of housing. Those include exclusionary zoning ordinances which limit multifamily construction, and local meetings which empower an unrepresentative set of citizens to voice their concerns over proposed development, often effectively vetoing construction of multifamily housing. In addition to exacerbating housing unaffordability, these policies are also a major contributor of racial and economic segregation in the United States.

Prior scholarship has focused heavily on economic considerations as a key motivator for anti-development public policies. One of the primary explanations for these policies is homeowners’ desire to maintain and increase property values. Renters, on the other hand, are theorized to support additional development, to lower rents. However, more recent scholarship has shown that many Americans – renters and homeowners alike – hold anti-development preferences, particularly against multi-family development. This opposition is still greater when development is in their own proverbial backyards. Moreover, renters and homeowners alike have very mixed beliefs about the impact of new housing on property values and rents. Therefore, we suspect other factors may motivate opposition to multifamily housing construction, beyond personal economic calculations.

In this study, we focus on explaining public opinion about multi-family housing. This is the type of housing most effective at increasing the supply of affordable housing and potentially reducing inequality, yet it elicits significant opposition from a wide swath of the population. While the literature on opposition to housing development has examined many potential explanations, little attention has been devoted to a factor familiar to urban planners: the fit between the style or size of new housing and the existing neighborhood. Concerns about fit and aesthetics come up frequently in comments at public meetings and in online reader comments about news articles. Yet these concerns have not received much attention in the political science literature.

We explore whether these variables of fit matter for opposition to multifamily housing. We test them against other explanations commonly found in the housing politics literature. We situate this investigation within a broader study of how citizens think about their neighborhood’s look and feel, and their perceptions about new construction, to see how these concepts may translate to politics.

Our original survey aims to uncover whether style and fit meaningfully impact development preferences and their intention to attend meetings or vote in local elections. Our sample includes respondents from the 30 largest metropolitan areas in the US, excluding low-density exurbs, representing cities most affected by the affordability crisis. We show respondents images of proposed developments, which vary in style and fit with pre-specified neighborhood contexts. We randomize the style and fit while keeping other factors found to matter in the literature fixed, such as parking, tenure, and developer contributions. Each respondent will receive all these combinations of buildings and neighborhoods in randomized order. We contrast opposition to the proposed development in each of these neighborhood contexts against an independent sample asked to rate the identical buildings devoid of neighborhood context. This contrast isolates the effect of fit with the neighborhood.

In addition to being externally valid (such renderings are often shown at local meetings), this visual approach improves the measurement of development preferences. Prior studies are typically text only, leaving it to respondents to imagine what these buildings look like or where they may be sited, which may introduce noise into the measures. We also improve the measurement of alternative explanations such as affordability, whose measurement difficulties may have limited prior studies, by defining rent levels at differing thresholds of affordability tied to each respondent’s area median income.

This paper contributes to the literature on housing by centering principles of urban planning and design. Neighborhood fit and style may help explain why land-use regulations are often “sticky” even when projects satisfy major concerns such as parking or affordability to middle incomes, and why any given new housing project is often met with resistance – even as many Americans support housing development in the abstract.

Authors

• Adrian Pietrzak, Princeton University

• Tali Mendelberg, Princeton University