Local Meetings and Housing Supply

• In Event: Political Economy in Geographic Space

Abstract

Towns and cities across the U.S. require public meetings to consider new housing development proposals. The members of the public who attend these meetings are unrepresentative of the larger population and they are more likely to express opposition to a development proposal. Scholars and activists routinely claim that unrepresentative attendance at public meetings slows the growth of the housing supply by empowering those who oppose housing development. But is this necessarily true? We analyze a formal model in which a developer makes a development proposal and neighbors can decide whether to sue to force the developer to decrease the size of the proposal. These lawsuits are costly to the developer. Against this backdrop, public meetings serve an important informational purpose: they allow developers to learn whether there are neighbors who are willing to sue, giving the developer an opportunity to rework the proposal to satisfy litigious neighbors. We show that meetings can therefore increase housing supply by making it possible for developers to craft compromise projects. Moreover, it is not in the interest of the developer for the meeting to be representative of the wider public. The usefulness of the meeting to the developer comes from its ability to reveal who is most opposed to the project. Making meetings more representative, by for example, lowering the cost of attendance or randomly sampling from the community, reduces the informational value of the meeting. Representative public meetings can therefore reduce the supply of housing relative to unrepresentative public meetings. Our analysis underscores the role that litigation—and not public meetings—plays in restricting housing supply in U.S. towns and cities.

Authors

• Allison Cuttner, Emory University

• Ryan Hubert, University of California, Davis

• Brendan Pablo Montagnes, Emory University