A new multifamily mix-use housing development? Not In My Back Yard.
Despite the country’s acute housing shortage, state and local governments have erected barriers over decades to make residential construction more difficult, particularly for apartment buildings. As a result, housing costs have shot up, more than doubling in some areas. In addition, such policies have increased segregation and restrained economic mobility.
But there is more to this dynamic than a knee-jerk resistance to development negatively affecting housing prices, noise, and congestion in the neighborhood, known as NIMBYism.
Research has shown that homeowners and renters hold similar views toward development, complicating explanations that rely on self-interest regarding the effect of new construction on housing prices. Other research has found that people oppose developments far from their backyard and support anti-development policies untethered to any specific proposal.
To better understand what might undergird public support for anti-development policies, Institution for Social and Policy Studies faculty fellow Josh Kalla; David Broockman, associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley; and Christopher Elmendorf, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, are drawing on a theory of social psychology rooted in how people process complicated issues based on how they feel about various symbols, often developed early in life.
“People form these attachments as they think about policies and politics, often involving feelings for or against particular groups,” Kalla said. “And later in life, when thinking about a political issue or a public policy, they think less about the policy in detail and more about how they feel about a symbol associated with that policy, oftentimes a group that might benefit from that policy.”
To gauge how such symbols might affect support for specific development policies, Kalla and his colleagues conducted experiments in which they asked participants for their views while manipulating the salience of certain symbols when presenting the policy. For example, some participants saw language referencing symbols such as developers, cities, or the groups who might live in the proposed housing. For other participants, such symbols were absent from the framing of the policies.
The researchers found that participants relied on their preexisting attitudes towards such symbols when they were presented as part of the framing or fundamental to the substance of the policies themselves, often despite what conventional wisdom would define as their self-interest and in ways that NIMBYism and homeownership could not predict with the same accuracy.
