New Research Unveils Why NIMBYism Alone Can’t Explain Anti-Development Sentiment
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.
“Some people do not like developers, for example,” Kalla said. “They may have established this symbolic association over time. And so, when we present a proposal that references developers as benefiting from the project — making this symbol salient even as developers are of course the people developing a construction project without having to explicitly state it — the triggering of this symbolic relationship appears to drive more opposition to the proposal.”
In another example, the researchers found that people who choose to live in cities are more likely to feel positively toward cities and less likely to oppose pro-development policies, such as one making it easier to build more or taller apartment buildings, that would make a city more city-like. Homeowners and renters who live in cities support such policies more than homeowners and renters who live outside cities.
The researchers have received a grant to build on the work prior to submitting it to a journal. In a working paper, they suggest that groups trying to spur more development can win popular support by emphasizing in their messaging or in the language of the policy itself how the effort will benefit groups with wide popularity, such as nurses, firefighters, and teachers. They write that government officials should consider that many voters do not have internally consistent or firm views on many housing policies, despite state and local laws that encourage gathering detailed community input prior to making policy changes or approving projects.
“Our findings suggest caution about policies that venerate public opinion about housing in this way,” they write. “How questions are presented to voters may radically alter the input they provide. For example, are voters’ views about allowing new apartment buildings more ‘genuine’ before or after they’ve been reminded that developers build them? Or before or after they’ve been reminded that nurses and firefighters might live there?”