Framing affordable housing: an experimental test of changing attitudes

Abstract

Is it possible to persuade voters to support more housing in their communities and affordable housing policies at the state and local levels? Generally, residents living close to proposed developments are more likely to oppose them, giving rise to the ‘NIMBY’ (‘Not in My Back Yard’) label. Previous research suggests institutional context rather than attitudes explains most of the geographic variation in regulatory barriers to new housing. This study investigates the possibility of changing voter attitudes towards housing and housing policies with a pair of preregistered survey experiments conducted on adult residents of New Hampshire, one of the most tightly regulated states for new housing. We discover two forms of messaging that move public opinion on state and local housing policy and find typical, anti-development attitudes among homeowners, but not renters, when it comes to proposed developments in respondents’ own neighbourhoods.

Keywords:

• Housing
• zoning
• land use
• public opinion
• political psychology

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest has been declared by the authors.

Notes

1 Using demographic indicators captured at the start of the survey, we constructed Heckman selection models of survey attrition for the messaging experiment and found no substantive differences in results, which are available in online appendix Table 5.

2 Our respondents were somewhat more pro-housing. If anything, this should make it a little harder to change their reported attitudes to be even more pro-housing. Compared to the randomized survey sample, our experimental sample was slightly younger and significantly more Democratic and less home-owning, which explains why they were more pro-housing to begin with.

3 Per Leeper, Hobolt, & Tilley (2020), the issue comparing the magnitude across subgroups is driven by AMCE forcing the reference category to equal 0, which is basically saying the two subgroups have a marginal mean that is equal for the reference category.

4 We are indebted to a comment by Michael Hankinson on this point.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority and helpful comments from Michael Hankinson, Max Latona, Ben Frost, Salim Furth, and participants in the ‘Land-Use Regulation and Housing Affordability’ research workshop at the Center for Ethics at Saint Anselm College. All errors are our own. Replication data and code are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VGKSQK.