Opposition to development or opposition to developers? Experimental evidence on attitudes toward new housing

ABSTRACT

Opposition to new housing at higher densities is a pervasive and understudied problem, and an obstacle to both urban sustainability and housing affordability. Most existing research on housing opposition focuses on subsidized affordable housing, rather than new market-rate development. Scholars also tend to examine opponents’ stated concerns, which often overlap and may obscure their underlying motivations. This article uses a survey-framing experiment, administered to over 1,300 people in Los Angeles County, to isolate different arguments against new market-rate housing and measure their relative persuasive power. We test the impact of common anti-housing arguments, such as traffic congestion, but also introduce the idea that residents might dislike development because they dislike developers. We find strong evidence for this idea: opposition to new development increases by 20 percentage points when respondents learn that a developer is likely to earn a large profit. This effect is similar in magnitude to arguments that new housing will harm neighborhood character. Our findings show that some opposition to housing is motivated not by residents’ fears of their own losses, but resentment of others’ gains.

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Acknowledgments

This research project was generously supported by the UCLA Ziman Center and the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. Insightful comments on earlier drafts were provided by Andrew Whittemore, Weihuang Wong, the editors and anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Urban Affairs, and participants at the NYU Wagner Seminar on March 1, 2018.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. For example, the 2017 American Housing Survey shows that 38% of renters below the poverty level receive some sort of rent subsidy, be it public housing, a voucher, or a means-tested below-market unit. The remaining poor households live in market-rate units, albeit usually older units.

2. Rent control could also explain why tenants oppose new housing in some cities. Rent control transfers some property rights from owners to renters (Arnott, 1995), and should thus let renters behave more like homeowners, particularly in decisions to exclude outsiders from local collective goods. Only a handful of expensive cities have rent controls, however, and renter opposition to housing appears prevalent even in uncontrolled expensive cities.

3. Whether this perception is accurate is another matter, and beyond the scope of this paper, but localized rent increases are highly endogenous. It may appear that a new development made prices rise in the existing stock, but it is also plausible that the new development and the rising prices were both consequences of rising demand.

4. Calculated from the 2016 American Community 1-year sample.

5. Available at: https://evildevelopermovies.wordpress.com/ (accessed February 17, 2018).

6. The second edition changed this image to a rendering of MetroTech, a public-private development in downtown Brooklyn.

7. Distrust of affluence, in turn, may be an ingrained residual of our evolutionary past, since hunter-gatherer lifestyles were so egalitarian (e.g., Morris, 2015).

8. Calculated from the 2016 1-year American Community Survey.

9. The conditions we describe here have some similarity to the way developers are portrayed in both urban growth machine and urban regime literature (Logan & Molotch, 1987; Mossberger & Stoker, 2001), in that both situate developers as influential players in city politics. At the risk of simplifying these theories, however, they also tend to see developers as being relatively unregulated. We emphasize, in contrast, that developers’ appearance of power and illegitimacy can arise from some developers being able to escape strict regulation.

10. The canonical example is people paying for organ transplants. Ample evidence suggests that many more people would get the kidneys they need if the organs were allocated by price, but such trades are banned for ethical reasons (Roth, 2007).

11. This approach is similar to one taken by Whittemore and BenDor (2018b). In the rest of the survey, we combined the three multifamily neighborhood types to simplify the structure of the questions. Only 5% of the sample (61 respondents) live in a predominantly 10+ story neighborhood. Unfortunately, this is too few to analyze separately with any statistical validity. We run later analyses without this group for robustness and find only trivial differences in results.

12. One could also make the argument that large profits depend on special permission, since the permission would increase a parcel’s residual land value after the developer had purchased it. We think this point is probably valid. Our concern, however, is with how people perceive developer profits, and since most people are not aware of the relationship between profit and discretionary permission, we do not consider it a compelling reason to combine our frames.

13. Another, smaller difference with this frame is that this frame includes a statement of fact (“some of your neighbors … point out that”) whereas the others suggest concern about probabilistic outcomes (“some of your neighbors … worry that”). This difference in phrasing might give the frame a slightly greater weight among respondents.

14. To be precise, the market-rate housing is different in being sold at a profit. Subsidized affordable housing is built at a profit by the developer, as anyone who has looked at an affordable housing pro forma knows. “Nonprofit” developers build housing that operates at a loss, but the development itself is profitable. The general public, however, probably does not make this distinction, and likely sees market-rate developers as interested in profit while nonprofit developers are not.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Ziman Center for Real Estate, University of California, Los Angeles, and the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.

Notes on contributors

Paavo Monkkonen

Paavo Monkkonen is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He studies how policies and markets shape urbanization and social segregation in cities around the world.

Michael Manville

Michael Manville is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He studies transportation, land use, housing and public finance.