It’s not just NIMBYism: How partisanship shapes support for affordable housing
If you haven’t noticed, the writers on this blog pay keen attention to Ezra Klein’s podcast. Klein recently released a new book, Abundance, with Derek Thompson in which they argue that Democrats should reorient their economic policies to focus on what can be done and should be built to make Americans’ lives better.
A central component of their argument concerns housing. Affordable housing has been increasingly difficult to obtain over recent years, and public opinion data supports this claim. In fact, a supermajority of Americans believe our country has an affordable housing problem. A recent study by Pew Research has shown that the issue was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, housing was in short supply; however, city dwellers fleeing urban centers have caused housing shortages in areas that have not faced any before. Research by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as reported by Pew, has shown that among the houses available for purchase in July 2024, the average price had increased by 57% since July 2019, outpacing the Consumer Price Index, a common goods inflation measure, by over 30%. The data is clear: housing affordability is clearly an issue for many Americans.
In their book, Thompson and Klein claim that a solution to the lack of housing in the United States is relaxing zoning laws. Zoning laws are legal restrictions on where certain types of construction can occur. The “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) movement, as identified by Klein and Thompson, is a central hurdle to building more affordable housing. The NIMBY movement reflects wealthy suburban homeowners who don’t want more housing built around them, as the new housing could potentially compromise their existing way of life as well as decrease the value of their property.
The NIMBY movement espouses that individuals are incentivized to support zoning laws based on self-interest. However, housing has become an increasingly partisan issue. Notably, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris made housing one of her central domestic policy issues. This tension caused me to investigate the extent to which partisanship versus self-interest motivates support for relaxing zoning laws. To investigate this, I use data from the most recent Cooperative Election Study. In the 2024 CES survey, respondents were asked if they supported or opposed “Relax[ing] local zoning laws in your state to allow for construction of more apartments and condos.”
To begin my inquiry I plot the distribution of support among partisans sorted by homeownership status and income. A few intuitive trends emerge from the plot, such as renters unanimously having higher levels of support for relaxing zoning laws and Democrats having higher support across the board, too.
However, for all Americans, the most interesting trend is related to income. As Democrats become wealthier, they actually become more supportive of relaxing zoning laws — a contrary trend to the historically wealthy group of supporters within the NIMBY movement. However, among Republicans, the opposite is true: as Republicans become wealthier, their support for relaxing zoning laws decreases. This finding illustrates that the story is more complicated than the conventional NIMBY story: there is more nuance in support and opposition for zoning reform.
The mechanism that might be behind this is affluent polarization. That is, Democrats and Republicans who are wealthier are more likely to exhibit stronger political polarization than members of their parties who are not as affluent.
Having observed these trends, I then investigate what characteristics predict support or opposition to the policy the most. If I am correct about polarization driving support or opposition to relaxing zoning laws, the effect of partisanship and/or ideology as opposed to other characteristics will be higher. Interactions between wealthier partisans will be notable, too. I put the standard demographic variables along with ideology, level of urbanization, and a measure of political interest into a logistic regression model to predict what characteristics seem to elicit the strongest prediction of support for the policy.
The plot above shows the regression coefficients from the model. The model supports my suspicions that affluent polarization could be a key mechanism aiding partisans and their support for rezoning laws. At the top of the graph the group that exhibits the strongest support for the reform are very liberal and wealthy renter respondents along with educated respondents. However, the groups that exhibit the strongest levels of opposition are wealthy Republicans. While the confidence intervals overlap for those in the suburbs and others, the results hint at affluent polarization contributing to the formation of opinions on the issue.
To fully investigate this, I then generated a predicted probability visual with the controls of the model above to plot how income, homeownership status, and partisanship shape levels of support for rezoning laws. The graph below is a mirror image of the first plot in this post, just with additional controls layered in with the added bonus of predicted probabilities rather than raw survey responses.
The visual above shows that self-interest certainly shapes support for rezoning laws, but much more significantly for Republicans. The difference between the dashed (homeowners) line and the solid (renters) line is much more significant for Republicans than Democrats. Furthermore, there is a slightly negative slope leading between the first two income groups for all the groups, however, among Democrats there is a positive effect in support as opposed to the negative effect for Republicans. All of these datapoints, which come from the model controlling for education, level of urbanization, ideology, and political interest support the claim that it is not simply NIMBYism that drives opposition for rezoning laws — it is a combination of partisanship and affluence.
The analysis here has illustrated a complex story about the support for relaxing zoning laws to build more housing: for Democrats their support is shaped largely by partisanship but for Republicans their support is shaped more by self-interest. Given these findings, the advocates of the abundance agenda ought to prioritize strategic campaigns for affordable housing in predominantly wealthy Democratic leaning areas, rather than just campaigning nationwide for affordable housing reform.
