The Political Psychology of NIMBYism

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“What about my property values?” It’s the question local elected officials have heard from their constituents countless times.

Whether it’s a debate over a new energy project, park redevelopment, or new housing construction, local governments can seem almost singularly obsessed with how proposals will impact home values.

The ubiquity of this concern has led many people to believe that property values are the primary way people decide whether they are in favor or opposed to new housing construction in their area. If an apartment building is going to harm your home’s resale value, the thinking goes, you’ll be against it.

But lots of people oppose new housing even when it’s in their financial self-interest.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the political scientist David Broockman about the limits of using self-interest as a lens for understanding people’s opposition to new development. His research, with the scholars Chris Elmendorf and Josh Kalla, points to symbolic-politics theory, a framework that de-emphasizes personal impacts and financial self-interest and instead looks at how people feel about symbols such as cities, developers, and affordable housing.

“I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, that financial self-interest matters some or personal impacts might matter some,” Broockman explains. “But we also know if we just think about any other political issues—so think about taxes, think about abortion—yes, self-interest, personal impacts are some of that. But there’s plenty of anti-abortion women. There’s plenty of rich people that vote to raise their taxes. Ideology, tastes—that’s a lot of the story too about why people have the views that they have.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: Why do people get so upset when someone proposes an apartment building or some other new development near where they live?

The prevailing theory is that it’s mostly about property values. Homeowners are worried that a high-rise or renters or, quote, “the type of people who live in multifamily housing” can lower the resale value of their house. And in a country where for most middle-class people, their primary residence is their primary wealth-building tool, anything that threatens your home value is suspect.

But is that the real reason for NIMBYism?

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

My guest today is David Broockman. He’s a political scientist at UC Berkeley whose new paper with Chris Elmendorf and Josh Kalla questions the roots of NIMBYism.

David and his co-authors reason that if NIMBYism is about protecting property values, then renters should be less NIMBY than homeowners. But they find that when they ask people about new development or building more housing, the opinions of homeowners are, essentially, the same as their renter counterparts.

David and his co-authors offer a different theory: Support and opposition for new housing is largely predicated on how you feel about cities to begin with. Regardless of whether your property values are at stake, someone who lives in a city probably likes cities and, thus, is more likely to support new housing or denser development.

This is a really fascinating conversation that zooms out to untangle the nature of political beliefs, and it dovetails with a lot of the reporting I’ve been doing over the years on this very question.

David, welcome to the show.

David Broockman: Thanks so much for having me.

Demsas: So why aren’t you a NIMBY?

Broockman: (Laughs.) That’s a great question. And, you know, if you look in the research we have so far in political science trying to understand NIMBYism, I actually sort of should be a NIMBY. So I own a home in San Francisco. And if you think about right now, there’s this big push to upzone cities, like, as a San Francisco homeowner, I should be a super NIMBY.

Obviously, I’m here to talk about my academic work, but as a person, I am definitely not a NIMBY. I would like to see more housing in my neighborhood. And so part of what we’re trying to do in this paper is come up with a theory of people like me and a lot of other people who don’t quite fit the boxes that we’d expect, in terms of what they think about housing politics, based on whether they’re a homeowner or not and whether or not development’s happening near them.

Demsas: I think it’s funny. Because I thought about this question, too, for myself, because, obviously, there are these macro explanations you can do. You can think about why you are the way you are, based on where you grew up, or who your parents are, or socioeconomic status you had as a kid, or the school, or whatever you had, and your own personal reasons.

And it’s very easy to just have the very individualized reasons like, Well, I read an Ed Glaeser paper when I was, you know, 17 years old, and so that’s why I’m not a NIMBY. But that doesn’t really explain things on a macro level. So the conventional wisdom about NIMBYism, or why people oppose new housing in their communities, I think of that as being popularized by Bill Fischel’s homevoter hypothesis.

Broockman: Yes.

Demsas: Can you lay that out for us?

Broockman: Yeah, there’s a few versions of it, actually. I think the original is, actually, a little more nuanced. It’s about, kind of, risk and how homeowners might want to basically not have a lot of change in their community, because they’re uncertain about the impact on their home value.

But I think the basic version of it that’s gotten popularized, which is a little more simple than the original, is just the idea that if you’re a homeowner—just like, say, a taxi driver at the time of the introduction of Uber—you have this kind of scarce good, so be it a home or a taxi medallion, and you don’t want a lot of competition to come in.

So if there’s more supply of homes, just like if there’s more supply of taxi medallions, the thought is, Hey. We’re part of this home-ownership cartel. If there’s more supply of homes, then the prices are going to go down. That’s going to devalue my asset. So I’m going to be against that. And that’s the kind of financial-self-interest explanation for NIMBYism, or this kind of popularized version of the homevoter hypothesis that’s out there more generally.

Demsas: Well, give us the complicated version. It’s a wonky show. What’s Fischel’s version?

Broockman: Yeah, I think it’s, in some ways, a little bit been lost to the sands of time in terms of how it’s been popularized. I think, if anything, the explanation that I think has gotten a lot more attention—and that I think is actually, in my view, much better empirically supported—is a little bit less about financial-self-interest.

Because if you just look at a lot of the empirical research, the empirical evidence for this financial-self-interest explanation, I think there’s some for it; there’s some against it. I would say it’s kind of uneven, to be honest. I think NIMBYism—and I think there’s a reason we kind of use that term—is the explanation that’s out there that I do think there’s a lot to, although I think it’s incomplete, and that’s just the idea that there’s these negative externalities, hyperlocal negative externalities of new-home building. That’s everything from the construction noise, traffic, impacts on views—things like that.

And so, you know, I think there’s a lot of evidence for that. For example, there’s a really nice paper by one of our former UC Berkeley students, Alexander Sahn, who’s now a professor at UNC, where he shows, in some really cool data work he did at the S.F. Planning Commission, that if you merge the data from the S.F. Planning Commission and all these public hearings where people say, Hi. I’m so and so. I’m here to oppose this new housing, or, I’m here to support this new housing—if you merge that with a voter file to figure out where people actually live and where this new housing is being proposed, people are way more likely to show up to oppose housing if that new housing is proposed to be built near their home and near where they live. And so I think we have a lot of evidence for that and a lot more evidence for it that that’s a lot of the story in terms of opposition to new housing.

And part of what we’re trying to do in this paper is say, There’s definitely some merit to that, but it’s not the whole story. As we talked about at the top, someone like me, I should be at the S.F. Planning Commission. It’s, actually—the planning commission is only a few blocks from my house. I should be going there all the time to oppose all the new construction in my neighborhood, as a homeowner, but that is far from what I’ve been doing.

Demsas: So what first made you skeptical that this explanation could really explain NIMBYism? Because, you know, it’s funny—I’ve been asked, you know, What’s something you have changed your mind about? And my answer for, like, the last year or so has been, you know, I used to really over-index on the idea that people oppose new housing because of their property values.

And a big part of what changed my mind on that was: (A) When you do a bunch of reporting and you talk to people, they’re often using the word property values as, like, a shorthand for things that they think are good or things that they think are bad. So like, Things will lower my property values if I don’t like them, you know what I mean? Even whether or not that’s actually true, that’s how they kind of talk about it. It’s a language we give people to oppose new housing in many ways.

But what kind of started you thinking that maybe this wasn’t really fully explanatory?

Broockman: Yeah, absolutely. So a few personal experiences actually, as well as just my academic training and being a political science Ph.D. So I come from this kind of school of thought and public opinion where my basic explanation with any new political issue that comes onto the scene—one of my kind of first frameworks that I use to think about, Okay, you know, who might support and oppose this? is a framework called “symbolic-politics theory.” This theory was originally popularized by David Sears and his colleagues a long time ago, where basically, back in the ’70s, they’re trying to understand how people think about issues like busing or how they vote in presidential elections.

Demsas: You mean busing for integrating schools?

Broockman: Yes, exactly. You know, back then, a lot of the basic explanations people would come to those kinds of questions with really assumed it’s all about kind of financial self-interest or kind of personal impacts on people, just like we think about with housing. And just like in those cases, I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong that financial self-interest matters some, or personal impacts might matter some.

But we also know, if we just think about any other political issues—so think about taxes; think about abortion—yes, self-interest, personal impacts are some of that. But there’s plenty of anti-abortion women. There’s plenty of rich people that vote to raise their taxes. Ideology, tastes—that’s a lot of the story, too, about why people have the views that they have. And so I’ve had a lot of personal experiences over the years paying attention to this housing issue that have made me realize: You know what? Maybe housing is just kind of like any other issue, where self-interest and personal impacts are some of the story but, actually, not the whole story.

One of those personal anecdotes: I was talking with a member of my family—as I mentioned, I have a condo in San Francisco, where I live—and this member of my family and I were talking about moving to this condo and how I wish there was more housing like this. I was talking to them about it, and they just said, You know, I just don’t understand how you can live like that. You know, You don’t have a yard. You know, you can’t walk out onto green grass right from your front door. And they, eventually, at some point said not just, I don’t think you should live like that, but they said, People shouldn’t live like that.

And I realized, Well, wait a minute. To some extent, you know, the people who choose to go live in the suburbs, they obviously have revealed through that choice, to the extent they can—on average, the people who choose to live in the suburbs are revealing that’s the kind of low-density living that they like. Whereas me, choosing to live in a condo in San Francisco, I’m revealing I have a taste for this like high-density living—where for me, living in the suburbs is like my version of a nightmare.

So I realized in that conversation, Okay, people clearly have these tastes, but they’re kind of externalizing those into their views about public policy and thinking, Okay, it’s not just that I think, for example, cities good. Like, as someone like me who loves living in a dense city, it seems that then affects my preferences about what public policy should allow. Just like people who live in suburbs, they’re thinking, Hmm, like, that’s not the kind of living I want. That’s not what the government should be encouraging.

Demsas: So it’s not like I think that anyone can have, you know—I like an iPhone that’s pink, but I don’t care if other people have green. It’s like, I think people should have phones or shouldn’t have phones. You know what I mean?

Broockman: Yeah, exactly. And so that’s one of the basic arguments we’re trying to make in this paper, is that people have varying tastes for denser housing development. And so when we’re thinking about NIMBYism, we shouldn’t just think about, Well, I don’t want more housing near me.

This started to become really relevant in California, where I live, because the state legislature started to do a lot to try to encourage building more housing across the state, and some of those bills specifically targeted cities. So for example, in California, the legislature passed this bill a few years ago, A.B. 2011, which basically upzoned vast swaths of the state, basically commercial corridors in cities. So there’s a bunch of new development—well, not a bunch—some new development in San Francisco that’s being proposed now using this new law.

And one of the interesting things about it is that if you look at who voted for that law and who some of the strongest supporters were, a lot of them were the legislators and the people who represent or live in the areas most affected. And that’s, like, really counter to what you’d expect from this idea of NIMBYism.

And we see that in our daily data as well. So we actually asked a survey question on one of the surveys we did, where we asked people, Do you think cities should have to allow five-story apartment buildings to be built along major streets and in commercial areas? And if you came in with the view that financial self-interest and NIMBYism explained things, again, people like me should be the most opposed to that. As a homeowner in a big city, I’m going to get the double-whammy negative impact of more new construction near me and new density and all that NIMBYism stuff, as well as maybe my property value would go down.

But actually, when we break things out by whether people live in cities or not, and it’s only people in cities this law would affect, as well as people who are owners versus renters, it’s actually owners in cities who are the most supportive. And that seems to be because the people who choose to own in cities have revealed through their behavior that they really like cities, and they have a taste for density.

And so to your point, when you ask those people, Well, do you think the government should do things to make more of the stuff that you like—namely, cities and density? people say, Yeah, let’s do it. Clearly, I like that.

Demsas: So that’s what your paper starts off with, right? You start off kind of trying to separate out the ways in which owners versus renters think about new housing. And like you say, the really surprising finding is that people who own their homes inside cities are the most likely to support new housing being built in these very kinds of neighborhoods. So I want to ask you about this finding and stress test it from a couple different perspectives.

First, I have a question around how we can even think about this, the way that new housing impacts property values, right? Because it really depends on how development occurs, what happens to your property values. So one thing that people have talked about a lot is that, you know, let’s say you have a single-family home, and it’s in this nice neighborhood. You can sell it for a pretty penny if you have a nice single-family home in San Francisco, but you could probably sell it for a lot more money if you’re now able to build a five-story apartment building on it, right? So isn’t it possible that a lot of people do view it in their financial self-interest to have their homes upzoned?

Broockman: Yeah, this is one of the, I think, funny things about kind of the details of these self-interest theories. And I think it’s part of why, you know, some of these theories can be a little bit difficult to pin down, because it really depends on how you pin down self-interest, right?

So, you know, even to broaden that out, you know, one more: We don’t want to necessarily argue here, Oh, people are being stupid or doing things not in their self-interest, in the sense that if I think about me as someone who has a taste for denser housing near me, I would say, you know, you could imagine a way of thinking about it, which is, Well, I guess it’s in my self-interest that I have this taste for more-dense housing near me. And so yeah, I’m gonna vote to elect politicians or for California ballot measures, which we love out here, to try to get more of the stuff that I like around me, because that’s what I want.

And I agree that, in this case, this is one of the reasons that, to your question, self-interest theory can be a little bit hard to pin down because it really depends on how you define it. And I don’t think even economists all agree about, Okay, A.B. 2011 in California—what is going to be the long-run impact of that policy on homeowners’ home values or financial interests? And you can think about all kinds of second-order consequences, like, Okay, well, maybe property-tax revenue will go up, and so that will put less pressure. And so there’s just so many possible mechanisms there.

And so I think from our perspective, our view is to say, Well, okay, that kind of stuff could be part of what’s going on in people’s heads. But at the same time, just such a powerful predictor of people’s answer to that question is just one simple question, which is, Do you like big cities? And the people who say, I like big cities, they’re like, Yes, we should build more housing in cities. And the people who say, I don’t like big cities, say they don’t.

So we want to be really clear in this paper: We’re not trying to argue that self-interest is not part of the story or that NIMBYism, especially, is not part of the story, but just that those probably leave something out. So there could be something to that—and maybe a lot to it.

There’s also this other thing, which is just: Some people like density on its own terms. They reveal that through their behavior. And it’s those people, when you ask them survey questions like where they think about policies like, Should we have more density? say, Yeah, I like that. Let’s do more of it.

Demsas: So if people who live in dense places like density, why isn’t it just really easy to upzone Manhattan?

Broockman: Yeah, that’s a great question. So this goes a little bit beyond our paper, but I’ll give you my kind of personal view of it, having had a bit of a front-row seat, having lived in San Francisco for over a decade now, kind of how things play out here.

I think it’s a funny irony where, basically, what you see is: People in cities tend to support a lot of new housing. There was, for example, a recent poll done by the folks at GrowSF here recently, ahead of our mayoral election, where they asked about a bunch of the different mayoral candidates’ housing platforms. And upzoning the city is incredibly popular. You look at in their poll questions about building skyscrapers near BART stations, having even five-to-eight-story buildings citywide, like, more people support that than oppose it. And that’s, I think, quite different from, I think, what you’d expect to see in something like a suburb.

My sense is that—and this is a little bit beyond our paper, but—there’s some other work on this. Especially, there’s a really nice recent paper by one of our Ph.D. students, Anna Weissman, as well as Asya Magazinnik and Michael Hankinson, where they have a kind of theory of this that I think has a lot of merit to it. Which is to say: It’s kind of more about interest groups, that in a place like San Francisco, for example, if a developer is going to go build housing, and they get all the approvals, especially before the rise in interest rates, that could be very profitable.

And so, basically, a bunch of interest groups show up. That’s, frankly, the city wanting fees. That’s unions wanting labor requirements. That’s environmentalists wanting labor standards. That’s affordable-housing activists wanting affordable housing. That’s all the toppings on Ezra Klein’s proverbial everything bagel that show up and say, Hey. There’s going to be this new development. There’s a lot of profit to be made. We want to capture some of that value.

And so that’s, in my sense, a part of what’s happening in places like San Francisco. Some of the barrier is NIMBYism—that, yes, the people in the immediate vicinity will kind of show up to give negative comments about new housing, but that a lot of the story is that those folks are in coalition with this set of groups who want to capture value from new housing and that kind of gum up the works.

Demsas: So basically, while people who live in very dense areas—whether we’re talking about Manhattan or, you know, San Francisco—generally, the people are clearly showing that they’re fine with there being tall buildings and some level of density. Interest groups are kind of interceding that process and kind of gumming up the democratic feedback loop.

Broockman: Yeah, I think that’s right. And, for example, in San Francisco, if you look at our recent citywide elections, almost always in our state assembly elections, our state senate elections, our mayoral elections, you almost always have a pro-housing candidate. You even have candidates who formerly, when they were representing neighborhoods, were kind of a little more on the NIMBY side. And then when they run for citywide office, they become super YIMBY in their rhetoric.

And I think that’s very consistent with this kind of theory that when people are thinking their immediate neighborhood, they get to be a little more conflicted about development. But when they think about these broad policies—like, Should we have more housing everywhere?—then they become a lot more supportive. And interest groups, I think, are a lot of the part of the story of how it is that when there’s these kinds of, you know, particular fights in front of the S.F. Planning Commission that the average person is not paying attention to, those interest groups can show up in force to try to block those proposals.

Demsas: So getting back to your paper, this finding you have about city homeowners are more likely than even city renters to be pro-housing in these communities—if it’s just about being willing to live in a city, why would homeowners versus renters be more likely to be more pro housing? Why don’t you just kind of see that divide between city dwellers and suburbanites?

Broockman: Yeah. So, you know, we’re not 100 percent sure. But my hypothesis for this—so in particular, I think what you’re asking about is that what we see is that if you look among people who live in cities, within cities, the owners are even more pro-upzoning than renters. And my guess for what explains that finding is simply that it’s just a stronger signal if you choose to make the choice to actually own in a city versus rent.

So you see this on both ends where, on people who don’t live in cities, the owners are more opposed than the renters among people who don’t live in cities—of upzoning cities. So my guess is it’s just, like, you see the owners being better sorted, because if you’re choosing to live somewhere kind of quasi-permanently, that’s just a stronger signal than Hey. I’m gonna rent here for a year or something like that.

Demsas: I guess it could also be, though I’m not sure how this squares with your finding about the suburbs there—it could also be that if you’re a renter, there are just fewer renter opportunities in suburbs, in general. And so you’re kind of forced to be allocated more-dense locations. And so you can’t sort as well as you could if you were just willing to own or able to own.

Broockman: Yeah, exactly. Definitely could be possible too.

Demsas: So I want to draw another tension. Because you’re really laying a lot on this idea that people’s affinity for big cities makes them more likely to support more housing. But you also, even in this conversation, have cited research that shows that people who live near a proposed project are more likely to give negative comments. That’s that Alexander Sahn research. So how do you kind of square the circle here? Like, people are both more likely to support if they live in dense locations, but also, if they’re in those dense locations and someone proposes a project, they’re more likely to oppose it.

Broockman: Yeah, I think it’s just: Both are true, and they’re not mutually exclusive. And we actually have the—we did a little reanalysis of some of the data from Alexander Sahn’s paper on this. So he, as I mentioned, has this really cool data where he geocoded all of these people who commented at the S.F. Planning Commission and showed there’s this really powerful relationship where people who live closer to a proposed project are more likely to show up and oppose it.

So one of the things that we find is that if you look in that same data—so we replicate his finding. You know, it’s very clearly there. We also just code the density of the block where they live, and we show that that also predicts things. So if you want to predict, basically—if you go to, for example, a random census block in San Francisco and then pick a random housing development, one very powerful predictor is: If that census block is closer to the development, you’re going to get more negative comments. But also, if that census block is itself denser, you’re going to get more positive comments.

So imagine, for example, you have a five-story building going up somewhere in San Francisco, and, on one side of the building, you have a kind of single-family neighborhood, and on the other side, you have a kind of denser neighborhood, somewhere at the kind of boundary of density, so to speak. Our basic finding is you’re going to get—obviously, the people who live near there are going to comment more, but, disproportionately, the negative comments are going to come from people who live at the same distance but live in a less-dense area versus the people who live in kind of the denser area nearby.

Demsas: Cool. So both of those forces are working on people, and how it nets out is, like, a question of how much density and also how many people live very close to that project.

Broockman: Yeah, exactly. As one anecdote on this: As I mentioned, I live in a condo building in San Francisco. There’s actually been a ton of new development proposed near our building. We have a very active WhatsApp thread in our building. You know, people love to complain about different things happening in the neighborhood. Basically, not a peep about any new housing development at all. You know, 14-story buildings, eight-story buildings—you know, no one thinks to complain at all, because there’s already a bunch of eight-story buildings near us, right? And so clearly, by choosing to live in this building we live in, everyone’s revealed that this is not the kind of thing that bothers them.

Demsas: So, you know, we talked a little bit about the symbolic politics that you ascribe to, and a big part of your paper are the symbols that turn people off to new housing. What sorts of symbols are turning people off to new housing? What kinds of things are we talking about here?

Broockman: Yeah. So the other reason we wrote this paper is that, you know, I think so much of the thinking about housing politics is really in this, like, what I’d call the S.F. Planning Commission sort of paradigm. So I’ve been to the S.F. Planning Commission to give comments about new housing, so I’ve experienced this. It’s important.

But the fact is that so much of the action right now in housing policy is not about planning commissions or city councils making discretionary decisions about particular proposed developments. There’s this whole vast area of other housing policy that I would argue is actually way more important in terms of outcomes. So that includes upzoning that we’ve been talking about, but a bunch of other things too: impact fees, below-market-rate housing mandates, permit streamlining, environmental reviews—all this other stuff that matters a lot.

And the basic idea of our paper, and where I think symbolic-politics theory really shines, is to say, Okay, let’s imagine a policy like below-market-rate housing mandates. So what that says is, for example, a policy might say, Oh, if you’re going to build a new market-rate building, then X percent—say 20 percent—of the units in that building have to be deed restricted, affordable housing that are going to be sold at below market rates.

Our basic thought is to say, Okay, let’s imagine a policy like that, or all the other many other policies that aren’t about specific proposed developments that state legislatures and cities are making. How are people going to reason about those? One view you could have is that, well, people are going to then think through, All right, well, what’s the impact for my self-interest?

And as we were talking about, that’s actually really hard to do—even for a social scientist to say, like, what is actually in someone’s self-interest, let alone an average voter who doesn’t have the incentive, frankly, to think through all that. And so symbolic-politics theory says, Well, what they’re going to do is, basically, rather than think through all that, think about the symbols that the kind of policy makes salient.

So imagine a policy like below-market-rate housing mandates that say, Okay, we’re going to force developers to build housing for low-income people. The basic idea of symbolic-politics theory is that when people are thinking about a question like that, they’re going to, in their head, think about just the much simpler question of, Well, do I like the group that this policy seems good for? Or do I like the group that this policy seems bad for?

So in below-market-rate housing mandates, on a superficial level, it’s like, Well, this seems bad for developers. You’re going to make them do stuff. And this seems good for poor people because you’re going to try to build housing for them. And so you’d expect to see that people who kind of don’t like developers as much and care more about low-income people or have more pro-redistributive preferences would say, Yeah, okay. That sounds good to me. And so that’s the basic idea of symbolic-politics theory, and we walk through just a ton of examples of a ton of different housing policies that look like this.

Demsas: And sorry—before you get into that, I wanted to ask: One of the themes of our show is sort of this question of how democracy actually functions. Like, how do voters understand what’s going on around them? How do they apportion blame? How do they engage the political process? And I feel like I can make arguments in either direction here. What you’re describing with symbolic-politics theory, does that indicate to you that voters are sophisticated or unsophisticated?

Broockman: Yeah, there’s a whole debate in our discipline about like, Oh, are voters rational? Sort of like, Are voters stupid? Are they competent? I find those debates, to be honest, a little bit overwrought.

Demsas: (Laughs.) Why?

Broockman: My view on this is that, you know, if you think about a question like this, voters don’t have the incentive to carefully think through all of these policy questions.

So for example, there’s a political campaign—so we just, for example, had a big election in San Francisco. One of the big things that the kind of less-pro-housing coalition in San Francisco politics likes to talk about is they say, Well, all of this upzoning is just allowing luxury condos. Why are they doing that? And I think part of why they’re doing it and why they use that rhetoric—and we actually have an experiment in our paper inspired by this—is that, you know, voters kind of know housing is a problem. The average voter doesn’t have the incentive to do a bunch of research and read a bunch of Ed Glaeser papers. Like, you know, freaks like you and me love to do that, but the average person doesn’t have the incentive to do that, because, individually speaking, whether they come up with the right answer on housing policy is not going to affect the outcome. So they don’t really have an incentive to figure it out.

But they hear this rhetoric like, Well, this politician supports building more luxury condos. And so I think people, even if on some level, if they thought about it, they would be able to come to a kind of more thoroughly reasoned view. I think, in typical politics, they just don’t have the incentive to do that, and so they’re going to rely on these heuristics where they kind of make a mental shortcut to say, Well, okay, luxury housing—you know, all right. Well, that seems like it’s good for rich people.

And so one of the things we show in our paper is: When we ask people a survey question about whether local governments should have to allow five-story buildings to be built in different areas, if we describe that building as a five-story apartment building versus a five-story luxury apartment building, people who feel fine about rich people don’t really care, but people really don’t like rich people have a very strong reaction to that and become 18 points less supportive, which is a huge effect. So all of a sudden, people who are like, Yeah, you know, apartment buildings? Fine. And then you say, Wait. But it’s a luxury. They say, Oh no, I don’t like that. Let’s not do this.

It’s funny: I presented that finding at an economics conference, and you know, this gets to your question. The economists are sort of flabbergasted by this.

Demsas: (Laughs.) Of course they were.

Broockman: Because they say, Wait a minute. And it’s a good point that if you look at just the revealed preferences in terms of where people choose to live, like, people seem like they like living near rich people. And yet, when you ask people, like, Well, should we allow for more luxury condos?—so presumably, a building that, on average, more rich people would live in—the people who have that negative affect towards rich people say, You know what? I don’t think we should do that.

And so for me, that’s how I think this kind of plays out is: You have elections where people are hearing a lot of different rhetoric. They don’t have an incentive to think through things very much. And so politicians on both sides have to worry about not just all the details of, like, What effect will this policy actually have? but when this policy is summarized in three or five words for people on a campaign mailer or in a TV ad or in a radio interview, How is the average person going to think about this?

And so if you support a policy that can be framed as, Well, this is going to allow luxury condos, well, in a liberal place where people have negative attitudes towards rich people, that could really depress support for that policy or the politicians supporting it.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: the symbols that divide YIMBYs from NIMBYs.

[Break]

Demsas: I interrupted you before, but what are some of these symbols in your paper that you look at that you find to be really explanatory or have massive effects on people’s support?

Broockman: So this paper is co-authored with Josh Kalla at Yale and Chris Elmendorf at UC Davis. So we basically work together to compile a bunch of these different policies. And again, there’s just so many that are relevant to housing.

So I’ll just give you a couple more examples. So one that we lead out with, which I think is really fun, was inspired by an anecdote from someone in California who was doing some focus groups on housing. And the anecdote they told us is that in focus groups, people will say, Yeah. Housing sounds good. We probably need more of that. And then at some point, someone will bring up, Yeah. But housing’s built by developers. And then supposedly, people in the focus group say, Oh, yeah. Maybe it’s not such a good idea if developers are going to get involved.

And so we are able to replicate that anecdote experimentally, where we do this very subtle manipulation where we ask people: Would you support or oppose allowing new apartment buildings to be built in your neighborhood, or would you support or oppose allowing developers to build new apartment buildings in your neighborhood? So same question. We’re just either using the passive voice or making clear, yeah, developers build apartments. And the people who don’t like developers, when we remind them developers build new housing, become less supportive of new housing.

Then we go into a bunch of policies that are kind of more detailed than that. So I’ll give you a few examples. One is a really important policy here in California, precisely because of all this discretion allowing local NIMBYs to show up and block housing, is what we call “by-right permitting”—so basically where, if a project is legal under the existing zoning and rules, it can go ahead, and there’s not some additional discretionary review.

And so one of the experiments we do is: We ask people, essentially, whether they support a state law that would require by-right permitting. So we describe this as, Should some group that submits a housing proposal be able to build apartments that comply with the clear and specific rules the government made in advance, or, Should, basically, the government always be able to reject a proposed apartment development? And what we randomize is whether or not we say that the person submitting the project is a quote, “small, local home builder,” or a quote, “big real-estate developer.” What you find is that—

Demsas: Two guesses.

Broockman: Yes. (Laughs.) What we find is that there actually are a lot of people that have perfectly warm feelings towards developers. And they don’t have—

Demsas: Really? Do you have the percentage? Like, how many people are fine with developers?

Broockman: Yeah, so I don’t have the percentage offhand, but in our graphs, you can see—and obviously, podcasts are a great medium for expressing graphs—but in our graphs, you can see that there is a decent amount of data up on the top end. We ask these feeling thermometers, where we ask people just, How much do you like or dislike this group? So big cities, developers, whatever else.

People on the top end who say they really like developers, they basically don’t care. Some of them are still opposed to the by-right permitting. Many of them are, actually. But whether or not it’s developers or small, local home builders doing it—they don’t care. But for the people who dislike developers more, this manipulation has a really, really big effect. And so it looks like about a 30-point drop in support among those people.

And I think this is part of, for me—and, I think, bringing the symbolic-politics theory to this housing debate—it almost feels like it’s a lens through which you can kind of understand so much of the dysfunction that, in my view, happens in housing politics. Where you get—for example, in California, and in San Francisco, we have a lot of debates about whether there should be things like owner-occupancy requirements in order to redevelop a home for more housing, which would mean like, you know, an owner of a home would have to pay out of their own pocket to redevelop their home into more housing, instead of selling it to an investor or a developer who can go raise private capital to do that.

And why do you see patterns like that? I think, in part, because, well, if people don’t like developers, and they like the idea of, like, Oh, the small, local homeowner, then you can get these distortions in public policy.

Demsas: I wonder if there’s—I’ve written about this in my own work, which is just sort of the way that symbols are developed generationally, and I think you get into this in your paper a little bit. You have an aside about Boomers.

And for me, I think it’s pretty clear that, you know, when I did this story in Minneapolis, and I was looking at people who were opposing Minneapolis’s attempt to legalize a lot more housing across the city—I mean, famously, they were the first city to end single-family-only zoning. And you find this group of environmentalists, and these folks are, you know—they moved to the city when no one else wanted to be there. Like, they’re people who were like, You know, we’re real enviros. Like, we care about the city. We care about, you know, being green, etcetera. And for them, though, like, their affect towards developers, their affect towards this kind of profit making in the housing space was, like, just immovable, even if they agreed with so many of the premises of trying to build more affordable housing.

And it’s funny. Like, when you have a lot of individual, one-on-one conversations with people about their support or opposition to housing, we really find pretty quickly that it’s not about a question of, like, reasoning someone to your position. Like, it is very much like they have these preconceptions that are either—I didn’t have this language before, but you’re right that they are attached to these specific symbols.

So can you tell me a little bit about the generational warfare angle and what you find in your own paper that supports that?

Broockman: Yeah. So two things I want to mention on this.

First is: One of the other findings we have that I think ties to some of what you’ve written about, what people talk about in this area, is this really big push against the idea of kind of Wall Street ownership of single-family homes. And so we have some evidence on this, where we find that people who hate Wall Street are much more supportive of allowing landlords to redevelop properties than Wall Street investors. So there’s a bunch of people that if you hate Wall Street, you’re like, Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, Wall Street shouldn’t be able to show up and demolish a unit and build an apartment building there. But oh, the landlords should be able to.

And this ties to your question because one of the things I was looking at—it might seem really natural now that, like, Oh, well, of course. Everyone hates Wall Street, but I was actually looking at some historical public-opinion data. And if you look back 20 or 30 years ago, views towards big banks—like, pre-financial crisis, especially pre-savings-and-loan [scandal], even further back—were actually a lot more positive. And so I think it might be part of why we see this big push against Wall Street ownership, is right now our Millennial generation, who is—

Demsas: Scarred.

Broockman: Yeah, we have this really negative affect towards Wall Street, and so that creates opportunities for politicians to show up and say, Oh, well, if you really hate Wall Street, and you really care about housing, guess what? I can put those two things together for you and come up with this policy that, you know, it sounds like it’s going to do something and plays on your kind of preexisting negative affect.

But yeah, the big finding in our paper on this, which I think is suggestive. I don’t want to put too much weight on it, but I do think it’s really interesting. So we came to this because, in some other data I was looking at for another project. actually, I noticed that views on housing are, actually, just incredibly correlated with age, and more correlated than I have seen for almost any other political issue, just like the relationship between all these kinds of questions about upzoning and age is incredibly strong.

And there could be a lot of reasons for that, right? Like, I think one might be like, Our Millennial generation—we’re having a harder time affording homes, so we want, you know, more new housing, and the Boomers, you know, in our mental stereotype are all, like, enjoying their five-bedroom, empty-nesting mansions, right? That could be some of it, that self-interest part. But I think that we have some suggestive evidence that tastes are actually part of it too.

So in particular, this symbolic-politics theory—a lot of it is about the idea that people are judging these public policies based on symbols: Wall Street; developers; small, local home builders; luxury apartment buildings and the people who are gonna live in them; etcetera. But also, the other part of symbolic-politics theory is the idea that where that affect comes from originally tends to be crystallized in what we call people’s formative years. So that’s basically around the time you’re turning 18, like, in your late adolescence, early adulthood.

There’s a lot of fun evidence on this in social science and other topics, right? Like, if you ask people, What’s your favorite song? When were the best movies made? like, people always mention and will say, like, Oh wait. Things were best when I was a late teen, basically. And political views are like that, too. And there’s a lot of great papers on this more generally that, like, what’s happening that time you’re voting for the first time when you’re kind of becoming an eligible voter, you know, you’re becoming a human being—like, that has a really big impact on you.

And so we have some suggestive evidence that that is part of why the Boomer generation is so opposed to housing as well. So if you think about the Baby Boomers—those folks, when they were going through their formative years in the ’70s, that was when cities were just, like, a total basket case. Like, I was talking to my dad about this and saying, So okay, you know, when you were 20 years old or 22 years old, when you were graduating college, were you or any of your friends—was it your dream to move to a big city? And he said to me, You’d have to be out of your mind to want to do that then. Right?

Because it’s not like now, when we think about, you know, San Francisco or New York or L.A. I think our generation has this connotation of those cities as places where there’s lots of amenities. There’s economic opportunity. There’s culture happening there. Back then, when the Baby Boomers were going through their formative years, cities—that was the time of high crime in cities, all the recent redevelopment, etcetera.

And one of the fun patterns we find to support that this could be part of what’s going on is that now, if you look in current survey data, if you ask people, Are you interested in living in a city? young people are way more likely to say that than older people. And I think we all take that for granted, of like, Oh, of course. Like, the pattern is like: When you’re young, you want to live in a city, and then you get old, and you know, your back starts hurting, and you move to the suburbs.

But actually, we found this old public-opinion data from the 1970s and ’80s where they asked the same survey question. And if you look then, the relationship between age and interest in living in a city is actually exactly the opposite. So when the Baby Boomers were young, they actually were also the least interested in living in cities. And actually, older people back then—so this is people born in the 1910s, 1920s—they were actually the most interested in living in cities. And think back to that generation. They’re coming of age, right, in, like—

Demsas: That’s pre-automobile. That’s—

Broockman: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And so these kinds of, you know, sorting out how much is what we call cohort—of, like, when you were born versus age versus, etcetera—is always a little tricky. So I don’t want to put too much on this, but I do think that’s kind of one more kind pattern we find that is consistent with what you’d expect from symbolic-politics theory, that when people are thinking about things like cities and densities, part of what Boomers are thinking about is, I think, all these negative associations that they had that were kind of baked in when they were in their late teens, early 20s. Whereas for Millennials and, you know, people going through that socialization process now, this kind of symbolism is very different.

Demsas: I mean, one thing on this that you can even notice in the way that suburban development is happening now, I mean, developers will say that, you know, Millennials’ tastes for suburban development are even different than their parents’ tastes. So, you know, new suburban developments often have things like a cute little main street with a coffee shop and, like, a little mixed use, so you’ll have some apartments above that. Even if you have, like, single-family homes that people want to live in, like that’s very different from what Boomers were demanding and like, you know, other generations with these sort of cul de sacs. Or sorry—culs de sac. That’s a classic mistake.

So I think that’s really funny about how, you know—I guess it’s kind of a positive story you could tell here. Millennials—it’s a very big generation. Not to be very, you know, morbid about this, but obviously, like, Boomers are gonna die, and then Millennials will make up the larger part of the voting block and the tastemakers for how new homes will be built and developed. So it seems like a possible situation, where the people who wanted cities to look a certain way, they got that when it was their time. And maybe things will change now that tastes are changing and people are changing.

Broockman: Yeah, I think it’s very possible. Obviously, we don’t know that for sure. Hopefully, our peer reviewers, you know, don’t make us wait 30 years to see what happens when Millennials get old before they let us publish our paper. But yeah, that’s based on everything we know about how people’s tastes change or, often more likely, don’t change over time. I’d expect that we’ll see that.

Demsas: So I want to broaden out a little bit into some of the policy implications of your work. And I just want to ask, how has your paper, or I guess the work you’ve done that is written about in your paper, shifted the sorts of advice you might give to pro-housing advocates?

Broockman: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, first of all, I’ll say that I think there’s this whole subset of discourse, which is like, Oh, what YIMBYs should be doing is X, Y, Z. And I’ll note at the beginning that, objectively speaking, the YIMBY movement has been one of the most successful political movements of the last couple of decades. So I don’t want to come off like a scold, like, Ah, YIMBYs are doing it all wrong, because clearly, like, they’re doing something right.

Demsas: That’s the role of professors, right? You’re supposed to scold everyone else.

Broockman: Yeah. So in the spirit of helpful thoughts, maybe, I’d say a couple of things. One is that, clearly, what you see, I think, in a lot of cities is that there’s a lot of cynical attempts to brand more pro-housing policies in a negative light by saying things like, Oh, right—as we talked about—this is going to help Wall Street. It’s going to help developers, basically trying to find all these disliked symbols, or in a liberal place like San Francisco, rich people, even though people here are objectively mostly really rich. And so you see that attempt, and I think there could be a little more, especially in policy design, effort among YIMBYs to think about ways to harness some of those same forces.

So for example, if people love the idea of affordable housing, right, that’s a great moniker, but not everyone necessarily knows what it means. YIMBYs might think about, Well, how can we basically use that moniker to define it more generously? For example, why not define affordable housing as saying housing that’s cheaper than the typical housing in the neighborhood? That’s affordable housing. We’re going to build more affordable housing.

Or for example, people really hate government fees. They hate red tape. And so one of the things we find, for example, is that if you look at our survey question about reducing fees—so this is, again, one of the many other policies really relevant to understanding development but that isn’t about specific development—support for capping fees that cities charge on developers is actually really high in our survey. And interestingly, like, all of people’s preferences about whether or not they want more housing to be built seems basically, totally unrelated to that.

What seems really related is just how people feel about taxes. So if you say, Hey. Should we cap this tax? people are like, Yeah, lower taxes is good. And so people who don’t like taxes, which is most people, are really supportive of that, even if they’re like, Oh, I don’t want more housing. But we should definitely cap those fees and taxes because government fees and taxes are bad.

Demsas: So another controversial implication of your paper, and I think you actually spelled this out quite clearly, is that it’s so much work to try to get low-density suburbs to accept denser housing that pro-housing advocates should just stop focusing so much energy on trying to get them to accept more housing and really just focus your energy on the lower-hanging fruit of making places that are already dense more dense. That’s a pretty controversial argument, I think.

Broockman: Yeah. So this is where, in our paper, I think for the YIMBYs listening to this, they can say, Those NIMBYs—here’s this political psychology theory of why they have these weird views. But I think, in the same way, you can use this framework to understand YIMBYs, as well, in a couple ways, right? One is that YIMBYs, on average, like the idea of denser development, and so that’s part of why YIMBYs, I think, like the idea of, say, upzoning and things that build more housing. It’s that, Hey. It’s going to build the kind of neighborhoods that I like and I want to live in.

But I think the other thing is that I think we’ve seen a lot of YIMBY enthusiasm for the idea of saying things like, Hey. We’re going to end single-family zoning. We’re going to go after the suburbs. And I think part of that might be a kind of symbolic idea of, Hey. We’re going to right this historical wrong. This is going to attack, kind of, historical racism. This is going to go after single-family zoning—the ultimate expression of this thing we don’t like: the suburbs.

And clearly, my view in the economics literature, the public-policy rationale for that is very strong. I think, politically speaking, it’s worth bearing in mind, though, that that’s a much tougher path because the people who live in suburbs have revealed through their behavior that they, on average, have less of a taste for density. And so politically, just all else equal, it’s gonna be harder to put more density near the people who have revealed to you through their behavior they don’t like density than near the people like my condo building and the people who live in it who have revealed through their behavior they’re okay with more density.

So I think this is a really challenging issue because there are real equity questions about where we put new housing. But I do think watching the debate in places like California, there’s a real push towards what we’ve got to put, like, almost all the new housing in these historically exclusionary neighborhoods. And as much as, you know, with my political preferences, that sounds great to me, I think there has to be just a real careful balancing of just, like, all the other toppings on the everything bagel of things that sound great. Like, of course, who’s against the idea of the workers developing the housing getting higher wages? Who’s against cities getting more revenue?

I think of this idea of we’ve got to put new housing out there in the exclusionary suburbs as just kind of one more thing that gets added onto requirements for new housing development—Hey. It’s got to be in X, Y, Z area, not in, you know, near or close to already-dense areas. That’s going to make it more difficult. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, per se, but I think housing advocates just have to be aware that, politically speaking, I would guess all else equal, less housing is going to get built if you stipulate it has to be in an area where it’s politically less popular to do it.

Demsas: I think there’s a point well taken about wanting to make sure you’re passing policies that are actually effective. If you end single-family zoning, but you build two townhomes as a result, how many people have you really helped, even if on the book, single-family zoning is over?

But I think, you know, part of my hesitation about this point that you’re making here is (A) the impact of helping lower- and middle-income people move to suburbs with good schools is just massive. I mean, this is the “moving to opportunity” literature from Harvard’s Opportunity Insights lab and, you know, showing that you have these massive impacts on kids’ futures, their future earnings, their likelihood to go to jail—all these different things—when they’re able to move to these suburbs. And, you know, it’s a massive, massive benefit to society, and it’s a huge harm when we don’t allow for more affordable, you know, denser housing to be there.

I mean, you know, in my own life, I lived in a townhome of inclusionary zoning development in an exclusionary suburb, and that’s why I went to the schools I went to. And so—not to make it all about, you know, making sure I can do whatever I want—but that’s why I think it’s important. But then I also think that on the political side, what you’re pointing out is that there’s this virtuous cycle of being in favor of more housing if you’re okay with density.

And I wonder if you need to be able to break the vicious cycle in some sense, right? Not saying we have to put 15-story apartment buildings in every suburb in America. But this idea of sort of gentle density of kind of introducing this to people, acclimating them to it, I think is a way of changing these symbols, as well, and making it possible for people to not just have to have new housing, new density stuffed down their throats but changing that symbol from, Oh, I think of all density as being crowded, loud, low-income people who are ruining my neighborhood—like, really classist views about who’s going to live there, views about how it’s going to destroy your neighborhood character—to, like, Oh, actually, you know, now that I’m walking around Nashville, I can’t really tell what’s a quadplex and what’s a single-family home, because they largely look kind of the same.

And so I wonder how you kind of think about that angle.

Broockman: Yeah, I think, you know, in this paper, we don’t come out with a strong stance on this. I think more than it is to just kind of raise a flag that this has to be thought through carefully. Because I do think there’s a lot of just unbridled enthusiasm for the idea that, like, Well, of course. If we’re going to build more housing, like, it’s got to be that we upzone, go deep into single-family neighborhoods in the suburbs, right this historical wrong.

And it’s not that we—you know, the paper doesn’t say, like, Of course, we shouldn’t do that. I think it’s more like, Well, we need to do kind of a careful weighing of the costs and benefits here. And for me, it is a bit reminiscent of some of how the supporters of below-market-rate housing mandates talk about that policy, where they say, Hey If you look at the small number of people who live in, for example, San Francisco in below-market-rate developments, the impacts on them are, you know, undoubtedly hugely positive, right?

There’s homes in San Francisco that if they were market rate would sell for $1.5 million that people are living in and, you know, paid a quarter of that for. And so, clearly, that’s a huge benefit to that one family. The challenge, I think, is there’s some nice research being done on this by a bunch of different folks, including the Terner Center, where they show that those below-market-rate housing mandates—when you have those mandates, because it makes new market-rate construction more expensive, every one of those new units that you build as a result of that policy comes at the expense of many more market-rate units that you don’t build.

And so there are these just really tricky and unfortunate trade-offs. And I think where if you’re gonna, for example, require more affordable housing, that means you’re gonna get way less housing overall. And I think that’s the fear I have that I don’t think is overriding, but I just think needs to be weighed when it comes to this kind of, like, gentle-density idea.

So I think also, if you just do the math on, first of all, the economic feasibility of a lot of this idea of gentle density, like, it’s in many parts of the country just not economically feasible to take a single-family home and redo it so that there’s two kitchens, the box of the building stays the same size, and you have two families living in it. And I think there’s this idea there that we can kind of have this gentle density throughout the suburbs that people won’t notice, they’ll be okay with, and it’s going to build a lot of housing. And in some cases, that might be true. I just think there needs to be, like, a real careful weighing of the costs and benefits and awareness that the political costs that you’re going to be able to do less of that in the suburbs, likely, than you would be able to in denser areas has to be part of that calculus.

Demsas: Weighing trade-offs is a great place to end. So our last question: What is something that you originally thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Broockman: Yeah. So as I was chatting about doing this episode with my co-authors, Chris Elmendorf said something that I’ll give him credit for, but I was like, Yeah, that’s totally right, which is: I think, being a social scientist, you know, coming into this, I always thought, you know, there’s an old famous quote, Politicians are weather vanes. They just go wherever the wind blows. Advocates—it’s their job to, you know, make the wind blow, basically.

And one of the things that, I think in my experience, and certainly seeing kind of other academics work on policy, especially in California, frankly, is that I’ve been shocked at the extent to which legislators actually do care about evidence that social science, the things happening in, like, Berkeley’s economics department, for example. Like, I see that being reflected in really impacting state policy to an extent that like, Hey. Legislators really do care about, and policy makers care about what the evidence says, much more than I thought.

On the flip side, I think I’ve seen advocacy groups care a lot less about what the evidence says than I expected going in. So I think the idea I thought was good on paper was, Hey. Legislators, you know—they’re just single-minded seekers of reelection, but you can work with these advocates to do smart policy. And I think, over time I’ve realized, yeah, sometimes it’s the legislators who care a lot more about the evidence than the advocacy groups do.

Demsas: Well, thanks so much, David. Thanks for coming on the show.

Broockman: Thanks so much. It was really fun.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.