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Most people in the United States support affordable housing, however, attitudes often shift when local developments are proposed. Stanford researchers have found that negative emotional associations with the idea of affordable housing, as well as racist beliefs, contribute significantly to neighborhood opposition to these spaces.
It’s well known that the United States has a severe shortage of affordable housing, and while polls have shown that most people support building more affordable housing, “the reality is that local opposition from the public at town meetings remains a huge barrier,” said Sarah Billington, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.
In a recent study, Billington and his fellow researchers explored the factors that predict support for affordable housing at the local level.
Their work, published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, shows that people's emotional responses to affordable housing can play a significant role in shifting hypothetical support for affordable housing to specific opposition to local construction.
Researchers say these reactions may be rooted in unconscious biases, such as racism or classism, and that addressing them could help build support for affordable housing developments.
“We really wanted to see how this emotional response, which may be driven in part by unconscious racism or classism, combines with more conscious racism,” explained Isabella Douglas, who led the research as part of her doctoral work in Billington’s lab. “There has been a call in urban planning to grapple with people’s emotional responses to the built environment and to recognize that these emotional responses, while they can be difficult to understand and manage, have a big impact.”
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there are only 34 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 extremely low-income households nationwide. The United States would need an additional 7.3 million affordable homes to fill this gap.
“This is a national crisis,” said Deland Chan, a Stanford researcher with expertise in urban planning and co-author of the paper. “The issue of affordable housing affects everyone, not just those in big cities, and we need more interdisciplinary perspectives and collaborations to make progress on these complex societal issues.”
Researchers distributed an online survey to 534 participants across the United States and found that while most participants supported affordable housing at the state, city, and neighborhood levels, the amount of opposition doubled at the neighborhood level.
“There’s a proximity effect, where as you get closer and closer to the person, their support levels go down,” Douglas said.
Many of their results were similar to what had been found in an earlier study conducted a decade ago: People who made more money, lived in suburban neighborhoods, or were more conservative tended to be less supportive of affordable housing in their neighborhoods, while people who trusted the federal government more tended to be more supportive of it.
The researchers also found several trends and correlations that had not been previously reported: People with higher levels of education or who lived in single-family homes were less supportive of affordable housing, and people who had lived in their neighborhood for more than 10 years or who had personally interacted with affordable housing were more supportive.
However, the most important predictors of opposition to affordable housing were racism and negative emotional connotations associated with the idea of affordable housing.
While the effects of symbolic racism have been documented, the finding that people's initial emotional response, potentially stemming from unconscious racism or other biases, can affect their views on affordable housing is new.
The researchers also found statistical evidence that these factors interacted with some neighborhood-level demographic characteristics, which could help explain the shift in support to the opposition once actual development proposals are on the table.
For example, people living in suburban neighborhoods had more negative emotional connotations with affordable housing, so they tended to be more opposed to neighborhood developments. This finding was not related to symbolic racism, highlighting the important role of emotional responses and the potential unconscious biases behind them.
“A lot of times, arguing about buildings is used as a more socially acceptable way to protest affordable housing projects,” Douglas said. “We’re going to be dealing with the effects of racism on our projects and we need to be able to talk about that and address it.”
The researchers intend for this initial work to be a starting point for understanding how engineers can help increase support for affordable housing developments.
This resource is supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as part of the Stop the Hate program To report a hate incident or hate crime and get support, go to AC vs Hate.
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