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Most people in the United States support affordable housing, however, attitudes often change 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 opposition to these spaces in the neighborhood.
It is well known that the United States has a major shortage of affordable housing, and while polls have shown that most people support building more affordable housing, ?the reality is that local public opposition at council meetings city is still a big 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 an important role in shifting from hypothetical support for affordable housing to specific opposition to local construction.
Researchers note that these reactions may be rooted in unconscious biases, such as racism or classism, and that addressing them could help garner 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 deal with people's emotional responses to the built environment and recognize that these emotional responses, while they may be difficult to understand and manage, have a great impact.”
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there are only 34 affordable rental homes available for every 100 extremely low-income households nationwide. The United States would need 7.3 million additional affordable homes to fill this gap.
“It's 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 perspectives and interdisciplinary collaborations to advance these complex social 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 is a proximity effect, where as you get closer and closer to the person, their support levels decrease,” Douglas said.
Many of their results were similar to what an earlier study a decade ago had found: 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 support it more.
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 those who had personally interacted with affordable housing were more supportive.
However, the most important predictors of opposition to affordable housing were racism and the negative emotional connotations associated with the idea of affordable housing.
And while the effects of symbolic racism have been documented, the finding that people's initial emotional response, potentially arising 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 from support to opposition once actual development proposals are on the table.
For example, people who lived 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 possible unconscious biases behind them.
"Many times, arguing about buildings is used as a more socially acceptable way to protest affordable housing projects," Douglas said. “We are going to deal with the effects of racism in our projects and we need to be able to talk about it and address it.”
The researchers intend 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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