Affordable Housing

Ilya Somin | 9.14.2024 12:55 PM

Exclusionary zoning regulations that severely restrict housing construction are a major cause of the housing shortages besetting large parts of the United States. The standard explanation for why these rules persist is self-interested voting and lobbying by NIMBY ("not in my backyard") homeowners who want to keep housing prices high in order to protect the value of their own property. But evidence increasingly indicates that much of the political support for exclusionary zoning actually comes from people—both renters and homeowners—who simply don't understand basic economics and therefore do not realize that increasing housing construction is likely to reduce housing costs. Such people are suspicious of developers and tend to believe that additional construction will just benefit only the developers themselves or other wealthy people.

In a just-posted article, legal scholar Chris Elmendorf and political scientists Clayton Nall and Stan Oklobdzija (ENO) provide valuable evidence on the extent to which this kind of public ignorance can be overcome by presenting "housing supply skeptics" with countervailing evidence. ENO are also the authors of two important previous studies on public opinion about housing issues, which I considered here and here. Below is the abstract for their latest article:

Recent research finds........

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