Is New Housing Popular?

It depends who you ask, how you ask, and when you ask.

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.

Fall is a lovely time of year, particularly here in D.C., where capital residents are blessed with the two weeks of pleasant weather we get each year. It's hard not to be happy when the air is crisp, the sun is shining, and the temperature is hovering in the mid-70s.

The only people suffering are journalists trying to find newsy housing policy content for their weekly newsletter when state legislatures are out of session and the federal government has shut itself down.

Fortunately, local policymaking and politicking continue. The courts are still making decisions in land-use cases. That gives us something to talk about.

To supplement those sources of news during these autumnal doldrums, I figured this week's lead item would take a step back and explore a fundamental question: Is new housing actually popular?

It's a tougher question to answer than you might think.

On the one hand, when politicians are asked by the press or individual voters are surveyed, support for new housing tends to look pretty good. Large majorities say housing costs are too high, and more housing would be a good thing.

On the other hand, any practical effort to build new housing or to change existing land-use regulations to allow more development normally attracts concerted opposition from both the public and policymakers.

Every reform effort becomes a bruising fight. Getting pro-housing state bills, local ordinances, and even individual projects over the finish line requires numerous moderating amendments and concessions.

If new housing were as popular as it is in surveys, why are efforts to allow more of it so contentious?

Is that because a loud but unrepresentative minority is able to force its slow-growth preferences on everyone else? Or is it because the majorities that say they like housing in the abstract end up finding reasons to oppose it in the real world?

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Is Housing Popular?

When Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass partially rolled back her own affordable housing initiative, she justified the move by citing concerns from voters.

"As a mayor, you have to listen to your constituents," said Bass of her decision to limit where Executive Directive 1 (ED1), a program that granted zoning variances and streamlined approvals to affordable projects, would apply.

In a recent opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, an associate professor at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs, argued Bass was misreading the mood of voters.

A UCLA quality of life survey of Los Angeles residents from 2023, Steinert-Threlkeld notes, found that 59 percent of voters said they wanted more apartments in their neighborhood. That support was spread evenly across the city, with majorities in 14 out of 15 council districts saying yes to apartments in their backyard.

Steinert-Threlkeld argues that city leaders should turn this "consensus into reality" by undoing the mitigating changes to ED1 and even expanding the law.

"More broadly, city leaders should develop the habit of evaluating policy options using representative survey data rather than responding to the vocal minority," he writes.

Were politicians to listen more to the polls, they'd seem to have reason to be a lot more pro-development. Time and again, respondents to city- and state-level surveys say they like new housing.

That's true in allegedly NIMBY San Francisco, where 74 percent of surveyed voters said they support a "Family Zoning" plan proposed by Mayor Daniel Lurie, according to a July poll from advocacy group GrowSF.

In New York, a Manhattan Institute poll published in February found 71 percent supported Mayor Eric Adams' "City of Yes" rezoning plan.

Here in Washington, D.C., which is in the process of rewriting its comprehensive plan, 63 percent of residents surveyed in a December 2024 poll said loosening zoning regulations to produce more housing is more important than preserving neighborhood character.

A July–August Politico poll found that 74 percent of registered California voters were in favor of reforms signed into law by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom that exempted infill housing from environmental review laws.

Polls vs. Reality

Yet despite the significant polled support for more housing, the process of implementing reforms that would allow it is fraught, contentious, and uncertain.

Local press coverage of Lurie's Family Zoning plan mostly focuses on the tensions and controversy it's kicked up and not all the love and support the mayor is getting for putting forward such a popular plan. Many of the elected officials who support Lurie's rezoning are plausibly only doing so out of fear that the state will take over the city's zoning if they don't.

Adams' City of Yes passed, but only after a long, contentious process that saw the plan watered down with a number of mitigating amendments.

A year on from rolling back ED1, Bass is not changing course. If anything, she's gotten more anti-development, blocking duplexes from being built in the Pacific Palisades and urging Newsom to veto zoning reforms that passed the Legislature this year.

If housing is so popular, one would think that anti-housing politicians would feel some pressure to change their tune. What gives?

A Nation of Supply Skeptics

One explanation is that voters are not in fact as pro-housing as local and state-level polling makes them out to be.

A handful of recent nationwide polls find that, contra city- and state-level polls, voters are actually pretty skeptical of the idea that new housing will lower housing prices, to the degree they hold views about housing at all.

That was the finding of a research paper authored by Christopher S. Elmendorf, Clayton Nall, and Stan Oklobdzija and published in the summer 2025 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Across three surveys of residents in urbanized zip codes, their paper found that a majority of homeowners (57 percent) wanted home prices to fall in their city, as did 85 percent of renters.

However, when asked whether more housing supply would lower prices in their city, only around a third of respondents said yes. Nearly half believed that more housing would raise prices, while the remaining respondents were not sure of new supply's impact on prices.

That obviously contradicts standard economic theory that, all else being equal, more supply meeting the same demand will lower prices.

"Housing does something to people's brains where they have these irrational views on how supply relates to prices," Oklobdzija, one of the authors, tells Reason.

He notes that their surveys found people were far better at understanding the relationship between supply and demand when asked questions about the markets for used cars and agricultural goods.

A September-published survey by the Searchlight Institute likewise found that respondents were pretty bad at intuiting the relationship between the supply and demand for housing.

"When asked about increasing the number of homes in their community, 44% think it will raise prices at least slightly, compared with just 24% who think it will lower prices, and another 32% aren't sure either way," reads the Searchlight survey.

Respondents also gave a seemingly contradictory set of answers about what they thought was responsible for raising housing prices and housing policies they thought would lower prices.

For example, some 68 percent of respondents said that zoning and building regulations were a barrier to building more housing. But not even a third of survey respondents supported two common zoning reforms—allowing multiple homes to be built on single-family properties and letting homes be built without parking.

And while only 9 percent of respondents agreed the length of time it takes to build housing was a primary driver of costs, 65 percent supported faster, cheaper permitting of new homes.

In all of the above surveys, developers and landlords polled poorly and were blamed by majorities for raising home prices. (We can blame Hollywood for that result.)

Policies such as rent control and taxes, limits on investor-owned housing, and vacancy taxes polled a lot better than supply-side solutions.

Squaring the Circle

So how does one explain polls showing strong support for new housing in some local and state-level polls, and extreme supply skepticism in national surveys?

One explanation is that people's views on housing and housing policy are just not that firmly established.

Oklobdzija notes that some respondents filled out multiple surveys in their study, and that often their answers could change substantially from survey to survey.

Charlotte Swasey, Searchlight's director of analytics, similarly says that, on housing, "opinion is so malleable. It's really subject to wording effects." She notes that her organization's survey had large percentages of respondents giving "don't know" or "unsure" responses to questions.

If people don't have strong preexisting opinions on housing, and their views are changed significantly depending on how questions are asked, it's not necessarily surprising that survey results would vary a lot.

It's also true that a lot of polling on housing policy issues is done by advocacy groups with a particular set of policy preferences. If wording of questions matters a lot, one would expect polls from organizations with opposing views to report opposing results.

It's worth noting that most of the aforementioned state and local polls asked about specific policy proposals. It's possible that the live debate about whether or not to pass those policies led people to develop a clearer set of housing policy opinions and policy preferences. That is, in fact, what democratic debate is supposed to do.

Opinion Polls and Practical Politics

Still, if opinion is in fact so malleable, it does leave open the question of why politicians are more willing to default to supply-skeptical positions and reform at the state and local levels is a difficult, bloody slog.

One explanation is that the people who care the most about housing policy are also the people who are the most opposed to new supply.

"Our public comment and local democratic institutions really select for extremely intense preferences," says Oklobdzija. If 50 people show up to oppose a new apartment building in a neighborhood of 5,000 people, that might seem like a lot, even though it's a small minority of voters, he argues.

Academic research on this point does find that public commenters at land-use hearings are overwhelmingly opposed to new housing and not representative of their jurisdiction's demographics.

Even if politicians understand the activists showing up to hearings aren't representative of their constituents and that people have broadly pro-housing views, it could still be rational for them to side with the anti-development minority.

In low-turnout, low-information local and state elections, it's smart politics to cater to the people who are really invested in the process.

The people who say they like apartments on a survey, but don't show up to support them at a city council hearing, might not base their vote for local or state office on a candidate's housing positions—even if they do vote.

It's also not hard for politicians to speak to both sides in the debate by saying they like housing generally, but not this particular project or that particular zoning reform.

What Is To Be Done?

What can pro-housing reformers do, given the state of public opinion and the incentives of politicians?

One solution does seem to be proactive policymaking. The polls finding the heaviest support for new housing supply are local polls of places having live debates about reforms aimed at increasing supply.

While people might have vague supply-skeptical views on housing in the abstract, it seems likely they can be won over to supporting supply when presented with specific arguments in favor of supply-increasing policies.

Despite polling really poorly in the Searchlight survey, more and more jurisdictions are eliminating single-family-only zoning and parking minimums.

That could be more evidence of specific supply-side policies becoming popular once voters are exposed to arguments in favor of them.

Or perhaps it's an example of small, persistent groups of pro-supply activists doing what the NIMBYs once did and convincing local politicians to adopt their strongly held minority preferences.

Even if the latter is true, one can still hope that supply-side success would beget more support for supply-side solutions.

Elmendorf, Nall, and Oklobdzija note in their paper that one reason people might not believe that positive supply-side housing shocks will lower prices is that few people have any personal experience with large, positive supply-side shocks.

Zoning regulations have been so strict for so long that all that most people know is tepid rates of housing construction and persistently rising prices.

"The onus is on people to do stuff and show what works," says Swasey. Despite their supply skepticism, surveys consistently find that people are very concerned about housing affordability, she notes.

Even if people say that they don't like eliminating parking minimums, they will like the lower prices that result from them. The politicians who lead on that issue will be rewarded.

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Quick Links

• Zak Yudhishthu has an in-depth, interesting essay on his Pencilling Out Substack arguing against policies that restrict or discourage lower-density development.
• New developments in the Zoning Theory of Everything: The city of Portland has issued a notice of zoning violation to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) facility that's currently the subject of anti–Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests. The city's violation notice alleges that detainees have been held for over 12 hours at the facility, in violation of its conditional use permit. The city also says that DHS boarded up windows in violation of the city's ground-floor window standards.
• In the pro-natal corner of housing policy research, Bobby Fijan and Lyman Stone have a paper on the kinds of homes young families want.

I'm very proud release a project I've been working on for 18months: the *first* rigorous study on floorplans & families. ~10K person survey & 40pg paper on:

Do floorplans matter to families, or people who want a baby?

Turns out, YES!

And having an *extra* bedroom matters MOST pic.twitter.com/FawaBTeKph

— Bobby Fijan (@bobbyfijan) September 30, 2025

• In New Jersey, a Mercer County judge has dismissed a challenge to New Jersey's "fair share" housing law brought by a handful of municipalities, which had objected to the law's requirements that they zone for additional housing development.
• The geographers are once again arguing that we need laws against landlords renovating their properties.

I like how people will just say "we need laws that stop landlords from renovating buildings" pic.twitter.com/wfaJwnZ84W

— Christian Britschgi (@christianbrits) October 3, 2025

• The Oaklandside has a fascinating story about katana-wielding for-hire vigilantes protecting investment properties from squatters.
• America's favorite right-wing fast-food chain says that it will start flying the largest flags local regulations will allow at its various locations.

The flag installations have begun at Steak n Shake.

Every Steak n Shake is getting the tallest and biggest American flag that local governments will allow!

Steak n Shake proudly supports American values and traditions. ???????? pic.twitter.com/w19csgwy5H

— Steak 'n Shake (@SteaknShake) October 4, 2025