How Design Influences Public Support for Affordable Housing
Project summary
California is suffering from an affordable housing crisis, which needs to be addressed in conjunction with the pressures of climate change. Sustainable housing and the preservation of historic housing provide avenues to address both issues simultaneously. However, issue framing and how we discuss polarizing topics can influence individuals’ opinions and support for local affordable housing developments.
We seek to understand if the labeling of affordable housing developments impacts public opinion and support differently. Our goal is to understand local support for affordable housing and inform local officials, planners, developers, and advocates of promising strategies to combat the housing and climate change crises together.
Driving questions
How do the designations “affordable,” “historic,” and “sustainable” impact California residents’ evaluations of specific proposed housing developments and broad housing support overall?
Do demographics and characteristics of participants influence broad support and/or support for specific developments in one’s own neighborhood?
Can eye-tracking studies help reveal conscious and subconscious attitudes toward affordable housing?
Key findings to date
Quantitative analysis of an online experimental study of California residents (N = 1,160) using photos of real affordable housing developments found that overall, designating a development as “affordable” or “sustainable” significantly increases both broad and specific development support compared to the unlabeled baseline. Support drops for these labels when seeing specific developments as compared to broad statements.
Labeling a development as historic did not cause a significant shift in broad support and had opposing impacts on support for a few of the specific developments.
Overall, the specific sustainable developments illicit more uniform responses to the labels while the response to historic developments was more variable.
A pilot eye-tracking survey (N = 21) indicates the “sustainable” development label may attract more attention to the facades of the affordable housing developments than the other labels. Further study is on-going.
Project team
Prof. Sarah Billington, CEE
Dr. Isabella Douglas, Graduate researcher
Prof. Arash Tavakoli, CEE, Villanova University
Daria Fontani Herreros, CEE PhD candidate