South SFV Today

The United States is grappling with a significant shortage of affordable housing. Despite surveys indicating broad support for the construction of more affordable homes, these projects often encounter considerable local opposition. This discrepancy led Sarah Billington, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, and her team to investigate the factors influencing neighborhood-level attitudes towards affordable housing.

Billington stated, “When you look at broad, national surveys, people often say, ‘We like affordable housing!’ but the reality is that local opposition by the public at city meetings is still a large barrier.”

In their study published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, the researchers discovered that emotional responses to affordable housing might significantly impact people's shift from theoretical support to specific opposition to local construction. They suggested that these reactions could be rooted in unconscious biases such as racism or classism.

Isabella Douglas, who spearheaded the research as part of her doctoral work in Billington’s lab, said, “We really wanted to see how this emotional response, which may be partly driven by unconscious racism or classism, paired with more conscious racism.”

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there are only 34 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 extremely low-income households across the country. The U.S. would need an additional 7.3 million affordable homes to bridge this gap.

Deland Chan, a Stanford researcher with a background in urban planning and co-author on the paper, described it as a nationwide crisis. She stressed that progress on these complex social issues requires interdisciplinary perspectives and collaborations.

The researchers conducted an online survey involving 534 participants from around the U.S. While most participants supported affordable housing at state, city, and neighborhood levels, opposition more than doubled at the neighborhood level.

Douglas noted a proximity effect where support levels decrease as one gets closer to home. The study found several correlations: higher income individuals living in suburban neighborhoods or those with conservative views were less supportive of neighborhood affordable housing. In contrast, those with more trust in the federal government were more supportive.

The most significant predictors of opposition to affordable housing were racism, as measured through the symbolic racism scale of beliefs, and negative emotional connotations associated with affordable housing. The researchers also found statistical evidence that these factors interacted with some demographic characteristics at the neighborhood level.

Billington and Douglas highlighted that engineers cannot ignore these biases if they want to successfully build more affordable housing. They intend for this research to be a starting point in understanding how engineers can help increase support for affordable housing developments.

“We need to work to change the narrative in the public’s mind about what affordable housing is and can be for society as a whole,” Billington concluded.