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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
People are much more pessimistic about normal workings of supply and demand in regional housing markets than in markets for cars, labor, agricultural commodities, and consumer goods. /3
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
But, critically, our prior work also finds that people's beliefs about the direction of the price effect of a housing supply shock are unstable, within & across surveys. Mass "supply skepticism" appears to be more confusion than conviction. /5
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
- T2: a written analogy between market for housing & market for cars, i.e., explaining the chain-of-moves idea with reference to a market in which "supply and demand" is widely understood, per our prior work /7
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
- whether the respondent picked, "Allow developers to build market-rate apartments/condos anywhere they want to build them" as the more effective of two housing-affordability policies (the other was a randomized alternative) /10
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
- whether the respondent said they support constructing more market-rate housing in their metro region (one Q about infill, another Q about sprawl) /11
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
- whether the respondent accepted an invitation to write to their Governor and legislative leaders about land-use and housing issues, and what they wrote /12
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
What do we find? On average, the treatments have big effects on econ beliefs *and* policy preferences, w/
@Sightline
video increasing support for market-rate housing development by ~15 percentage points! /13
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
The treatments *do not* polarize public opinion by tenure. Contra Fischel's "homevoter hypothesis," homeowners' support for development increases as much or more than renters'! /14
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
And while no treatment significantly increased the probability of respondents writing to state policymakers or # of words written, the
@Sightline
video increased prob. of a message calling for more market-rate housing from ~1-2% to ~3-4%. /15
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
Our results on how the treatments affect content of respondents' political communication are "off plan" and so should be taken as suggestive only. But they certainly suggest that the economic belief & policy preference results are not just "cheap talk." /17
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
To put our results in context, the effect of the Sightline video on land-use preferences was > 3x larger than typical effect of a persuasive political communication (per Coppock's recent review). press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book /18
press.uchicago.edu
Persuasion in Parallel
A bold re-examination of how political attitudes change in response to information.   Many mistakenly believe that it is fruitless to try to persuade those who disagree with them about politics....
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
Caveats: - We didn't measure persistence of treatment effects, or whether they'd hold up in face of counter-messaging - This wasn't a field experiment. We have no idea whether supply skeptics would actually watch the
@Sightline
video "in the wild." /20
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
- The video, and the written paraphrase of video, had about the same effect on econ beliefs but the video moved policy preferences much more. A mystery. Maybe b/c video conveyed emotional urgency? Maybe b/c I goofed & used word "developer" in paraphrasing the video? 😖 /21
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Chris Elmendorf
@CSElmendorf
That said, I think this may be the most hopeful set of results to date in the politics-of-housing lit. It is strong evidence (1) that supply skeptics can learn from simple informational interventions, (2) that when they learn, they change their policy prefs, /22
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Brian Rosa
@brianrosa
Funny, housing expert here. And I don’t form part of this consensus. Take a look at Manchester, England and see if increased supply has led to lower prices. Even the city hall admits it has not.
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Brun Canard
@CanardBrun
Only retarded people think more supply is the answer. The answer is lower immigration. The only reason we "need" immigration is because it allows for GDP to rise without per capita GDP rising too much for employers to lose control.
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