Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo
In a study, home prices appeared to be the biggest factor in vote-switching in the counties where partisan preferences changed from one election to the next.
Public anxiety about the cost of living is as much about high housing prices as anything else. The difficulty in finding an affordable place to live has spurred a host of policy pitches across the political spectrum. The activist groups Right to the City and the Center for Popular Democracy have new polling out showing a giant number of those surveyed—87 percent—believing that the cost of housing is a major or big problem, as well as significant support for their policy preferences: rent stabilization and more funding to build affordable-housing units. In Congress, Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), who is about to become a senator, and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) released a bill based on their preferences: helping communities roll back restrictive zoning requirements by establishing federal standards and guidelines, along with a relatively modest set of grants for housing development.
Regardless of what framework you think makes the most sense, tackling the housing shortage in America is an imperative to tame the cost of living, promote community development, reduce financial stress, and even reduce carbon emissions. The only people who have any problem with making housing more affordable, in fact, are homeowners. And that’s the whole problem.
An ingenious little study from researchers Eren Cifci of Austin Peay State University, Alan Tidwell of the University of Alabama, J. Sherwood Clements of Virginia Tech University, and Andres Jauregui of Fresno State starts from the fairly obvious premise of self-interest: Homeowners want home prices, and therefore their property values, to go up. It’s a simple case of the wealth effect, and people, unsurprisingly, like to be richer. William Fischel, a former economics professor at Dartmouth, coined the term “homevoter” to describe the link between property values and local voting trends. But this paper is the first to track it at the presidential level.
The authors look at voting patterns in 87 percent of all U.S. counties across the past six election cycles, looking for correlations between home prices and vote-switching. Homeowners in counties where home prices rose in the four years before the presidential election were more likely to switch their votes toward the party holding the presidency at that time, whether Republicans or Democrats. Conversely, when housing prices plummeted, homeowner voters switched their votes away from the incumbent party.
While home prices mattered across the board, it appeared to be the biggest factor in vote-switching in the counties where partisan preferences changed from one election to the next. In these “swing” counties, according to the study, every 1 percent of increase in home prices in the four years prior to the election translated into a 0.36 percent increase in likelihood of the county voting for the incumbent party, and a 0.19 percent increase in “flipping” the county to the incumbent party. The trend is stronger if the incumbent candidate is actually running for re-election.
The dataset includes one year, 2008, when housing prices absolutely collapsed and nonincumbent Barack Obama won by the closest thing in our polarized age to what could be called a landslide. That could be skewing the results a bit. But the authors maintain that the pattern is consistent across elections, and by examining at the county level, variances on home prices in different places are taken into account. The study controlled for demographic changes, economic growth, the unemployment rate, and education levels, among other variables.
The population that wants higher home prices is bigger and votes at higher rates than the population that wants lower home prices.
“Real estate concerns are part of the deep link between the economy and the electorate,” the authors conclude. “The performance of the country’s largest asset class, residential real estate, can influence voter behavior.”
It should be noted that, if this paper is accurate, that would be fairly positive news for Joe Biden. Home prices over the last four years, according to Realtor.com, have risen by a minimum of 22.8 percent (Louisiana) and as much as 67.6 percent (Maine) across the country. Over that four-year period, home prices are up 46.4 percent, and over 50 percent in key swing states like North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.
But this home price inflation is actually what has renters, first-time prospective homebuyers, and others extremely upset about the high cost of living. Unfortunately for them, homeowners are a bigger share of the electorate.
In the U.S., the national homeownership rate is 65.6 percent. That measures the percentage of all homes in the U.S. that are occupied by owners, as opposed to renters. It would be wrong to say that this means exactly 65 percent of the public owns a home or lives in an owner-occupied home, but it’s an approximation. We also know that homeowners vote at higher rates than renters. Census data based on the 2022 election showed that voter-eligible homeowners had 58.1 percent turnout, compared to just 36.5 percent for renters.
This is a problem for enlightened policy on housing. It’s not about whether zoning deregulation by itself is popular, or rent control. The crux of the matter is this: The population that wants higher home prices is bigger and votes at higher rates than the population that wants lower home prices. In some ways, our dysfunctional housing policies are just that simple. The easiest way to keep prices up, after all, is to mobilize and prevent the construction of new housing nearby. Contrast Tokyo, which has historically permitted nearly twice as many housing units as the entire state of California despite having a third the population and one-two-hundredth the amount of land, so rent therefore remains cheap.
The biggest hurdle here is the contradiction between housing conceived of as a basic right and as a financial investment for wealth-building. That creates a disconnect between incumbent homeowners and aspiring ones. If wealth-building were tied to other measures, like a stock portfolio that begins with a baby bonus or a social wealth fund, maybe the desire for high property values wouldn’t be as strong. Or if we were more of a nation of renters like in parts of Europe—or, perhaps, denizens of social housing—that wealth tie wouldn’t bind.
Or homeowners might be convinced that skyrocketing values are not all that great even for them, as it drives up homelessness and tends to create bland cultural homogenization. It also leads to higher property taxes—except in California, thanks to the wretched Prop 13—and should you want to cash out your appreciation, it means either downsizing, moving away, or buying back into the same inflated market.
But it’s hard to un-ring a bell. Today in America, we have a housing system that’s incredibly biased toward homeownership, with special subsidies for mortgage interest and the like, and we have few other opportunities to build generational wealth. Therefore, at this moment, those who rightly advocate for better housing policy have a challenge; what they’re doing is likely to be unpopular with a large and active voting bloc.
At some point, values have to triumph over pandering to the electorate. Making housing cheaper will bring more people into homeownership or affordable rental units, who might remember the policymakers who made that a reality for them. And other policies to sever the link between housing and savings might help as well.
But for those who base their worldview solely on giving voters what they want, it presents a dilemma. Perhaps no writer is more associated with the relaxation of zoning requirements than Matthew Yglesias. He’s also an enthusiast for “popularism,” the idea that politicians should focus on popular issues and stay away from unpopular ones. These two concepts exist at cross-purposes; increased building with the specific intent of driving down housing prices would be largely unpopular and a threat to re-election, according to this available evidence.
You could side with popularism, and counsel politicians that they should not touch housing, or at least not talk about it. But that would keep this major policy problem for tens of millions of people unsolved. You could side with housing, and bear the consequences. But that would serve as an admission that popularism is an empty philosophy, bereft of a compelling reason to engage in politics to improve people’s lives.
Some principles are definitely worth fighting for, even if it means a marginal potential to lose an election. The bigger issue is that the structure of our housing markets and our engines of wealth frustrate the kind of solutions that broaden prosperity.
