Do Americans want European-style Social Housing? Survey evidence from California

• In Event: Political Institutions, Public Preferences, and Regulation of the Housing Supply in American Cities

Abstract

As state and local governments across the United States search for new models of subsidized housing production, advocates and policymakers have increasingly looked to European social housing for inspiration. For the most part, European systems use a cost-rental model, which finances housing production through long-term loans to non-profits and sets rents to recover costs. This approach can produce far more units at lower per-unit public cost. However, cost-rental systems tend to either serve households across a much wider income range than US programs, which set rents as a share of tenant incomes, and depend on low-income households receiving rental assistance. Whether such a model is politically viable in the US depends in part on public attitudes toward what would be a fundamentally different approach to subsidized housing.

This paper asks: do Californians want European-style social housing? I will answer this question using a conjoint survey with responses from over 2,000 Californians. This research design will allow me to identify preferences for eight features of social housing programs: income eligibility thresholds, developer type, subsidy level, program scale, tenant protections, resident governance, and building type and location. A central question is whether Californians prefer to expand the existing model, in which deep subsidies, restricted to low-income households, build a limited number of units per year, or whether there is appetite for a program that is available to a broader share of the population and capable of producing housing at much greater scale.

An additional contribution of the survey will be its assessment of the relative importance of symbolic features like its name, goals, and main actors (e.g. providers and governance structure) as compared to technical features like financing, rents, and eligibility criteria. Although the latter group will determine its scale and impact, it is conceivable that the former may sway public opinion more. These findings will have direct implications for planning practice and policy design across the United States, where interest in social housing is growing but the political feasibility of European-style approaches has remained uncertain.

Author

• Paavo Herbert Monkkonen, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author