Who Favors Rent Control and Inclusionary Zoning? Survey Experiment in Six Cities

• In Event: Affordable Housing, Development, and Inclusion in Cities

Abstract

Densifying existing settlements has become a planning priority in urban areas. It aims to protect undeveloped land, while simultaneously providing more housing in cities. Yet, densification transforms the urban fabric like other urban development processes and thereby risks gentrification and the displacement of existing residents. Therefore, planners, housing activist and scholars increasingly favor to supplement urban densification with planning and policy instruments like rent control or inclusionary zoning. Rent control provides rules that specify how much landlords may charge for rent and regulates the extent to which rents can be increased over time. Inclusionary zoning aims to anchor affordable housing within new housing projects by requiring developers to make a minimum share of the newly constructed housing units available to low income households.
By using data of a survey experiment about acceptance of densification among 12,611 residents in six metropolises (Berlin, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Paris), we estimate Individual Marginal Component Effects to examine who supports rent control and inclusionary zoning in the context of new housing projects. Our first analysis indicates that both rent control and inclusionary zoning are favored, with slightly more support for rent control. This finding is encouraging because next to rent control, which could be motivated by self-interest, urban residents also want inclusionary zoning that specifically supports low-income renters. Thus, urban residents seem to support measures that anchor housing affordability in the city regardless of whether they would personally benefit from them or not. These findings will be further scrutinized by subgroup analyses, city-to-city comparisons, and analyses of the effect of different physical distances from the residential location of the survey participants to the proposed housing projects.

Authors

• Michael Wicki, ETH Zurich

• David Kaufmann, ETH Zürich

• Fiona Kauer, ETH Zürich

• Katrin Hofer, ETH Zurich