How Sociotropic Aesthetic Judgments Drive Opposition to Housing Development

Voter opposition to new housing development contributes to America's housing shortage. Prevailing explanations for voter opposition emphasize homeowner self-interest and ``NIMBY'' concerns with new housing's local negative externalities. We argue that sociotropic aesthetic judgments also powerfully shape housing policy preferences, helping explain significant patterns of opposition to housing development. We support this argument with a variety of novel descriptive and experimental findings. Motivating our analysis, we first show that homeowners in already-dense areas are highly supportive of new apartments in their neighborhoods---indeed, moreso than in neighborhoods of single-family homes---a pattern prevailing theories cannot easily explain. We then show that measures of aesthetic tastes strongly predict support for dense housing development, as do experimental manipulations which vary the aesthetic quality of new housing---even for housing located far away from the respondent's neighborhood. Other explanations offer more limited explanatory power. Finally, we show how crafting housing policies to be sensitive to voters' aesthetic judgments could help address America's housing shortage.