It Was Never Really All About Property Values

Every planner has heard some version of it.

"People only oppose housing because they're trying to protect their property values."

It's become one of those explanations that gets repeated so often it starts to feel like fact. But new research suggests the story may be much more complicated.

A team of researchers, Josh Kalla at Yale, David Broockman at Berkeley, and Christopher Elmendorf at UC Davis, set out to better understand why people resist new housing. If protecting home values were the primary motivation, you would expect homeowners to oppose development while renters remained relatively neutral.

That's not what they found.

Homeowners and renters held surprisingly similar views. People often opposed projects nowhere near their own neighborhoods. They also supported restrictive housing policies even when no specific proposal was on the table. Self-interest simply didn't explain as much as many of us have assumed.

As planners, that finding matters. We make assumptions about why people oppose housing, and those assumptions shape how we communicate, how we design public engagement, and sometimes how we interpret what we hear.

So, what does explain people's reactions?

The researchers point to something they call symbolic politics. Most of us don't evaluate housing policy clause by clause. Instead, we react to the ideas, experiences, and groups a proposal brings to mind. Those associations often formed long before we ever walked into a public meeting.

When people hear the word developer, for example, they may immediately picture a set of assumptions, some positive, some negative. But describe the very same homes as places where nurses, teachers, firefighters, or young families could live, and people often respond differently.

I think that's an important finding, but it's also one that can be misunderstood.

The cynical interpretation is that we simply need better messaging. Just choose different words.

I don't think that's the lesson.

If a handful of words can change how people feel, that isn't permission to manipulate people. It's a reminder to talk about housing honestly and in human terms.

I have a personal connection to this. I'm married to a developer. He's mission driven and yes, he's a for-profit developer. He also spends his career building affordable and mixed income housing. Yet the word developer often becomes a symbol before people ever meet the person behind it.

The same is true on the other side. A nurse who can't afford to live in the community where he works isn't an abstraction. He’s a neighbor.

The word developer flattens a wide range of people into a single symbol. I think we do the same thing with labels like NIMBY. Once we've labeled someone, we've often stopped trying to understand them.

Leading with people instead of labels isn't a communications strategy. It's simply a more honest way to tell the story.

The research also raises another question, one that's particularly relevant for those of us who design public engagement processes.

If the way we frame a question influences the answers we receive, how should we think about public input?

Are someone's views about an apartment building more authentic before they've imagined a developer building it? Or after they've imagined a teacher living there? There probably isn't a perfectly neutral way to ask.

I don't think that means we should trust the public less.

I think it means we should design engagement better.

That has been the foundation of our work for years.

Public engagement should be more than meeting a legal requirement. It should help people understand what is being proposed, why it matters, and how it connects to the future of their community. People can't respond thoughtfully to something they never had a fair opportunity to understand.

That's why we believe in creating multiple ways for people to participate. We break complicated issues into manageable pieces. We explain before we ask for opinions. We work hard to reach people who don't typically attend public meetings. We show community members how their input will be used. Most importantly, we create opportunities for people to listen to one another, not just react.

Good engagement isn't about extracting opinions. It's about helping communities think together.

One of the most common labels in housing conversations is NIMBY. Sometimes it describes a pattern of opposition. But just as often, it becomes a shortcut that allows us to stop being curious about why someone feels the way they do.

Ironically, that's exactly what this research challenges. If opposition isn't primarily driven by self-interest, then calling someone a NIMBY may tell us less than we think it does. People may be responding to uncertainty, to past experiences, to concerns about change, or to symbolic associations they've built over many years.

Labels can be useful shorthand, but they can also flatten people into stereotypes. We do it to developers. We do it to housing advocates. And we do it to neighbors who raise concerns. Once the label takes over, the conversation often stops.

Good planning has never been about winning an argument. It's about creating the conditions for better conversations.

None of this means every project is the right project or that every community should accept every proposal. Communities still need to balance housing with infrastructure, environmental protection, historic resources, fiscal realities, and many other important goals.

But if we want better decisions, we need better conversations.

Property values may be part of the story for some people. This research suggests they aren't the whole story, and perhaps they were never the most important one.

The real opportunity isn't to become better at persuading people. It's to become better at helping communities learn, listen, and think together.

To me, that's what good planning has always been about.