Our First Published Work
Housing costs are too high, but Americans aren’t unified on solutions
Hi everyone! You may have seen that we published our first piece of polling, a housing survey, on our website. I’m incredibly excited to start putting things out into the world.
The polling on this is a mixed bag! One thing of note is that large numbers of Americans had no opinion or weren’t sure about every question. The level of information and understanding on housing issues is low, lower than other issue areas. Americans express some real concerns about the effects of more housing in their area, but simultaneously have high approval of (some) policy interventions designed to bring about that increase in housing.
As part of our commitment to transparency, we have also published the toplines and crosstabs (see our post for links to those). This is a long poll with a lot of questions, not all of which got a spotlight in our writeup. There are probably five other really interesting stories that could be told from this data. If you think you’ve got an idea for one of those stories, we invite you to go for it! I’m probably not always going to fully agree with your conclusions, but a big goal of making the full survey available to the public is to enable other thinkers to draw unique conclusions.
For the true polling nerds, I want to mention one piece of survey design. I’ve started asking our pollsters to add the question “Do you think this survey was designed by Democrats or Republicans?” to the end of each survey. (We’ve been doing it somewhat erratically, but we’re standardizing on that as a best practice.) The idea behind this is it gives us a barometer for how much our survey is reading as partisan to respondents, which could be influencing their answers. We’re not always going to get a perfectly neutral “score” on this, just from different topics reading as more Democratic or more Republican. The aim is to use it as a double-check, not a metric. This survey in particular came out fairly neutral, which is a good sign.
Check out our website for the poll writeup, toplines, and everything else. Hope you find something interesting in it!
 | A guest post by
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Nice breakdown of the perceived problems, but I'm not sure some of the actual real-world bottlenecks to housing are reflected in the issues identified in the survey. For example, “reducing environmental regulations on housing development," most often relate to environmental assessments and the prevention of water pollution through runoff and altering natural storm water drainage patterns. These are necessary steps that we would ignore at our peril. Which brings me to my second point: identifying the issues are nice but what about practical solutions? If you want to speed up that process, then the solution is to increase funding at the local and state level so more staff can be hired. I do agree that corporate ownership of housing is a big problem. I have seen statistics that indicate in some cities it accounts for a very large percentage of home ownership. But again, what is the solution? This is obviously very complex and a federal law would seem to be the solution, but you would need a team of lawyers, high-powered political connections and a public relations campaign to sort it out.
If your purpose is to identify issues, good job. If your purpose is to propose solutions, not so good.