Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Since 1970, regulations constraining the development of new housing have caused prices in high income cities to dramatically increase, both burdening current renters and limiting the opportunities of those priced out. I argue that these regulations stem from the effect of decision making scale on homeowner and renter support for new housing. While renters and liberal homeowners support new housing at the global (city) scale, both groups exhibit spatial sensitivity, or `NIMBYism', to new housing when proposed at the local (neighborhood) scale. These behavioral changes suggest that the shift in city planning institutions to local scale has damaged the opportunity to build a citywide coalition renters and liberal homeowners in support of new supply. In short, the neighborhood decisions foster collective action problems that citywide decisions could overcome. To test this theory, I combine survey experiments with behavioral data from two original data sources, a 3,019 respondent national survey and a 1,660 voter exit poll, with 152 respondents completing both. These findings not only advance our understanding of how scale alters political behavior, but provide the first experimental measurements of NIMBYism.