Panel:
The Politics of Housing and Neighborhoods
(Politics, Media, and the Policy Process)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
A person’s home and neighborhood are not merely locations. They represent life-changing financial investments and are the setting for meaningful socio-political interactions. Both can have lasting impacts on physical and mental well-being, socioeconomic mobility and overall quality of life. Therefore, it’s not surprising that they would drive political behavior, especially at the local level. Largely due to data constraints, studies that examine the nature of these local politics are sparse—this panel contributes to building this knowledge base. All of the papers on this panel offer up novel data and methodological approaches to overcome the limitations of past research. The first two papers consider how residents and homeowners interact with the political system. In one paper, the authors use registrant-level data to test if homeowners respond to economic shocks (i.e. sharp devaluations in their homes) by going to the polls; and, if they do, whether or not they engage with local elections more than state or federal ones. The second paper considers the politics of housing mobility programs that aim to help low-income families move to higher opportunity areas. The author investigates institutional variation in housing mobility programs, which operate in a variety of complex, cross-jurisdictional environments, and examines how and why political resistance to these programs varies across regions. The last two papers examine the role of organized community associations in electing a candidate or attracting local development and investment. One of the papers tests the importance of voter self-interest in determining elections, by comparing the influence of local neighborhood candidate endorsements with broader partisan ones. Also looking at community-based organizations, the fourth paper on the panel explores how local actors mobilize to attract and implement economic development in urban communities. The papers approach the housing and neighborhood politics from multiple disciplines (economics, urban planning, policy and political science) and use diverse methods (experimental, quasi-experimental, case study analysis and interviews). Altogether, the papers help to piece together a picture of local political influence and how housing tenure and neighborhood collective action mediate it. The findings from the research on this panel have tangible implications for how legislators, government managers, organizers and pollsters understand local political processes (and the public policies that emerge from them).
