Daily Exasperation #2
The tyranny of the majority strikes so hard in housing.
Majority of Americans prefer a community with big houses, even if local amenities are farther away by Ted Van Green for Pew.
There’s a Pew poll—there’s always a poll—that says in uncertain terms that “[a] majority of Americans (57%) say they would prefer to live in a community where ‘houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores, and restaurants are several miles away,’ according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted March 27-April 2, 2023.” As expected, this number is split across different demographic and political lines as self-identified. Seventy-two percent of Conservative Republicans prefer to live in such a place compared to 35% of Liberal Democrats, who prefer “houses [that] are smaller and closer to each other, but schools, stores, and restaurants are within walking distance.” It’s a very wide 35-point, 2x gap.
There are a few things to point out here and it’s good to get smarter at reading numbers and what they mean:
FIRST: polls are only so meaningful and should not be near the only factor in deciding broad policy. In electoral politics, polls are only useful in determining where internal resources should be spent, moved, or removed. Polls should not be interpreted, even in the aggregate, as anything more than what they are: samples smoothed out by large numbers and normalization across representative groups. Multiple polls are supposed to suss out any anomalies or wild divergences from some mean or expectation.
In this instance, the poll is not surprising, but nor is it useful outside of a general understanding or landing point from which more nuanced research can be conducted.
SECOND: when we frame the outcome of a poll from the perspective of the majority, we often forget about the minority position or other it. We’re conditioned to this because our political system rewards the entirety of an office to the 50% + 1 vote winner of every election. That’s how the first-past-the-poll system works in US politics, so of course we’re going to see other outcomes through a similar lens (and it doesn’t help that the article frames it like this).
It doesn’t have to be this way since housing and land use politics are local, I don’t buy this poll especially because no matter the outcome of this poll, that 42% wish for denser, more walkable neighborhoods are mostly ignored because it’s illegal to build these types of communities in many places across the US. There’s a missing housing middle problem, but it would also seem that there’s a missing middle political void.
What does this have to to with transportation? Remember that housing and transportation are the same fight. We need a ton more of both—but a ton more of the right-sized kind.
That’s all for now. Please remember to RE-STACK this article, like, share, and interact with it (definitely tell me I’m wrong).
Great points about the limitations of polling — I’d also argue that folk’s stated preferences can and often do differ from revealed preferences, and that’s reflected in housing prices near amenities.