Ep 70: Overcoming Resistance to Density with David Kaufmann and Michael Wicki

What makes people more or less supportive of dense housing in their communities? David Kaufmann and Michael Wicki surveyed 12,000 residents in six of the largest U.S. and European cities to find out.

Show notes:

• Wicki, M., Hofer, K., & Kaufmann, D. (2022). Planning instruments enhance the acceptance of urban densification. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(38), e2201780119.
• Debrunner, G., Hofer, K., Wicki, M., Kauer, F., & Kaufmann, D. (2024). Housing Precarity in Six European and North American Cities: Threatened by the Loss of a Safe, Stable, and Affordable Home. Journal of the American Planning Association, 1-17.

Transcript

Shane Phillips: 0:05

Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast. And I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This week, we're joined by David Kaufmann. And Michael Wicki, and we're talking about their research on how different project characteristics and planning instruments affect people's support for densification. In six major cities in the US and Europe. Project characteristics can be things like the size and location of a building and the type of developer building it. And planning instruments can be things like inclusionary zoning, or different levels of community engagement. I think the importance of this research speaks for itself, building more and denser housing in our existing cities is critical for everything from housing affordability, to sustainability, to economic opportunity. And as I'm fond of saying, the major challenge in housing policy is not identifying the things that will help us achieve those goals. It's convincing a majority of voters that those are things worth doing. I'm going to leave it at that make this quick because I am headed out the door to LAX for a nine day trip to Japan, where I will be when this episode comes out. And we're attitudes toward densification seem radically different to ours here on the other side of the Pacific. I am very excited, and hopefully I learned a thing or two that I can take back with me. The housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. With production support from Claudia Bustamante, Jason Sutedja, and Gavin Carlson. If you have a question or show idea, send it to me at shanephillips@ucla.edu. And with that, let's get to our conversation with David Kaufmann and Michael Wicki. David Kaufmann is Assistant Professor of spatial development and Urban Policy at ETH Zurich, a university in Switzerland. And Michael Wicki is a senior researcher at the same. They're joining us today to talk about their research into the factors that affect people's acceptance of dense housing development in major cities in the US and Europe, and how certain planning tools or instruments can be used to increase public acceptance of density, David and Michael, thanks for joining us, and welcome to the housing voice podcast.

Michael Wicki: 2:20

Thanks a lot for having us.

David Kaufmann: 2:21

Thanks for having us.

Shane Phillips: 2:22

And my co author for this one is Paavo. You may be able to tell we have some European guests. And Paavo is on sabbatical there this year. So he's meeting lots of folks in setting up lots of interviews. Hey, Paavo.

Paavo Monkkonen: 2:33

Hey, Shane, how's it going? Good to see you. Thanks for waking up early. Michael and David, it's so great that you can join us and talk about this very interesting research. And I'm looking forward to visiting ETH Zurich in a few weeks.

Shane Phillips: 2:44

Yeah, and this is our chance to get some sweet European tours. So every guest, we asked for just a few minutes of a tour of a city that they've lived in that they know well, whether it's you know where you live now in Zurich or elsewhere. So maybe David will start with you. Where do you want to take us around?

David Kaufmann: 3:01

Yes. So when fellow urbanist or housing scholars or planning scholars come by and visit us, so we've mostly tried to take you on a tour through Zurich, so I'm living in Zurich since my early 20s. I grew up outside of Zurich, but now I'm in Zurich for almost 20 years. The center of Zurich has like 450,000 inhabitants. And it's the center of a metropolitan region between 1.5 and 2 million inhabitants during the day is I have two small kids. So I will take you to one of the community centers we have a lot of community centers, it's a polycentric city. So Rick, and Deke little community centers, they are mostly like a park with playgrounds, we have workshops, they're like little cafes, and the in my community center next to my house, we have also little animal Sue, and the creek runs through it. So it's very green, and very family oriented, where I'm living but it's still rather Central. And then probably later because your housing folks we will take you to a visit of one or two of the housing cooperatives in Zurich we have a very different one like old established one that have like garden type of city wipes are like old housing and not so dense but but in a very, very distinguished time period. And then maybe also very new one that tries to experiment with new ways of living co living activities. So if you're going to visit them and then at night power when you come then we will go to the so called Long Street it's an area to go out with different restaurants, bars and even clubs wide variety of fancy cocktail bars to more rundown bars and there I think it's the Zurich becomes most urban, especially like weekend nights.

Shane Phillips: 4:51

I do feel like the dense urban cities in Europe are much better than the dense ish urban cities in the US at If for having children basically, they're much better at supporting families than the cities we've got here. Unfortunately, I hear is it Switzerland? Or maybe Zurich, specifically, I'm thinking of kind of has a very, you know, things shut down pretty early talking like 11:12pm, even on a weekend or what things look like there

David Kaufmann: 5:18

No, no, no, we can go out later then. We're not shutting down. We also have like new this called Mediterranean Nights is kind of because it's getting warmer, right? So but it's just them that the restaurants can be open late. So you can go out until next morning, if you want to notice spots. I'm getting old now. I don't know spots anymore. So good. But no, it's kind of it has areas, but just certain areas where, where it's very vibrant. And then it's a certain area where it's very quiet, almost provincial. So I would say also did say the city of Zurich is sometimes very provincial. In some regards, yes. But it's a particular type of cities. But that can be compared to other types of European cities.

Shane Phillips: 6:05

Michael, how about you?

Michael Wicki: 6:07

Yeah, I'll stay rather close. But I just moved six months ago from the city of Zurich, to Durban Dorf, which is a suburb of Zurich, right at the city border, actually. And if we go there, you don't actually realize you're leaving the city. So it's really a flowing into the agglomeration of Zurich. And yes, I think Devendorf is really exemplar, Tory also of identification processes that are going on in Switzerland, in general, and specifically also in Zurich. So it has now around 30,000 inhabitants. And yeah, experienced quite some urban densification. And with that, also things like rising housing prices, urban renewal, and such things. And so we would start probably just right at the city border, where it is really urban also has quite some skyscrapers that are even growing now, or there are added even more and more, and take our way through the town towards the rather rural area, direction of Lake Drive and say, which is then really just out in the green, where we don't really have the city anymore. And I think that is really showing you also the development process that is going on and gives you a really good view of how Switzerland or Swiss people live, because he gives you really the entire spectrum of really there are other urban, not maybe in American terms, but urban interest terms to the really, rather rural living areas, and also the high development. So the city actually grew within the last decade, I think by more than 20% of inhabitants. And this is growing even more with positive and negative effects that it has, and that you can really experience there.

Shane Phillips: 7:58

Is that development mostly happening on previously kind of industrial land or lower density residential, or is it like undeveloped land that is becoming urban? Yeah,

Michael Wicki: 8:10

No, it's mainly industrial land development is happening on also gardening companies that have been located there and that relocate now in further out of the city.

Shane Phillips: 8:23

Seems like we don't have enough of those to be rebuilding here in the US cities like, Yeah, we don't have the whole neighborhood that's being redeveloped from an old industrial one most of the time, or I guess when we do it, we just do it parcel by parcel like in the arts district. Yeah, I was worried they were displacing those Swiss cats in the countryside. I love this. The Swiss farms have these like every farm has a cat sitting in the middle of field. It's an amazing, amazing place. I don't know at least where I went.

Michael Wicki: 8:50

Usually more than one.

David Kaufmann: 8:52

Usually the families around the form can also kind of get a cat from there very easily. If you take take one pick home a cat.

Shane Phillips: 9:03

So the article we were discussing this week is titled planning instruments enhance the acceptance of urban densification. And it was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022, Katrine Hofer is David and Michael's co author on this one. And their study reports findings from an online survey of over 12,000 people in six cities, three in the US and three in Europe. And we'll talk about what those cities are in a little bit. And it tests which features of urban housing projects and associated planning instruments make people more or less accepting of them. Specifically, they use two experimental survey approaches to find out if people are less likely to oppose a new dense housing development if it's farther away from them, which would be sort of the the NIMBY, not in my backyard effect, whether features of the development matter like how big it is, who builds it and if it advances climate goals, or whether it's accompanied by certain kinds kinds of planning interventions like inclusionary zoning or rent control. Most findings, I think are as we might expect, just for example, everyone seems to dislike international for profit developers, at least more than the alternatives. But we will also get to some pretty, I think, surprising results, at least, you know, in the American case, but I think there's some surprising differences even among the European cities, among and between them as well. First, though, let's just map out the existing literature and knowledge base on this subject a bit. The paper starts with an interest in understanding local opposition to increasing density, because as you observe, living in denser places, is more environmentally sustainable. And in some countries, of course, environmental sustainability is a really high policy priority. You also note that growing the supply of housing can improve affordability, and also increase racial and economic diversity. I know this subject of many of our listeners are very supportive of urban densification of infill and building more housing. And so this question of, well, how do we actually get more people on board is a really, really important one to many of our listeners. So can you tell us what the previous research had to say about how people respond to dense housing development? Specifically, what does that research say about the importance of proximity and project characteristics? And then what gap in the research were you really trying to fill with your own study here?

David Kaufmann: 11:27

So first of all, it's important to trace a bit the the history of the concept of densification, or the phenomenon in the discourse, but also in the discourse of practitioners of planning scholars, it's an environmental concepts like gaining traction in the 1980s and 1990s. I mean, the origin was to combat urban sprawl, I think dissolves into us decays, but at least very strong in Europe. It's related to concepts such as the compact city or smart Grove, I think in the US, there are a number of other urbanism concepts coming up that are very closely related. And so it's so that Some scholars say it's a synonym for sustainable city densification, or the compact city. So in general, we would assume that it delivers a lot of good sustainability effects, especially regarding environmental sustainability by containing urban sprawl, reducing carbon emissions from traveling mostly, and also in Swiss context, very important preserving on build land, it should also add on housing supply. But it's this was not the original meaning of the concept, I would say. And so scholars and practitioner, agree that a lot of us agreed that we should have and densification. So we have a high acceptance for the principle of densification, mostly with an environmental argument, we also see that in survey research, traditional kind of policy survey research of Swiss voters so that we have very high acceptance or even support for densification, mostly when linked to the argument that we want to preserve the unbilled land, the nature of Switzerland, and so on. So we have this very high general acceptance of it. But then a lot of us know that when it then is about implementing densification, it becomes very much tricky. And one line of research is this NIMBY, not in my backyard phenomenon, that's the support vanishes, when actually the implementation of densification comes close to you. This is well documented phenomenon that residents support densification theory, but then there are post specific projects near there. And this is especially the case that would say with home ownership. As a homeowner, you tend to overestimate negative potential impacts from changes in your surroundings. But it's also visible for for other people. And this can also be a bit explained by behavioral theory so that we are kind of very risk averse, sometimes. But then we also felt that this NIMBY explanation, and also bit of the discourse of this yimby A NIMBY discourse is way too simple. Sometimes for us, he cannot really explain the conflict structure so well, or it's very reduced explanation of the complex structure and it cannot describe the more nuanced discussion among planners, but also about local population, how they want to implement densification. So I would say that we want to also kind of work with different ways of implementing densification that can be very different way who is building, how the building for whom are they building, and also include local planning instruments or policy instruments to also see if planners and policymakers have some some influence on the acceptance and he says especially kind of triggered through 10 years of experience of densification in Switzerland V is in Switzerland. I think it's one of the only country or the only kind In the world, where densification is a legally binding federal policy goal, and we are now 10 years into that federal policy goals. And there is a lot of discussion, action implementing, and different ways how to implement. And I think this is what we want to contribute to the literature, on the one hand, really testing the proximity argument again, but then adding on top of the proximity argument, different ways how to implement densification.

Shane Phillips: 15:26

You know, it's interesting, I think, here, in a lot of the US, NIMBY now means much more than just the kind of narrow, I support housing, but not in my backyard, not in my neighborhood. I agree, we need it but not not in my community. I feel like it's sort of come to just mean, people, it just refers to people who oppose housing for any reason, it can be anything from, and I think this is like an unfortunate flattening of the word where it can be anything from, you've got the people on the far end of the spectrum, who are beyond NIMBYs, they're the bananas, the build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. And then you've got people who, you know, maybe are open to development, even in their own community, but they are very concerned about displacement or other other issues, that can be a real problem. And so they're all kind of lumped together. And in some ways, I think this line of research is teasing these different reasons for opposition or concerns apart.

Paavo Monkkonen: 16:25

Yeah, I think I mean, the densification topic in Europe, I think, is so different from the US that it's I'm really not wasn't understanding until living here and reading the scholarship about densification, 1015 20 years into the US national projects and many European countries. So, I mean, maybe you could talk a little bit more about that in the Swiss case. I mean, I think that, you know, like we have, it's an interesting parallel kind of conversation about densification, in the US and in, in Europe, but in Europe, the governments are taking such a more active role. And municipalities are acquiring land and giving it to developers, and they're really leading this this process in a way that in the US doesn't happen. And it's connected to this climate change. Fight here in Europe, that is not happening in the US. I mean, I think, you know, basically, our planet in California has electric cars. Whereas here in France, for example, they have a number of different policies and different ways that are reshaping cities to make them more climate friendly. So I guess I mean, I was gonna ask you, since you've done a couple of related studies on this topic, whether there was like an inciting event for you on this or something specific that got you into this topic of urban densification? Or is it just because of the policies and actual densification happening, but you focused on this topic?

Michael Wicki: 17:46

Yes, I think that the starting point is really what David already mentioned, that we have in Switzerland, this policy that is now in charge for 10 years. So we voted on this back in 2013. Also with a quite a vast majority. So I think all but one of the cantons, so the the national sub units here in Switzerland, were in favor of really densifying and thus protecting on undeveloped land, right, and really identifying the cities that are

Paavo Monkkonen: 18:16

Gotta, protect those farm cats.

Michael Wicki: 18:18

Exactly.

Shane Phillips: 18:20

That one outlier

Michael Wicki: 18:21

And Vola.

David Kaufmann: 18:26

And Vola has like 70% of all people own land in Cola. Case. So it's very high ownership rate. And if you have I mean, building land is so valuable, it's with racial motivation, probably in financial

Shane Phillips: 18:43

Switzerland and Germany are the two highest renter shares that the population in Europe, right.

Michael Wicki: 18:49

Yeah, we have around 70% of renters in Switzerland, going as high as 90%, for example, in the city of Zurich. But yet still with with that policy that we have in charge, yeah, we still struggle to actually get the densification done the right, things like that these NIMBY effects might still happen. So specific projects often fail due to local opposition or other reasons. And there wasn't really direction of how to implement this in a decent way. Also, because competencies are maybe not always clear, or Yeah, it is in the competence of the municipalities themselves to actually implement that policies and also on the cantonal level, but not really on a national level. Right. And I think just in the last few years, densifying has a bit shifted of justifying to 10 Divine Right, and to also include sustainability aspects of that ecological and social sustainability.

Shane Phillips: 19:49

Can I ask just what densification looks like in the Swiss context? Or maybe the Zurich context specifically like, I'm assuming we're not necessarily talking about single family homes on fire Over 7000 square foot lots turning into four or 10 apartments or something like you might see in the US. Is it mostly that kind of fringe II or formerly industrial kind of becoming six or eight storey buildings? Or is it lots of kind of three or four storey townhouse style row house style, like, what does it really look like? Yes.

David Kaufmann: 20:23

So it's, it's a very important question. So and it will change, and it is changing into density. So it was first of all, it was just that municipalities still had building reserves, they're not allowed to add on more building reserves. So they could technically still do build on the fringes on the on Greenland or do some infill developments. So the cheap or the easy ways that are still done also in cities,

Shane Phillips: 20:48

And is it building reserve? Like, what am I thinking of, like a Greenbelt, an area that you can't build anything? What is it building resilience, okay? And it's sort of just surrounding the city

David Kaufmann: 20:58

Surrounding the city like you have, like, you're now just allowed to have 10% of your land that you have can be future building land, okay. There's certain type of greenfield development possible, but they should be reduced, that there are still these reserves that's being built. We are doing now study for the Federal Housing office and we see in the agglomeration, municipalities and suburbs, they are still densification for them still means building on the green field, but just to infill development, adding a bit on the fringes of the settlement. The second thing that that happened is a lot is this a brownfield development so industrial development turning into housing, this happened a lot in the city of Zurich in the 2000s for example already, but this reserves are more or less kind of vanishing, at least kind of in in the dense inner city. So there is not much industrial brownfield development anymore. And now it comes to the very contested transformation in existing settlements. So we have like, three four storey houses getting teared down, and they're added maybe one or two storey more. But these are not so sustainable now, and it's now really the question, okay, what are we doing with this? Buildings like buildings from after the World Wars 45 to 60s, they are now getting teared down? And this is a huge question, because these are the affordable housing units now that are tackled, and what are we doing with the residents there should be tearing down based on co2 emission and build new? How much can the building industry or should the building industry contribute to co2 emissions? So it's now very much the question about how we can like the socio ecological transformation of the building of how we build. And it's very contested, because we also see a bit of negative impacts of densification, meaning kind of getting rid of old housing stock that is still affordable. And we have this discussion there, what should we do with them? And then we have the discussion that pub also raised, what is the role of the state in it? Or should it be done through market actors and in Switzerland, compared to other European countries, we still have very market oriented development, not so much state led, then, for example, the Scandinavian countries, but also not as Paris who has, we have the mark, or like municipalities, the cities are getting more active with acquiring land and buying up land. But this is a rather newer development. Now again, because they sing, they feel okay, we need to have an active role in implementing densification. Super interesting. So I'm curious when you started this particular project, because you had already been doing some work previously, or at the same time on this issue of acceptance of densification in Switzerland. And so this project doesn't include Zurich, it includes three other European cities, not in Switzerland and three US cities, the what made you choose these six cities to research this question? Yes, we want to do both. So we want to have very local, or we want to do very local studies in Switzerland to really be relevant here for Switzerland, because it's such an important topic. But then we also want to work comparatively to understand the bit What are other kind of planning contexts, but also what are similarities across planning contexts because we think that in the big cities, the discourses are somewhat similar as problems are somewhat similar. And that's why we also want to have a comparative element. The Surrey case does not really fit this big cities, circ is a bit of a smaller cities. So we didn't want to include that. And we really want to see okay, what are the major cities in North America and in Europe, what are they doing? Or what is the perspective of the residents there? And we also in this article, there is mainly the experimental part of it, but we also had a long, descriptive survey report about the housing situation in this six city where we ask a lot of question about the housing situation, place detachment neighborhood if their perceived fear of having to move out. And this study, more descriptive study we just published beginning of this year in the Journal of the American Planning Association more about housing precarity in this six city,

Shane Phillips: 25:16

And I should, we're not trying to obscure the cities that we're talking about, I don't think we've actually said what they are. So let's just say, six cities are Berlin, London, and Paris, in Europe, and then New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago and the US. So we've established that now we know where we're talking about all very large, important cities in both continents.

Paavo Monkkonen: 25:38

Yeah. So you got these six cities, you survey over 2000 people in each one, and you use two kind of survey methods to ascertain how people feel about new dense housing projects. And one of them is, you know, you just it's called a random frames where you ask different people, different framing devices for the project. So use that for the NIMBY effect, you say the project is in your neighborhood, or it's in your not in your neighborhood, but in your district, or it's not in your district. And then the difference in people's level of support between the people that are asked those questions can give you an answer to how important proximity is, the other piece you do is a conjoint. So I think this is a cool and increasingly used survey technique by posing scholars and local scientists studying housing. So maybe you can just talk about how the contract works in a way that's cool and accessible to non researchers. Good luck. Oh,

Michael Wicki: 26:33

I'll try. Yes. So yeah, I mean, you you already mentioned how it worked. So specifically, also, it wasn't just showing the respondents whether it was in their own district or somewhere else, but it specifically stated the name of the district because we first asked them where they live, right, and then randomized, whether it is that or just another random district in the same city. And yeah, I mean, the combination of these experiments, I think that is also what was really the methodological contribution, so to say is that we have this proximity effect in the overall frame, and can test it in the conjoint itself. So we can see for each of the single attributes be the identification itself, which has been done by scholars already, but also for other attributes such as whether there is mixed use, whether there are rent control requirements, or also who is the developer, etc. To see how this proximity effect actually plays out in the single attributes.

Paavo Monkkonen: 27:39

Great

Shane Phillips: 27:40

Yeah, and I do think there's a forced choice element to this, where in that conjoint survey, people have to pick and so they're given a series of characteristics on one hand, and then kind of another set on the other. And one of those things might be, you know, it's in your neighborhood versus District versus some other, but also this one's mixed use. This one's just residential. This one is in a city where you have rent control, this one doesn't have rent control, it just kind of varies randomly. But I think having that forced choice, at least allows you to kind of get a sense for ranking, not just do people support this overall or not. And I think that forces people to grapple with trade offs a little bit more. So we gave a quick summary already, but let's have you give us a bit more detail on what you were testing. Again, you looked at how proximity project level factors and planning instruments affected support or opposition to proposed housing developments? What were the specific ideas that you tested in each of those three categories? And what were your expectations about how people would respond to those different options?

David Kaufmann: 28:47

Yes. So the proximity a frame we already discussed. So there, it would be the classical argument and expectation that the closer to you to your neighborhood, the densification project comes, the less likely you are accepting it. Then we had some project related factors. So these are really characteristic that comes more with the building or with the project. And we wanted to see if this is important for residents, so how much denser it will get, what is the type of use mixed use or not we were testing, if the building has some kind of climate goals related goals to it. So we have a lot of buildings being billed or at least kind of be pretend to build which are wanting to reduce co2 emissions from building then who is the project in western so these are more kind of the characteristic of the project itself. Sometimes they are not in the hands of the local plan or the local policymakers. And then we added more planning instruments we call them but it's more kind of a random category of planning and policies or like issues that are discussed in the literature. So these are rent control. If there The rent control law in the city, if there is inclusionary zoning, meaning a couple of subsidized housing units for low income people in the project, and what level of participation is there. And what we expected is actually that a lot of this project characteristic that or go more towards ecological measures and social measures, they are tend to be now more favorite to add them to the housing project more generally. But for example, when it's about inclusionary zoning, so that you will get more low income people in a project. And when this project then in proximity frame that is close to you. So there we will have less acceptance. So we were testing actually, a couple of expectations that we derived from the literature from housing scholars around the world,

Paavo Monkkonen: 30:50

You know, that that rent control verse inclusionary, is a really clever way to get at that issue in the US at least. And I don't think in Europe, like individual buildings aren't necessarily rent controlled, so that even though that's not a reality, it's a way to say, Oh, look, these neighbors are going to be stable, but they're not necessarily going to be willing to come versus in this other building 20% of them are going to be low income, right. So it gets a different attributes of building characteristics.

David Kaufmann: 31:15

Exactly. And it triggers a bit of rent control measures that can be also be selfish. So you want to have rent control, or or you because you fear of displacement. Whereas inclusionary zoning a lot of this residents or servi. interviewees, they would not benefit from rent control, right? So we can tease a bit out, if it's a very selfish motivation, rent control, or very selfish social motivation or not.

Shane Phillips: 31:43

I think either Paavo, or I misunderstood the rent control one, my interpretation of that one was not that this new building will be rent controlled, necessarily, maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. But you're posing that project as happening in a city with rent control, so that, you know, if someone is a renter in that city or in that neighborhood, their home would be rent controlled. And so they would have a little more comfort security, that they're not going to have their rents increased, you know, if that's a concern, or be displaced somehow, to the extent rent control can help with that. Is it more of a city wide policy? Or is this kind of posed to people as just relevant to that specific project?

Michael Wicki: 32:25

Yeah, we specifically included that as a as a city wide policy, and very much also inspired by the meetings technical discussion in Berlin, which

David Kaufmann: 32:37

I noticed the Berlin results were different from the other cities. They've been thinking about rent caps,

Michael Wicki: 32:42

That discussion was highly deriving, or highly deriving. But yeah, as you just mentioned, the idea was really also for for citizens that are not living directly in their building, right, that they have some security or that they don't have to fear rent increases such based on on spillover effects, by some segregation, gentrification processes that might go on?

Shane Phillips: 33:04

Yeah, yeah. Either one. I mean, I think Chicago's point like either way you do it, it's sort of setting up different winners and losers. And so you're kind of it is asking different questions from inclusionary zoning, which I think makes it very interesting seeing the results next to each other.

Michael Wicki: 33:18

Yes, I think this way, we also see their self interest in the in rent control rights, versus the inclusionary zoning, which then is really specifically for the project that is developed, which you as a as a respondent wouldn't even be profiting for directly when it comes to rent, right.

David Kaufmann: 33:39

And just to add, but as you know, there are very different forms of rent control in different cities. And we kind of took a couple of variations into conjoint element, but in generally, like in a lot of European cities, but I don't know, obviously, everyone, every European cities, the new housing would also be subject to rent control in over the year. So normally, you can set the higher prices if you build new but then this unit is also rent controls. I mean, there are there are several different measures. But yeah, a lot of complicated cities. Yeah, it gets complicated death. These are path dependent. Laws. Right. And yeah, it's a bit of a mix.

Paavo Monkkonen: 34:18

Yeah, I'm just thinking because like in the US, I mean, in California, you know, they tried to pass rent control ballot initiative, and it was voted down. So I wonder how I mean, I was surprised a bit that it had a favorable impact on pupil support in LA, but I guess we'll get there in the results.

Shane Phillips: 34:34

Yeah, yeah. And it's a pretty common proposal by many rent control or rent stabilization proponents to say like, we don't need to rent control new housing, in part because we recognize that might actually discourage the construction of new housing, which we want to happen, but maybe 1520 25 years after it's completed. It can kind of age into that program, at which point it is not going to go off the market if it's not a crazy strict rent control law. So you're kind of getting the security, but you still got the thing to be built in the first place. So we've talked about two of the planning instruments and a little bit of detail, the rent control and inclusionary zoning, we haven't really talked about what the participatory planning or public engagement aspect of this is. And so you had various different options for that for how people could be involved in the project, or maybe the broader planning of their community. So what options were people given? And kind of? How were you thinking about those options when you were creating them? Yeah.

Michael Wicki: 35:35

So we had these different attributes, characteristics for the public participation, that all somewhat showed way for residents to participate in that project development, and especially in the planning of the project development. And this somewhat ranges from no participation. And also involvement of residents is not happening to simply information events, where the citizens will get some information presented that at one particular event without actually being able to voice their issues, but at least, yeah, they have a direct contact, and then two more involving ones one, really the involvement in the planning and the implementation of the densification project, where residents should really be able to have a say in in how this is going to be developed and how this is going to play out. And then also the last one, which is really a veto point in residents having having the power to vote in the project decision, in the end whether it will be implemented or not.

Shane Phillips: 36:41

Yeah, that's a that's a strong, strong participation level, having people just vote on every individual project, it does, it does happen in some cities here in the US. And not surprisingly, those cities do not build a lot of housing. But can I just follow up on the planning and implementation option here? So I think that can be interpreted different ways. You know, what does it mean to be involved in project planning? Is it like the developer comes to the neighborhood with a proposal and then they can really have a lot of input on well, we want this or that to be changed, and so on? Or is this like a step above? Or before, which is kind of where I tend to think we should prioritize public engagement and participation, which is that the community planning process, it's like we're developing a plan for our entire neighborhood, what we want to allow what we don't want to allow what we want to incentivize. But once we get to the project, proposal period, and the entitlement and permitting and everything, the public does not have much of a role there. Is this sort of one or the other? Or is it both?

David Kaufmann: 37:44

First of all, I want to say in Switzerland, we have to vote on every planning and house, almost every planning and housing project. So we have direct Democratic vote on

Paavo Monkkonen: 37:53

But but no longer go to the town square and raise your hand to vote

David Kaufmann: 37:57

In some we have.

Paavo Monkkonen: 38:01

I went to the town where you do that. It's amazing.

David Kaufmann: 38:03

You went to up and said, Yeah. So I mean, when they confirm to the building and zoning law, we don't have to vote on it. But change to the building and zoning order and special land use plan, we have to vote on it. Right. And a lot of densification has to happen now through different means and zoning laws. Yes, and because the zoning laws or rather, as you also know, Rod are not dynamic enough to actually enable to engage in urbanization processes, so much. So DEROS just zoning and saying what kind of stories but normally, you want to add up a lot of different plots together and densify in a more neighborhood scale way. So this is all has to be all voted upon. And we have another another part of Swiss national science project is actually collecting all these votes from all 162 Swiss towns and cities to over 20 years. So we have a lot of coders who help us to make sense what changed over time to this local ballot. So and this was also a bit of inspired obviously, the last point two people vote upon on the Swiss experience. And I think you alluded to that as well in the US, you also have dissipated sometimes you have to vote on it. And I think in this circumstances is a lot important that you have a lot of upstream participation already, as you explained, like more into community planning development already in there. And then on the project level, you also have a bit of participation but more kind of voluntarily, or people who wants to voice their opinion a bit. So I think in Switzerland participation is kind of a process that goes through through all stages of the densification process. It's sometimes annoying, and sometimes it leads to blockages, but it's also very kind of more than traditional of involving residents and I think the whole scale we ask is obviously a bit I'm inspired by I mean, the old concept of the letter of participation, but the newer ones where you have more intensive form of participation. And this is what we want to look a bit at participation also as a democratic measures, but it doesn't make so much of a difference in the results, it will want to already preview the results. But it's maybe also a bit of an overwhelming and too complicated, too nuanced question, maybe.

Paavo Monkkonen: 40:26

Yeah, I mean, that might be one reason that the results don't show up as being very large. And I think connected maybe with the rent control one as well, where you're asking about us, do you support this building? happening? And then it connects to these larger issues may be too, too much of a stretch for people? Can I ask a question of you guys we didn't prepare for but since we've been talking about Switzerland, a lot, what how many housing units are built per year in Switzerland? And what's the population?

David Kaufmann: 40:54

I have to look it up. Okay. Well, it's it's the fact that there are missing, they're missing 50,000 every year. So this is a discourse, because

Paavo Monkkonen: 41:02

I'm just curious about like how the you have a national law that says you have to densify and that has, has seems like it has led to new projects happening in Swiss cities. That's my impression where you live, maybe Michael. So they kind of they convince all of these points of democracy in the planning process to approve of the densification. So

David Kaufmann: 41:23

I don't know the numbers. But I mean, it's a bit of a watered down densification, then in the end, right. So it's kind of a compromise of densification. There is still densification possible, like with infill densification, or very limited densification within the zoning laws that you will once voted upon. But there is a lot of special land use plan that have voted on it.

Paavo Monkkonen: 41:46

And from your data on the votes. Have you already got a sense of like, what percent are yes, and no?

David Kaufmann: 41:52

Yes, it's overwhelming. Yes. So it's kind of becomes a bit so that you vote on, like, I don't know, five times a year in smaller cities to 10 times a year on planning issues from building the local school, through very technical amendments in zoning, law through financial issues, so that the municipality want to acquire this piece of land to planning project sometimes even? And this predominantly, yes, because it's very technical technocrat 05 times a year, maybe like five times six times a year, four times.

Paavo Monkkonen: 42:30

Is your vote online?

David Kaufmann: 42:32

No, by letter, well, the or you can go to the ballot itself.

Paavo Monkkonen: 42:35

Okay. And what percent of the population participates in these elections? Like, what's the voting rate?

Michael Wicki: 42:40

About 40? To 60%, depending on the issue, I think last ballot was around 60%. But there we also voted on some rather Social Security pension funds. And to revising that, that really mobilized people I'll take the percentage usually will be high. Yeah.

David Kaufmann: 42:59

And on the local level, there can be also 30%.

Paavo Monkkonen: 43:02

Yeah, okay. I'm not familiar, like LA.

David Kaufmann: 43:07

I mean, there are also democratic problems with it, because we have like 30% Plus foreigners that are not allowed to vote. You're only allowed to vote if you're nationalized. And it's rather hard to. I've heard it's very hard to become Swiss. Yes. So there are a lot of problems attached to this.

Paavo Monkkonen: 43:23

Yeah. Interesting.

Shane Phillips: 43:25

I'm looking at the Swiss, like Statistics website. And it seems that there are about 4.7 million dwellings in in the country, which is a very large number for a population of 8.7 million, it's less than two people per household. And they built about 45,000 units in 2021. So about, you know, 1% growth rate in dwelling units, which is not amazing, but better than California, better than California. And, you know, it always depends very much on demand, and like how many people are having children and who's dying and how much immigration there is. And I don't know, nearly enough about the country to weigh in on whether that's, that's enough. So let's jump into the results here. There's a lot to talk about. But can you give us some of the highlights of the main findings, st things that stood out to you some of the stuff you think is most important to comment on here?

David Kaufmann: 44:16

First of all, I would say it's, the NIMBY effects was visible, but not to a very big extent. I mean, it's sickness, statistically significant, but it's not changing a lot of the results. It's visible with regard to density. So the more density we will propose in a project through this conjoint experiments, the more density comes to you drives down acceptance. So this is very much in line with previous finding, but then it's not just about density, it's not rejecting high density, it's also the different building characteristics is also very important. And then we will say mixed use is more accepted. I think this is also a dominant discourse in plannings in 30 So we should do mixed use. So this is not really contested.

Shane Phillips: 45:03

And what's the what's the sort of rationale behind that? Why do we think that buildings that include restaurants, stores, bars, whatever on the ground floor are going to be, are more appealing to people on average than just a straight up dwellings only kind of building?

David Kaufmann: 45:20

Think it's this resurgence of urban life. So that's actually people want to live in the city that seek kind of this diversity and to seek kind of closeness, proximity, walkability, don't want to have a car. And so people that's searched urban lifestyle in today's time, they want to have everything very close by and I think this is a bit the rationale behind this mixed use.

Michael Wicki: 45:45

We also see that in our other research, right? Where we look in Switzerland and look at these different amenities specifically, also, depending on where people live. And there we also see somewhat a decrease of preferences for mixed use, it's still high, somewhat, but less so than in urban areas, because things like urban greenery, privacy, and so on become way more important also on the on the rural side of things.

Paavo Monkkonen: 46:15

And that just to point the difference, it's like 48% approval with only apartments and something like 51 52% approval with mixed use. So four percentage points, more or less across all of these cities.

Shane Phillips: 46:27

Yeah, and when you look at the individual cities, even, you know, people might think like, oh, that maybe that's true in in London, or Paris or New York, but not Los Angeles. But Los Angeles as well. There's certainly still a preference, maybe smaller, somewhat, but a preference for mixed use versus apartment only. Alright, next section.

David Kaufmann: 46:45

So the somewhat surprising result is what we already were talking a lot about is this rent control versus inclusionary, zoning one, so that both actually are positively drive up acceptance. And also if inclusionary zoning is coming and close to you, and I think this was kind of interesting to see, but also was something that, that we think is kind of something that is somewhat positive, so that it's not just about okay, my rent unit is controlled. So do we are not kind of self interest, explanations, but it's something about, okay, there is an increasing awareness that some people, especially low income, people need some sort of stability and security to come with this densification process. And I think this is a bit what we found out. And I think this is also something actually exciting to see,

Shane Phillips: 47:34

I'm glad you think so highly of your fellow humans, but I've interpreted the ring control thing a little differently. I feel like it's more about the stability than people being altruistic and wanting to help lower income people particularly I feel like, you know, it's there's a bias to want stability in your neighborhood. And if you'd give rent control, even if a lot of rent control benefits, middle and upper income renters, and then they're more likely to stay and that might be what people want.

David Kaufmann: 48:00

Absolutely. I mean, this is not it's just a combination of rent control drives up acceptance and inclusionary zoning. So rent control can be very unselfish, and just protecting your own unit. And also, as a lot of scholars were showing also, maybe, maybe not so good for investment in some contexts. But then on top, we have very similar results for inclusionary zoning that is not likely to benefit you. And the combination of these two results, is actually what makes us optimistic.

Paavo Monkkonen: 48:31

Okay, let's go back to the proximity effects. I wonder what your reaction because it was like two percentage points more support, on average across all these places, when a project was not in your district? Did you expect bigger effects? Or was that more or less what you were thinking?

Michael Wicki: 48:48

No. I mean, that was definitely something somewhat surprising. I mean, based on existing research, we would have definitely expected larger effects. But I think it also shows a bit that with somewhat nuanced projects that we that we showed here, right, that might both reflect social and sustainability goals, adhering to to climate goals and so on, that if projects include those, this NIMBY effect might also somewhat decrease.

Shane Phillips: 49:18

I wonder if you were if you were able to ask people about like, kind of the strength of their feeling positive or negative, if that might play a role in this as well. Or maybe, you know, it's only as you get closer to someone's home, only a few more people feel negatively about it, because most people are kind of like either generally supportive or generally Oppose no matter what. But as it gets closer, you really bring out the people who feel very strongly the ones who are going to show up, organize their neighbors call their councilmember, all that kind of thing where maybe we're we're really talking about a pretty small number of people who are influencing the process. I mean, that's just factually what we see here. You know, in terms of who's organizing against these things, it's very small shares of the popular They shouldn't, but they're very noisy, they're the only ones really activated because people don't really get super fired up to come support a development, understandably, but they certainly get fired up to oppose it,

Paavo Monkkonen: 50:12

I encourage people to go download from the website of the proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the appendix to this because you can look for these different cities exactly kind of how the different parts of the survey elicited more or less support and opposition, it seems like kind of the biggest effect was in a few cities, just the size of the project, really, you know, you could see almost 10 percentage points in Paris and London, if the project is 20%, bigger than the building there versus 100%, bigger than the building there, which kind of makes sense because Paris and London are very concerned about historical buildings and the historical characteristic of the city. But I was kind of surprised for my hometown of Los Angeles, California, the project size effect was actually pretty small. Any thoughts on the difference in the effect of project size across the cities?

David Kaufmann: 51:02

And no, not so much. But it's actually Thanks for reading an appendix. So. We, we we also, we always think we write it for the reviewers only, but it's good to go through it. I mean, I'm actually didn't look at the Appendix for a year or two. Now, two things may be here to say. So we also have all the survey data online open access. So if somebody's interested to look at the at one city more specifically, you can download all the data, we have like database for all the six cities, you can download and use it as if you're a student, use it for your master's thesis or whatever you want. So this is kind of what we want, and actually to also engage a bit more with local experts and to look at,

Paavo Monkkonen: 51:50

yeah, I mean, just the one ideas, since you did it by percent, if you increase the size of a typical building in LA by 100%, you're just making a single family home into a big single family home. But you're, you're going up to 14 stories. So maybe that's one one reason,

Shane Phillips: 52:07

I want to make sure that we talk about who's building it and the impact that has on support or opposition, the four options you gave were, it's a government investor, a nonprofit investor, a national investor, or an international investor. And so I think in some ways, the results here are what people might expect, but there were some surprising ones. So could you talk a little bit about that?

Michael Wicki: 52:30

Yes, for sure. I mean, we generally see and you already mentioned that in the introduction, right? That for profit, international for profit, investors, gain the least acceptance and have the most negative effect actually, on the acceptance. On the other side, it's nonprofit developers that, on average, gain most acceptance, but I think where it becomes really interesting is if we look at comparison by cities, right? So there, really see some divide between the European, the three European cities, as well as the three US cities. So in the US, the project developer has less of an effect, still, the pattern is somewhat similar. But for example, in Berlin, the International for profit investor really fall short. On average, I think 10% less or even more,

Shane Phillips: 53:24

just off on its own on the left side of this chart,

Michael Wicki: 53:27

Decrease the figure quite a bit to the left area. And I think that is really what is what is striking to me also to see these differences. And I think these are also the biggest differences, if you look at the otherwise rather coherent results over over all these six cities.

David Kaufmann: 53:47

And this has for sure something to do about the role of the state in the production of housing, that is kind of in European countries, historically, very much the case. And I would assume that you are more kind of the expert in North America that there is more private market oriented development. And we have almost Yeah, and we also mean there are successful programs from the state. Some are also less successful and from housing cooperatives is a big thing in a lot of European countries. And so discussion now shift a lot since the last 10 to five years I was in the big city that actually they want to see densification implemented more by the public if the public wants to do more density will increase the density, meaning also tearing down old, still affordable housing, they have to make sure that these affordable housing units are still there. So subsidized housing units. And this is a big discussion. For example, yesterday, it was just at the talk of the National Housing ministry of the Netherlands, and they have a huge national housing programs want to invest a lot of money to support municipalities to build housing, below market rent rates. So this is kind of a very big deal in Europe.

Shane Phillips: 55:02

I do want to say here that the US cities, there's much less of a gap between the nonprofit for profit government. And in fact, as I'm looking at it, most of the cities, this may not even be statistically significant. But the national for profit is actually the highest supported compared to government compared to nonprofit compared to international for profit. And I think these are all kind of within the margin of error. But it's very different from Berlin in particular, where like the for profit, or just all the way to the left, really opposed. And again, I feel like maybe the recent striking down of the rent control law. And this is just like in the news. And so the, I think private in for profit is is very much vilified right now, and maybe for good reason. But it's interesting seeing that result. And I actually think it's really important to say, for anyone who is not going to look at this chart, or either of these charts, just looking at the results overall, the US cities, this is I think most people will be surprised to hear this, they are significantly more supportive in general, even, you know, the least popular project characteristics and so forth, are supported by a higher share of the US survey participants than the most supported project characteristics and other things in the European cities by and large. And I think that's just, I don't know what to say about that.

Paavo Monkkonen: 56:22

That would be in that game. I would call that Shane, you edited my earlier question in the intro of this episode, because I put shocking when I first saw this paper, that was one thing that intrigued me very much. And I wonder, I want to hear what you guys think about why are we just optimistic here? I mean, well, I have a theory, but I'll let you guys.

David Kaufmann: 56:42

And first, first of all, just to blink case, again, we already talked about very high rate of renters. And I think renters are kind of a bit, the ones that feel densification, or that are least pressured under densification. So there is kind of a fear of being evicted. And due to densification. And we see that we can visibly see that also in Switzerland, and we can see patterns of debt, and it's mostly, um, low income renters that are being displaced. And this is the discussion a lot in European cities. So densification, as a concept is still supported environmentally. But socially, it's very much contested, as well, more how it's implemented. And effect. This is at least a discourse together with a high share of renters together with a strong history of state led production of housing so that it's now a lot of supported densification when it's being done by the state, or at least when there are some measures implemented by the state to protect some of displacement that comes from densification. That would be a bit more my interpretation, but I'm limited to the understanding of the North America. So I'm curious about your theory.

Paavo Monkkonen: 57:55

Yeah, I think I mean, it actually this point you just had brought up Shane about government built projects not being more favorable in the US, well, the government doesn't build housing in the US, or at least it hasn't for 50 years. And so I think a little bit might be just the context from which people are responding. And there aren't, you know, most people in Los Angeles and Chicago are not living anywhere near or barely ever see large scale densification projects. Like if you're living in Zurich, you might go near, you know, some of the new projects that are happening in your city. And so not having the experience close by in the US these days, maybe would lead people just be like, oh, yeah, sure, I would accept that. But it's because it's not, you know, happening near them. Right now,

Shane Phillips: 58:39

There's a little bit of you know, we just don't have the same kinds of development, not just that we don't have government building housing directly. But I think the way that we would think about government invested housing is like public housing, which I think is what you're referring to Pavo, where it's really the government kind of leading and building it. But you know, this is actually government investor, nonprofit investor. The way it works here is like the government invests the money, but the nonprofit builds it or the for profit, in many cases builds the low income housing. We don't have like a nonprofit that builds housing without government funding, really, nonprofits are the government builder at some level, whereas in many European countries, you actually have nonprofit builders who are limited profit, there's just like, kind of different models entirely. And so I think, I think people who hear this still kind of have a in the US have a sense for what is meant by government versus nonprofit but the European reader versus the American reader looking at these results is probably thinking about somewhat different things.

David Kaufmann: 59:40

Just very quickly I think, while we're talking about what is interesting about comparative urban research, there are certainly also limits to compare different research so that we cannot model the context so much that people think their context and neighborhood but they have to adhere to kind of questions developed and designed from some dudes from Zurich, Switzerland. But, I mean, we talked to experts and tried to make it more general as good as we could. But I mean, there are also limits to it.

Shane Phillips: 1:00:07

Well, even it is, I don't think this was intended as a critique.

David Kaufmann: 1:00:11

It's recognizing

Paavo Monkkonen: 1:00:12

Even if you have perfect knowledge of all of these cities, it would be impossible to design a single survey that would be applicable in all the same places in the same way. Right. So you can make it as general as possible, but then you removing some of the local context necessarily. So just to summarize the project and planning features that were most accepted versus least accepted. Could you just give me like the typically best project and the typically worst project from the respondents point of view?

Michael Wicki: 1:00:37

Yes, sure. So over all the cities, we see that the most accepted proposal will be one with the lowest population densification. So 20%, with mixed usage, and in this case, really with mixed use with entertainment, restaurants, cafes, and bars. Although this is just slightly different to the other mixed usage, attribute characteristics, then that would be nonprofit investor, although we just talked about this, this is different between the US and Europe. It includes climate goals, it has a rent cap as as a rent control measure. So full rent control measure, not just a maximum increase of some certain percents there. And it has the maximum of inclusionary zoning so that 20% of the newly developed project are actually going to low income households, ensuring somewhat social social mixes there. And last but not least, planning and implementation. So involvement of party of residents in both planning and implementation receives the highest share in that project still, here. Again, this is very close to all the other public involvement attributes that we see, as long as it's not no involvement, which would be the least preferred one,

Shane Phillips: 1:02:05

I felt very seen on that last one where voting was not particularly popular, people didn't want that level of involvement. It was just like, I don't want to vote on every project. I don't think most people want to be involved at that level. I think in theory, people like the idea of like being as involved as possible and always being consulted, but then you're voting on 20 ballot initiatives in a single election. And you're just like, actually, maybe you don't need to run every single one of these things. By me, there's so much more we could talk about this. And I really encourage our listeners to look up the paper because you know, even if you don't read the thing, there are two really great charts that summarize almost everything we've been talking about. And you can kind of just see what stands out to you. But, you know, I got to ask the question of what we do with these findings. Because, you know, I think just for some examples, people may be more supportive of a 20% increase in density than 100%. But increasing density by 100% are often a lot more at the kind of project level is necessary. In many cases. Inclusionary requirements can increase support for housing, but they're sometimes associated with less production and higher rents and prices in that city. And you have a similar issue with more and more and more public participation. I think in cases where there aren't really visible large trade offs, like including mixed uses in buildings, this seems like a pretty straightforward, let's do more of that. But when that support comes at the expense of maybe we're gonna build less housing, and everyone's rents are gonna go up for that reason. And so we've got more support for what we are building, but we're building less like, that's a very steep cost to pay. So how do you think about these things, especially the ones where there are really clear or at least likely trade offs to getting that extra support.

David Kaufmann: 1:03:59

So first of all, it's maybe not about one concrete project and all the little characteristic, what we also want to show is that you can kind of increase the support for densification with a range of different measures. Some are in the hands of project developers, some are in the hands of the government or planters. And I think it's important to see that and it's important also that we are now starting to discuss more ecological and social issues. And that we, when we identify people really want to see this more strong sustainability effects. This is also what we can see in the Swiss debate. But I would also argue that I think if we start to densify, especially if we have to tear down buildings, so it's not about infill development or fringe development. If we tear down existing building then we need to have large gentrification gains to actually make an impact. And to think if we have large densification gains, this automatically drives down acceptance, but then also kind of different project characteristic or planning instruments regulatory measures can help to bring up also a very large project. And I think this is now a very, it's a very creative discussion, but I think we should go for for large density increases, but then it needs kind of additional instruments to, to harness to support for this large density.

Shane Phillips: 1:05:18

And I do think I put a positive spin on this, I think this shows is on level people are willing to support projects, you know, that they're movable, there are things that you can do. And these planning instruments in particular are trying to address people's legitimate concerns about security, about displacement, about having a diverse community, whether racially or socio economically or otherwise. And when you take steps toward or show some intent to address those concerns, more people are willing to come along and whether it needs to be inclusionary zoning or rent control or the specific planning instruments. I think that's up for debate. But it does show that there is real potential there. And that it's not necessarily just about people's purely selfish interests, either. There's a kind of maybe broader social interest that a lot of people have in this as well.

Paavo Monkkonen: 1:06:10

Well, this is super interesting research, guys. And I just wanted to ask a final question, because I know when I was doing a survey experiment, once upon a time similar to this, this was our first Episodes Episode. Yeah, this is a cool coming coming full circle. I pretty quickly wanted to do another survey, because there was a few things that I wish I had included, and the answers that I got, like already crew recruiting more questions. So I wanted to see if what follow up you've done or whether you've done follow up or kind of what what this project has led to?

Michael Wicki: 1:06:39

Hey, yes, definitely. I mean, also, we already in in that project itself, the dataset is so large, and allows us to do even more analysis. So we have two other paper projects, also based on on this dataset, where we delve more into the individual effects. So the first one is really individual effects that are driving acceptance of such projects, where we test for different demographics, but also political attitudes. And this is allowed actually, by including this acceptance of each of the proposals, that allows us to estimate the individual effects for each individual and somewhat attribute and and a utility for each of the attributes to these respondents. And there, we actually see that it's also a highly politicized issue. Interesting. So it's really left right or

Paavo Monkkonen: 1:07:33

So what are the more conservatives are more supportive or less supportive?

Michael Wicki: 1:07:38

Overall, the Conservatives are more supportive, if I'm not mistaken now, but it's not the rent control part. Yeah, exactly. It's specifically more interested when we go to different attributes. Right. So left or liberal ones wanting to regulate more, right, conservative ones being more in favor also, for example, for for for profit investors. But yeah, for the identification, it's somewhat surprising that it's, or at least I didn't expect that that it's the right or conservative ones that are even more more accepting of you

Paavo Monkkonen: 1:08:12

Hanging out with California Democrats long enough, and you might not be surprised.

David Kaufmann: 1:08:17

Conflict, it's a conflict about regulation and deregulation, and how much state intervention and involvement should be there or not an effect. This is also what's already you probably a bit described in some of your paper and think this is very strongly that we think it's very political, the politics of densification is about the implementation and how much state involved in this there are how much free market drives density

Paavo Monkkonen: 1:08:44

So that paper is published or it's

Michael Wicki: 1:08:46

It's under review right now. Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And then we have another one that is still a work in progress, so that we will hopefully submit soon. So we also had an open text field at the end of the contract experiment where we asked respondents why they decided in favor of one or the other project, that was kind of an experiment to see what, what that gives us. But we were able to use some natural language processing methods to mirror that right with the results from the experiment itself, and it gives us some new insights. So for example, we touched a bit on that, regarding the public involvement thing, where we see that it's not really about participation for the respondents, but rather because they want to have that others in their community at least have a say in that because it's connected to their belief that this way their amenities will will be somewhat protected. Right, but it's not like they want to necessarily participate in the entire,

Paavo Monkkonen: 1:09:51

I don't want to vote but other people should.

Shane Phillips: 1:09:53

Yeah, I want us to build public transportation for someone else to use.

David Kaufmann: 1:09:59

And it's Also, a lot of people want to voice their concerns. And I think also participants that are kind of wrote a lot of stuff into the open text field. For them also participation was more important. Yeah. So also have been the function of participation to be involved somewhat interesting.

Shane Phillips: 1:10:17

So you're saying the person who was likely to fill out the open text field is also the kind that kind of person who's likely to show up to a public hearing and voice their concerns?

David Kaufmann: 1:10:26

Yes, so. But it was a bit more nuanced than that. It's not just about the frequency, but the person that actually commented on how the project would kind of affect the community, not only negatively but wants to just give their opinion, they were kind of more in favor of participation.

Shane Phillips: 1:10:44

Yeah, yeah. I feel like that's a fairly consistent finding, but just giving people the opportunity to kind of share their views often builds up support, and then it's just how do you balance that with not giving people too many veto points and kind of getting the input but not necessarily shutting things down? All right, we will have to stop there. David Kauffmann and Michael Wicki, thank you again for joining us on the Housing Voice podcast.

David Kaufmann: 1:11:07

Thank you for having us was a pleasure.

Michael Wicki: 1:11:09

Yeah, likewise.

Shane Phillips: 1:11:15

You can read more about David and Michael's work on our website. lewis.ucla.edu. Show Notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on social media. I am on Twitter at Shane D. Phillips, and Paavo is at el paavo. Thanks for listening. We will see you next time.