What actually changes people’s minds about housing?
Researchers at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and Yale recently ran a randomized controlled trial to test exactly that. Different videos about cities were shown to participants to see which messages actually made people more supportive of housing and density.
Some focused on economics. Others highlighted how people move between cities and suburbs at different stages of life. Another tackled a common misconception: that cities are unhealthy places to live.
Some arguments that seem persuasive didn’t move opinions at all. Others worked surprisingly well. And certain topics — like homelessness and architecture — turned out to influence housing attitudes even more strongly than expected.
Watch the video to find out which message actually worked.
CHAPTERS
0:00 The context
2:57 The experiment
10:39 The results
13:24 What’s next?
MAIN SOURCES
Housing messaging experiment — David Broockman, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Joshua Kalla
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/kz4…
The Symbolic Politics of Housing — David Broockman, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Joshua Kalla
https://osf.io/preprints/osf/surv9_v2
Cruel Musical Chairs housing video — Sightline
https://www.sightline.org/2017/10/31/…
Journal of Economic Perspectives article on housing supply
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
Aesthetic City research on architecture preferences
ABOUT JUSTINE
I’m a journalist with a background in economics and theater. I worked as a producer and on-air reporter at Yahoo Finance, and I later created a documentary series focused on science and tech at Real Vision. My focus now is on urban design, and I was recently elected to City Council in my hometown of Falls Church VA.
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