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Lack of housing in liberal coastal cities is a major reason America isn't more liberal.
Research shows:
1. People who live in these cities become more liberal
2. They're the hardest places to build housing
3. Far more people would move to them if not for a lack of housing.
1/n
Research shows:
1. People who live in these cities become more liberal
2. They're the hardest places to build housing
3. Far more people would move to them if not for a lack of housing.
1/n
1: Jonathan Haidt ( @JonHaidt) has a great talk on why coastal cities are liberal. tl;dr: liberalism is what you get when different cultures live in close proximity, as happens in cities with ports. It might not happen quickly, but it would happen. https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/morality-2012
2: The fact that coastal American cities are the hardest to build in is supported by the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulation Index (page 61)
http://real-faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/~gyourko/WRLURI/GyourkoHartleyKrimmel_NBERw26573.pdf
http://real-faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/~gyourko/WRLURI/GyourkoHartleyKrimmel_NBERw26573.pdf
3: Research shows that far more people would move to coastal cities if not for high housing costs because they'd make more money. This used to happen much more before housing prices went crazy:
Ganong, Shoag (2018) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119017300591
Ganong, Shoag (2018) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119017300591
This isn't a small difference.
Hsieh, Moretti, (2015) modeled people moving to the cities where they'd make the most money if not for housing costs and found population increases of 500% to 800% in New York/New Jersey, San Francisco, and San Jose.
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=housing_law_and_policy
Hsieh, Moretti, (2015) modeled people moving to the cities where they'd make the most money if not for housing costs and found population increases of 500% to 800% in New York/New Jersey, San Francisco, and San Jose.
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=housing_law_and_policy
You can argue about how feasible it would be for these regions to grow that much, but that misses the point: there's massive demand to be unlocked if only we could build enough housing. Land constraints certainly aren't the issue: https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2017/10/30/the-myth-of-the-land-constrained-city/?sh=700d46c44369
tl;dr: Not building enough housing might be the biggest liberal self own.
