Cruel Musical Chairs: How to Talk About Housing Supply (HINT: use video)
Image from Video: Cruel Musical Chairs (or Why Is Rent So High?), by Dan Bertolet, Copyright 2017 Sightline Institute; used with permission.
Despite the expert consensus that building more homes reduces housing prices, a significant portion of the public remains skeptical of supply-side housing policy. This skepticism poses a challenge for policymakers aiming to implement land-use liberalization and other pro-housing development policies.
In Do Housing Supply Skeptics Learn? Evidence from Economics and Advocacy Treatments, Chris Elmendorf, Clayton Nall, and Stan Oklobdzija test the effectiveness of four different types of arguments to see whether people will change their minds in response to new evidence, and what kinds of messages are most persuasive.
Key Takeaways:
- Every pro-supply message the researchers tested reduced respondents’ supply skepticism, with the greatest effect coming from a video using a “cruel musical chairs” analogy of the housing market.
- The treatments increased support for market-rate development, with the “cruel musical chairs” video increasing support by .35 standard deviation.
- Contrary to the “homevoter hypothesis,” the treatments did not polarize opinions between homeowners and renters. In fact, homeowners responded as positively as renters did to the messages.
The study tested the effects of four different messages on respondents’ beliefs about housing markets and policy preferences: a written summary of economic research on housing supply (“econ evidence”), a layperson-friendly analogy comparing the housing market to the car market (“used car analogy), an advocacy video explaining the housing market using a “cruel musical chairs” analogy (“cruel musical chairs video”), and a written summary of the “musical chairs” video (“cruel musical chairs text”).
All of the treatments significantly reduced respondents’ supply skepticism, having roughly twice the effect of typical economics-information treatments on respondents’ beliefs.
The cruel musical chairs video treatment was by far the most effective in moving respondents’ policy preferences, generating a two to four times larger effect than the other treatments, and the econ evidence also had a strong effect. The used car analogy and cruel musical chairs text treatments did not have any statistically significant effect.
Surprisingly, the effects were not polarized by homeownership status: renters and owners responded similarly, with the homeowners responding slightly more favorably than renters.
Broadly, the study found that most people have fairly weakly-held views about what should be done about housing affordability, and that they may be exceptionally responsive to informational interventions that shift both their beliefs and policy preferences.