New paper appears in Cities
How do housing labels impact evaluations in California?
A new paper from the lab led by former PhD student Dr. Belle Douglas explores how the designations “affordable”, “sustainable”, and “historic” for a housing development impact its evaluations by individuals in California (N=1160). Co-authored by Prof. Arash Tavakoli (Villanova U.), Draper Dayton, and Prof. Sarah Billington, the paper aims to understand how public acceptance of new affordable housing may vary depending on the type of housing being proposed.
One of the major findings is that compared to unlabeled (baseline) housing developments, the same developments with labels involving affordable and sustainable have significantly increased support for potential development in participants’ neighborhoods. In addition, for the labels involving affordable and sustainable, support is significantly lower for the developments shown with photographs compared to the same type of housing asked about without showing photographs.