Preferences for density

David Broockman spoke about some of his work on factors that influence opposition and support for new construction. In one strand of his work, Broockman and coauthors Chris Elmendorf and Josh Kalla find that people who live in dense parts of a city are more supportive of building a 5-story apartment building than those living in less dense parts of the city. Broockman and coauthors interpret this as sorting: people with a taste for density choose to live in denser parts of the city. But there was a lively discussion afterwards about where this taste comes from. Maybe a taste for density is really a taste for the familiar, and people initially aversive to density get comfortable with it over time. Or maybe it’s about what kinds of aspirations are depicted in media: do movies and TV celebrate owning a single-family home or a trendy downtown condo? Or perhaps the health of cities (in terms of crime, education, order) during your formative years affects your lifelong preferences. Broockman noted that at least one unpublished source of age-gradient preferences for density used to be inverted, suggesting at least some degree of preference endogeneity formed by life experiences: Today young people prefer density more than older people, but when the Boomers were young, older people liked density more than younger people. You can make arguments for all of the above!