Housing and Communities: what the public prioritizes and why it is hard to measure

Housing and Communities, one of the ten provisional subjects in My Vote Forward, covers housing cost and supply, neighborhoods and community services. In the United States, a record 22.6 million renter households, half of all renters, spent more than 30% of income on housing and utilities in 2023, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, yet housing barely registers in some of the best-known national polls. A high priority for housing tells you people want the subject addressed; it does not tell you whether they want prices to fall, values to hold, more building nearby or less.

In plain words

Housing is where people live, so almost everyone has a stake. But the stakes are different.

A renter may want rents to stop rising. A homeowner may want the value of the house to hold, because it is most of the family’s savings. A young worker may want more homes built so she can live near her job. A neighbor may want the street to stay the way it is. All four might rank housing first.

This page explains what surveys show and miss, why the subject is hard to measure, and the main arguments. Two companion pages explain who decides and what the evidence shows.

Defined terms

Housing and Communities (as a My Vote Forward subject). Housing cost and supply, neighborhoods and community services, as scoped in the demo’s provisional list. See Subjects.

Cost burden. Spending more than 30% of household income on housing and utilities. Severe cost burden means spending more than half. These thresholds are conventions used by researchers and agencies, not natural limits.

Price-to-income ratio. The median home price divided by median household income in a market.

Zoning. Local rules that say what may be built where, including use, height, lot size and density.

Rent regulation (rent control or rent stabilization). Legal limits on rent levels or rent increases for existing tenants.

Homelessness (point-in-time count). The number of people counted as homeless on a single night in January, the basis of the national homelessness figures cited on the evidence page.

Priority versus proposal. A priority says the subject deserves attention. A proposal, such as a hypothetical change to a city’s zoning code, has an authority, a cost and consequences for specific people. See Proposals.

Evidence: what the public says about housing and communities

Housing and Communities is partly invisible in national priority measures, and the reason is how those measures are built. Gallup’s open-ended “most important problem” question, asked of about 1,000 adults from September 1 to 17, 2026, did not report a separate housing category in its results table; the closest category, “poverty, hunger, homelessness,” was named by 3%.⁠¹ Housing costs may also be folded into the 13% who named the high cost of living or inflation.⁠¹ Coding decisions like these decide what the public appears to care about. See Subjects for a fuller discussion of open and closed questions.

Housing tends to be experienced locally. Rents and home prices vary enormously between metropolitan areas, and the concerns of a renter in a high-cost coastal city differ from those of a homeowner in a declining industrial town. National averages can hide intense local priorities, which is one reason the framework reports results at the level where decisions are made. See Jurisdictions.

Why housing and communities is hard to measure as a priority

Housing and Communities is hard to measure as a priority for several reasons.

Interests conflict within the subject. For about two thirds of households, a home is also an asset. The Census Bureau reported a national homeownership rate of 65.0% in the second quarter of 2026.⁠² Policies that lower prices help buyers and renters but reduce the wealth of existing owners, at least on paper. A single priority ranking cannot tell these groups apart.

It overlaps other subjects. Transit and roads shape where housing can be built, placing part of the concern in Infrastructure and Transport. Homelessness overlaps with mental health and addiction in Health and Care. Wages and prices overlap with Economy and Work. Property taxes fund schools, which belong to Education.

“Communities” is broad. The demo’s scope includes neighborhoods and community services, which can mean parks, libraries, code enforcement or local character. Some participants ranking this subject may be thinking about something other than housing at all.

Local conditions dominate. Participants in one city may rank housing first because of rents; participants in another may rank it first because of vacant and deteriorating property. Pooled results can combine opposite problems.

Participants are self-selected. People without stable housing are among the least likely to take part in any online exercise, which means a participant pool will underrepresent the people most affected. See Measurement.

The real tradeoffs in housing and communities

Housing involves tradeoffs that no ranking resolves.

Affordability versus existing wealth. The Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that the national home price-to-income ratio reached 5.0 in 2024, on par with the record set in 2022 and well above the pre-pandemic 4.1 of 2019.⁠³ High prices burden buyers and renters, while the same prices represent savings for owners. Any policy that seriously lowers prices transfers value from one group to the other.

More housing versus neighborhood change. Building more homes in desirable areas can ease prices, but it changes density, traffic, views and the character of established neighborhoods. Residents near proposed projects bear concentrated costs, while the benefits are spread over future residents who do not yet live there and cannot vote locally.

Protection for current tenants versus supply for future tenants. Rent regulation protects current tenants from sudden increases and displacement. A study of an expansion of rent control in San Francisco found it reduced tenants’ mobility by 20% and lowered displacement from the city, while affected landlords reduced the supply of rental housing by 15%, which the authors say likely drove up market rents in the long run.⁠⁴ The same policy helped one group and, by that study’s account, cost another.

Local control versus regional need. Cities decide most land use, but housing markets are regional. A suburb that limits building may push demand, prices and commutes onto its neighbors. When states override local zoning, they gain regional capacity but take power from local voters. See Who decides.

Public order versus compassion and rights in homelessness policy. Communities debate how to balance enforcement against encampments with shelter, treatment and housing. In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024), the Supreme Court held that “the enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property does not constitute ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ prohibited by the Eighth Amendment”.⁠⁵ The decision widened local choice; it did not settle which choice is wise.

Strongest arguments across perspectives

The strongest arguments about housing cross the usual political lines. Each has serious advocates and evidence they cite.

Build more (“supply”). Supply advocates argue that housing is expensive mainly because regulation makes it hard to build where people want to live. Glaeser and Gyourko describe the gap between prices and construction costs in many markets as “a regulatory tax” and argue that the evidence points toward, though does not conclusively establish, that this tax exceeds the costs new building imposes on neighbors.⁠⁶ This view draws support from both free-market economists and some progressive housing advocates.

Protect tenants and communities (“stability”). Tenant advocates argue that new construction takes years to lower rents, if it does at all in high-demand areas, and that people facing eviction or displacement need protection now: rent stabilization, eviction protections and right-to-counsel programs. Critics respond with evidence like the San Francisco study that such rules can reduce rental supply.⁠⁴

Public and social housing. Some argue the market will not house lower-income people without public investment, and point to cities such as Vienna, where about 220,000 municipal flats and about 200,000 subsidized cooperative flats mean that around half of residents live in subsidized dwellings, according to the city’s housing portal.⁠⁷ Critics answer that U.S. public housing has a troubled history, that conditions in Vienna developed over a century, and that public construction is expensive and slow.

Local control and neighborhood character. Defenders of local control argue that residents who have invested in a community deserve a say in how it changes, that infrastructure and schools may not keep pace with density, and that state mandates override democratic decisions made close to home. Critics argue that local control has historically been used to exclude, and that the people most affected by housing scarcity are often not residents yet.

Ownership and wealth building. Some argue that policy should prioritize homeownership as the main path to household wealth, through down payment help or lower borrowing costs. Others caution that subsidizing demand without increasing supply raises prices.

Competing interpretations

Housing priorities can be read in at least three ways.

An affordability reading holds that a high priority mostly reflects cost burdens, which the Joint Center finds at record levels for renters.⁠³

A stability reading holds that people want security: not being priced out, evicted or displaced, and not seeing their neighborhood change too fast. This reading can lead to opposite policies for renters and owners.

A place reading holds that “communities” matters as much as “housing”: safe streets, working services, and a sense of belonging. On this reading, a high priority may say more about neighborhood conditions than about prices.

My Vote Forward does not choose among these readings. A subject ranking cannot distinguish them, which is why opinions on specific proposals are asked separately. See Opinions.

Application to this framework

• Priority. A participant can rank Housing and Communities against the other nine subjects. The result is a statement of attention, not of policy. See Priorities.
• Opinion. Views on a specific proposal, such as a hypothetical rezoning near a transit station, are a separate step with exact wording. See Opinions.
• Authority. Because housing decisions are split between cities, counties, states and federal agencies, the framework points each concern toward the body that can act. See Who decides.
• Tradeoffs. Ranking housing high does not decide who pays or who benefits. See Tradeoffs.

Hypothetical example: participants in a metropolitan area rank Housing and Communities first. The published result says that, with the denominator, list version and method. It does not say they support more building, less building or rent limits. A city council weighing a zoning change would still need to hear from residents on that specific proposal, and from people who would like to move there.

Unresolved questions

• Should “housing” and “communities” be separate subjects, since one is mostly about cost and the other about place?
• How can priorities fairly include future residents, who bear the cost of local decisions but have no local vote?
• Should housing priorities be reported separately for renters and owners, and would collecting tenure status create privacy risks? See Privacy.
• How should results be compared across places where “housing” means opposite problems, such as scarcity in one city and vacancy in another?