Housing for Me, but not for Thee: Values-Based Motivations of NIMBYism in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada is in the midst of a housing crisis that threatens the economic well-being of younger generations. One of the key barriers to ensuring the growth of the housing supply is local opposition to development, often called NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). We use a pre-registered study on a nationally representative sample of adult Canadians to explore the values-based correlates of NIMBYism and opposition to local housing development, as well as opposition to public policies designed to increase the housing stock. We also evaluate whether values moderate the relative importance of housing characteristics (e.g., build size, proximity, affordable vs. market-rate housing) on support for local development using a conjoint experiment. We find that nativism and traditionalism are generally associated with opposition to housing development, while free-market attitudes and egalitarianism are associated with support, but the latter two value dimensions differ in their support for policy depending on the role of the state. We also show that Canadians are less supportive of rental developments and those that feature larger build sizes (e.g., high rise apartments) and that are more proximate to their own homes, but are more supportive of affordable (vs. market-rate) housing. The latter finding is concentrated among those with low levels of traditionalism, nativism, free-market support, and high levels of egalitarianism. Taken together, our results suggest a complicated and nuanced relationship between core values and attitudes toward housing, but one thing is abundantly clear: values matter.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".