By Adam Pagnucco.
Greater Greater Washington (GGW) has released a poll of Montgomery County Democrats on housing and related issues. The poll, conducted by Data for Progress, generally shows support for more housing and land use rules facilitating it, which aligns with GGW’s policy views. It also contains a few noteworthy tidbits assembled in this column.
First, let’s look at the methodology. The poll surveys 505 likely Democratic primary voters and has a margin of error of +/- 4 points for topline results. Data for Progress’s methodology uses a combination of text and web panel respondents rather than traditional phone calls. That’s a newish methodology and raises some questions for me, especially this statement about the web panel:
Respondents will receive an incentive based on the length of the survey, their specific panelist profile, and target acquisition difficulty, among other factors. The specific rewards vary and may include cash, airline miles, gift cards, redeemable points, charitable donations, sweepstakes entrance, and vouchers.
That said, these kinds of polling techniques are increasingly common and Data for Progress gets a strong rating in Five Thirty Eight’s ranking of pollsters.
Here is what interested me in these poll results.
The poll only surveys likely Democratic primary voters.
Why does it do this? GGW is an advocacy organization. One of its purposes is to persuade elected officials to vote in accordance with its views. In Montgomery County, non-Democrats have not been elected to partisan offices in more than 20 years so Democratic primary voters call the shots. While these poll results can’t be considered as representative of the entire community, they do measure the sentiments of voters that local politicians care about.
People who contact the county council are not representative of the public.
For many years, the issue of representation in comments to the council has come up, and this poll confirms it. The poll asked this question: “Have you ever written to or called your council member, or provided public comment on issues in Montgomery County?” 37% of respondents said yes.
Now here are some differences. 41% of White respondents said yes while 24% of Black respondents said yes. 42% of homeowners said yes while 26% of renters said yes.
No one should be surprised at this but the poll has done a public service by quantifying these differences.
Residents support opening up zoning policies to allow more housing.
This is the central point of the poll and is supported by answers to several questions. Here are the support, oppose and net numbers on questions that are key to the poll.
“Allowing duplexes and triplexes to be built in areas currently zoned for single-family homes throughout Montgomery County.” Support 55%, oppose 38%, net +17%. 72% of very liberal voters and 71% of renters support this.
“Allowing fourplexes to be built in areas currently zoned for single-family homes that are within one mile of rail transit stations.” Support 61%, oppose 32%, net +29%. 74% of very liberal voters support this.
“Allowing townhomes and small apartment buildings to be built in areas next to major roads, like Georgia Avenue and Connecticut Avenue, that are currently zoned for single-family homes.” Support 62%, oppose 33%, net +29%. 75% of very liberal voters and 72% of somewhat liberal voters support this.
When asked about broad support for the county’s Attainable Housing Strategies initiative after its elements are explained, 67% supported it and 27% opposed it. Sure, the style of explanation matters and I bet these numbers would shift depending on how the initiative was characterized. The point here is that the poll lays out a roadmap for how this proposal can be sold to Democratic voters.
The only caveat here is that respondents were not asked whether they support more housing next to their own homes. This is the principal driver of NIMBYism, not broadly ideological opposition to housing, and it was not addressed by this poll.
Residents don’t want the wild west.
While the poll indicates support for loosening zoning requirements, at least from primary voting Democrats, it also shows that residents don’t support a complete relaxation of standards. 70% support “Limiting the height of duplexes, triplexes, or fourplexes to 3 stories in areas currently zoned for single family homes.” 70% support “Setting clear design guidelines for how duplexes, triplexes or fourplexes should look in areas currently zoned for single family homes.” 65% support “Limiting how large a new single-family home constructed on the site of a teardown (a home that was demolished) can be.”
MoCo Democrats want more housing. They don’t want Houston.
Residents oppose policies that would allow fewer parking spaces.
One priority of urbanist groups is to reduce parking spaces to cut down emissions and encourage use of walking, bicycles and public transportation. Respondents were asked whether they supported “Allowing developers to build fewer parking spaces to be able to build more housing units in new housing developments.” 31% supported this idea and 58% opposed it. (78% of Black Democrats were opposed.) These are primary-voting Democrats, so imagine what these numbers would be if they included Republicans, unaffiliated people and casual voters.
The more housing argument defeats the neighborhood character argument.
The poll asks this question: “When thinking about housing development and zoning in Montgomery County, which of the following comes closest to your view, even if neither is exactly right? It’s more important to lower housing costs by loosening certain zoning rules and increasing housing development. It’s more important to preserve the character of our neighborhoods by maintaining zoning rules and limiting housing development.”
63% said more housing was more important. 32% said neighborhood character was more important.
There were huge differences among demographics on this question. Among voters under age 45, the split was 74-24 in favor of more housing. Among renters, the split was 82-12 in favor of more housing. And among homeowners, the split was 55-40 in favor of more housing.
Young voters almost always have lower turnout rates than older voters. And nationally, homeowners have higher turnout rates than renters. This suggests that support for more housing is disproportionately high among low-turnout voters, which is a problem for housing advocates. Still, this poll shows robust support for housing overall, at least among MoCo Democrats.
Now here is something I discount a bit. According to the poll, when respondents are asked whether they were more or less likely to vote for a council member who opposed “reforming zoning rules or developing more housing,” 26% would be more likely to vote for that person and 56% would be less likely, a negative gap of 30 points.
I would push back on two grounds. First, no council member would vote no and say nothing. They would offer reasons for a no vote. One of them might be that the county has a multi-billion dollar infrastructure backlog and a large influx of new residents could conceivably exacerbate that. (This will be the topic of a future post.) Also, most voters tend not to vote on a single issue.
That said, the contribution of this poll to the public discourse is to illustrate that support for more housing is real, as is support for many policies that would facilitate it. MoCo candidates can benefit by incorporating that message into their campaigns for office.